I found this, from the Washington Post, interesting, and not for the reason you’d think:
‘Ray Buckley, the longtime chairman of the New Hampshire Democratic Party, likened the DNC to a car that’s broken down on the side of the road but really only needs a tune-up. He said he’d reallocate money from television advertising toward field organizing. “We need someone who can lift up the hood and fix the damn car,” he said.
“While many of you know that I’m openly gay, many of you don’t know … that I come from the lowest of the white working class,” he added later. “We ran hundreds of millions of dollars of commercials telling the voters that, ‘Oh, our opponent if [sic] offensive.’ When you’re worried about your damn paycheck, about your job, about where you’re going to live and if your kids are going to go to school, you don’t really give a crap if the president is insulting. The reality is we didn’t have a positive message for anyone I’m related to. We didn’t offer a message to my neighbors. We didn’t offer a message to the people in Indiana or Ohio or Pennsylvania or Kentucky.” ‘
See, it must be an indication of my residual east coast privileged bubble mentality, that I still find the above statement surprising. I get the worried about basic survival part, having lived in Ohio, where many folks are transplants from rural Kentucky, and the negative campaign part, not positively addressing real needs of working class America. But it’s still so hard for me to understand the not caring if your president is offensive, vulgar, greedy, ineffective, phobic, infantile, a liar, and all the other disqualifying character/behavior flaws. Is there such a disconnect that poor white voters don’t worry that their candidate spews contradictory rhetoric with no intention of serving them, the actual people who need help? Do traditional American “values” somehow not apply to a Repub extremist, only to the Dem opponent? I’m still perplexed.
I guess I’m looking for logical sense and ethical standards where there aren’t any. I’m still thinking like a liberal progressive from a privileged background. The trump voters I’ve met here are not educated enough to think critically or skeptically, just brainwashed to echo media propaganda. They were simply fed up with their lives never noticeably improving during any administration, and blindly took a stab in the dark for “Change”, some vague wishful thinking involving better economic living conditions, not based in reality. They don’t get that the very government programs and services they depend on could get much worse under a trump. It’s a paycheck to paycheck mentality, or rather, reaction.
I just wonder if Dems will ever be able to comprehend or bridge this gap between haves and have-nots. They assume working class middle America must think reasonably and make educated decisions, just like them. The majority of progressives have never lived hand-to-mouth, with few opportunities. If they’ve had the good fortune to work their way up out of poverty, and educated themselves, they may assume others can manage it, too. In other words, they’ve either never lived in the midwest or deep south, or they’ve forgotten their roots.
Well, I wasn’t going to do the political commentary thing, but this DNC Chair candidate’s unique point of view and take on the disconnect and impasse that persists in this country got my attention. The fact that he’s openly gay is noteworthy but not unusual. In fact, more peculiar to me is the unexpectedly high number of gay Republican conservative trump voters from poor rural backgrounds that I’ve encountered in this state. It seems all out of proportion and defies logic. You’d think they of all people would know better, but they seem to see no contradiction or conflict there. I think it’s cognitive dissonance.
OK, enough with the politics. On to more practical topics, like the imminent prospect of drinking scotch, a very rare occurrence down at this economic level. I don’t officially know this yet, but I have it on good authority (someone so inexperienced at booze that she had to consult me on my own birthday present)! I also “don’t know” about those yummy cake-baking aromas emanating from somewhere… I do, however, officially know these wondrous See’s items are in our immediate future, thanks to The Bobs:
