“Every Group Has Its ‘Other'”: Here We Go Again, Trash-Talking The Working Class
Bear with me, please, as I start this column with a brief story about my two grandmothers who lived in trailer homes.
They lived in Ashtabula County, which is tucked into the northeast corner of Ohio, an hour east of Cleveland. If ever you’ve travelled a good distance along U.S. 90, you likely passed our county’s handful of exits on your way to somewhere else.
For all of my childhood, this was home, and I was seldom happier than when I had time alone with my maternal great-grandmother, Ada, who raised my mother from the age of 8. In the late ’60s, after her husband died, Ada sold her house and 20 acres to move into a trailer home a couple of miles down the road. It was closer to her church, her second home.
I spent weeks at a time in the summers with her, freed from the responsibilities of the oldest child always on duty. She taught me how to cook, garden and quilt. Every Sunday after church, rain or shine, we walked to the cemetery to tend my great-grandfather’s grave and say a prayer of gratitude for the time we’d had with him. We had our evening rituals, too. She believed a steaming cup of tea at sunset was a great way to settle the mind for the big thoughts that show up only under the night sky.
My maternal grandmother, Vivian, lost custody of my mother when she was 8 and spent the rest of her life trying to make it up to her and taking care of my uncle, who had a mental disability. His name was Francis, and she never spent a day away from him until he died from complications of diabetes in his late 50s.
Grandma Vivian was the first person I knew to buy an aluminum Christmas tree. What a sight for my siblings and me. My mother stood behind us and whispered orders to close our mouths and stop acting like we’d just seen a ghost.
This was the grandma with the trunk full of antique dresses and hats for us to play with whenever we visited. When my mother wasn’t around, Grandma often served me a cup of coffee loaded with milk and sugar — a grown-up reward for “being so responsible.” When her house in Ashtabula County became too run down to be safe, my grandmother closed it up and lived in a trailer on the back lot until Alzheimer’s robbed her of the ability to take care of herself.
I wanted you to know a little bit about my grandmothers so that you might better understand my outrage over a Cleveland Plain Dealer writer’s reaction to Sarah Palin’s endorsement of Donald Trump for president:
“Thanks to Trump, the entire Palin clan is now back in the spotlight they so crave. Come July, Republican National Convention organizers should house the whole dysfunctional family at a trailer park in Ashtabula.”
This is surely not the first time a pundit has cast the Palins as “trailer park folks” — which is code, of course, for “white trash.” We are hearing these phrases more frequently as pundits try to make sense of Donald Trump’s soaring poll numbers.
In her book “Framing Class: Media Representations of Wealth and Poverty in America,” sociologist Diana Kendall describes how in 2008 then-“Late Show” host David Letterman “maintained a night-after-night monologue about Sarah Palin and why she is white trash.” He was joined, she writes, by “print media, television and Web blogs … full of descriptions of Sarah Palin’s trailer park lifestyle.”
Much closer to home, since Donald Trump’s charade of a candidacy caught fire, I have heard many fellow liberals freely toss around the terms “white trash” and “trailer trash.” These are people who would never dream of telling a racist joke, but they think nothing of ridiculing those of lesser economic means.
Every group has its “other.” For too many white intellectuals, it’s the working class.
Neither of my grandmothers had much money, ever, but they contributed so much to the lives of the people they loved. They were both storytellers who helped me understand the long-ago sacrifices of people I would never know but who live on in the blue of my eyes and the ambitions of my heart. They are why I’ve devoted a number of columns and stories over the years to people who live in trailer parks.
Just this week, I was remembering Marjie Scuvotti, a 24-year-old mother of four. I interviewed her in 2002, on the first anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. She talked to me in her home in a trailer park as she painted her 6-year-old son Issac’s face red, white and blue for a parade celebrating first responders.
“You’re my American-flag boy,” Marjie whispered in his ear. She couldn’t have been a prouder mother.
This campaign year has barely begun, and it promises to be a long one. Regardless of which partisan lens we look through, we will see some voters who confound us.
Mocking them will never bring us closer to understanding them, but it will surely reveal us, and we will not benefit from the exposure.
By: Connie Schultz, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Columnist and Professional-in-Residence at Kent State University’s School of journalism; Featured Post, The National Memo, January 28, 2016
“Out Bullying The Bullies”: The Donald Trump Vs. Fox News Clusterfuck, Explained
A quick recap of the tumultuous, on-again/off-again relationship between Fox News and Republican frontrunner Donald Trump:
Trump has an ally in Fox News.
Trump doesn’t like Megyn Kelly.
Trump irons things out with Roger Ailes.
Trump is boycotting Fox News.
Trump is no longer boycotting Fox News.
Trump spends New Year’s Eve with Fox News.
Trump might not show up at Fox News’ GOP debate.
Trump is kind of a chicken for ducking Fox News’ debate.
Trump is “definitely not” going to the debate.
Why can’t these two frenemies just get along?
Like the bickering Sam and Diane duo from Cheers sitcom fame, Trump and Fox News obviously belong together (they like all the same things!), but they just can’t get past their stubborn differences.
Thursday night’s Fox-hosted primary debate on the eve of the Iowa caucus has now been completely overshadowed by the roiling feud between friends/enemies Trump and Fox, as the two institutional bullies lock horns. Is the current impasse a lasting one, or will the harsh words be papered over in the days and weeks to come the way previous Trump vs. Fox skirmishes ended in handshakes and smiles? It’s too soon to tell.
What’s so strange about the discord is that Trump is practically the living personification of the Fox News id: He’s a bigoted nativist who wallows in Islamophobia and thrives on dividing Americans and insulting President Obama as an un-American radical.
After the traditionally nice campaign of Mitt Romney in 2012, you’d think Fox News would be loving the insult-throwing Trump, a candidate who, like so many Fox anchors and hosts, isn’t afraid to make stuff up. Trump mirrors the often-tasteless brand of divisive rhetoric that Ailes helped hallmark at Fox.
But the truth is, Trump seems to hold Fox in the same general contempt that he holds the rest of the press. Meaning, from the Trump worldview, Fox doesn’t operate on a similar plane as him. Fox is subservient to Trump and — in his mind — should be in the business of touting his campaign. If and when it does not, Trump loses his cool because he doesn’t like to be second-guessed by “lightweight” journalists.
This represents a whole new world for Fox, which has controlled the conservative debate, and in turn controlled Republican politicians, for more than a decade. Fox sets the parameters. Fox picks the agenda. Fox grooms a handful of Republicans for right-wing media stardom. That’s why I can’t recall anyone ever picking such a public fight with Fox News from inside the GOP tent the way Trump has. It’s simply not done. And Fox’s frantic, off-key corporate response to Trump’s jabs has confirmed that executives there have very little practice fighting intramural skirmishes.
Forget that Fox cemented Trump’s right-wing celebrity status in 2011 when it handed over uninterrupted airtime for him to unfurl his misguided birther campaign against President Obama. Forget that Sean Hannity’s basement is probably lined with Trump for President posters.
Without Fox News’ exaggerated generosity over the years, and without Fox providing endless free airtime in the form of promotional blitzes to tout Trump as a possible presidential player, it’s unlikely Trump today would be perched atop the Republican field.
Trump this week is exercising a power play, pure and simple. (He knows he’s the reason Fox likely sold ads for the debate at a sky-high rate.) Bottom line: Roger Ailes is finally facing someone who’s willing, and eager, to out-bully him. And do it in public.
Of course what makes all this angry back-and-forth so funny is that one combatant is supposed to be a news organization. News organizations aren’t supposed to have bizarre, on-going public spats with one party’s leading candidate. Anchors on a news channel aren’t supposed to plead with candidates to show up at debates. And the head of a news channel doesn’t usually try to patch things up by directly phoning powerful politicians. But this is Fox News, so all the normal rules go out the window.
Indeed, the underlying truth here is that if Fox News conducted itself as an ethical news outlet, these kinds of messy spats and hurt feelings wouldn’t be an issue. Instead, Fox is often run as a Republican National Committee marketing arm, or a GOP clubhouse, raising expectations from Republicans in terms of how they’ll be treated. Trump clearly senses a weakness there and is now trying to exploit it.
In August, I suggested that Fox News, via the unwieldy Trump charade, had “eaten the Republican primary season” and that the “slow-motion fiasco is only going to get much, much worse for Republicans.”
Boy, has it. Democrats are likely pointing and laughing this week.
By: Eric Boehlert, Media Matters for America, January 28, 2016
“He Has A Chance To Make History”: Could Americans Elect A Non-Religious President? Bernie Sanders Wants To Find Out
Right now, Marco Rubio is basically telling voters to choose him because he’s the most religious of the candidates. Ted Cruz is praying with voters. Mike Huckabee’s supporters are running ads saying not to vote for Cruz because he might not be a sincere Christian. Donald Trump is picking up surprising support from evangelicals.
Yet over on the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders might just be the first serious contender for a major-party nomination in modern times who is openly not religious — which would be the most significant religious development of this campaign.
Are Americans ready to elect someone who doesn’t even pretend to be religious to the White House? Maybe not yet — but if the country’s religious landscape keeps changing the way it has been, it could happen before long.
Mostly because Sanders is a Democrat (more on that in a bit), the question of his religious beliefs hasn’t gotten much attention up to now. This is from an article in today’s Post:
But as an adult, Sanders drifted away from Jewish customs. And as his bid for the White House gains momentum, he has the chance to make history. Not just as the first Jewish president — but as one of the few modern presidents to present himself as not religious.
“I am not actively involved with organized religion,” Sanders said in a recent interview.
Sanders said he believes in God, though not necessarily in a traditional manner.
“I think everyone believes in God in their own ways,” he said. “To me, it means that all of us are connected, all of life is connected, and that we are all tied together.”
Sanders doesn’t talk about this a lot, so we have to do some inferring about the substance of his beliefs. But what we can say is that the way he describes his conception of God — as a connection that exists between people and other living things — is most definitely not the conception of either the faith he was born in or of Christianity, the dominant faith among Americans. Those monotheistic religions (as well as others) see God as something external, a being with its own intentions, ideas, and decisions. Sanders can call his idea “God,” but a close reading suggests that he could be the first president in American history not to profess a belief in the kind of God most Americans worship. (There have been presidents, including Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, who were accused by their opponents of being atheists, but whatever they privately believed, in their public statements they spoke about God in familiar terms.)
To be clear, I don’t think Sanders’s thoughts about metaphysics should play much of a role in whether anyone votes for him or against him. I’ve long argued that voters should care about the substance of a candidate’s religious beliefs in proportion to the amount the candidate claims those beliefs will influence his or her behavior in office. Sanders isn’t arguing that his ideas about God will determine what course he pursues on Wall Street regulation, so those ideas aren’t particularly relevant. On the other hand, when Marco Rubio says, “I do think it’s important for our president to be someone who is influenced by their faith, especially if it’s Christianity,” then we should know exactly what his faith consists of and how he sees that influence manifesting itself.
At the same time, we should acknowledge that finding a candidate who shares your religious beliefs is one of the worst ways to make your choice, no matter what your beliefs are. If you’re an evangelical Christian, for instance, you probably love Ronald Reagan, who seldom went to church, and you probably dislike the only evangelical Christian ever elected president, Jimmy Carter. (Contrary to popular belief, George W. Bush is not an evangelical; he’s a Methodist, just like Hillary Clinton.) Pick the president you most revere and the one you most despise, and both at least professed to be believing Christians. So as a tool to predict the content of a presidency, which box the candidate checks isn’t much use.
Nevertheless, it’s long been true that Americans say they won’t vote for someone who doesn’t believe in God. Yet that’s now changing. According to a recent poll from the Pew Research Center, 51 percent of Americans say they’d be less likely to vote for someone who didn’t believe in God. That’s larger than the figure for a Muslim (42 percent), someone who had had an extramarital affair (37 percent), or a gay candidate (26 percent). But it’s also a decline of 12 points from 2007, when 63 percent said they’d be less likely to vote for a non-theist.
Similarly, a Gallup poll in June found that 58 percent of Americans said they’d vote for “an atheist” for president — a low number, to be sure, but significantly higher than the 49 percent who said they’d vote for an atheist in 1999, not to mention the 18 percent who said so in 1958.
And that number will probably continue to rise. It’s older people who are most resistant to a non-religious president, while young people have much less of a problem with it. And most importantly, the ranks of secular people are growing. This is probably the most significant development in American religious life in recent years; the ranks of what are sometimes called the “Nones” — those who claim no religious affiliation — have exploded in recent years. According to Pew’s data, the Nones went from 16 percent of the population to 23 percent just between 2007 and 2014, and they too are more heavily concentrated among the young, while the oldest generation is the most religious.
It’s important to note that many of these people with no religious affiliation don’t call themselves atheists, and many say they believe in some version of God; there’s plenty of diversity within that group. But they constitute a growing portion of the electorate for whom religion isn’t all that important and who don’t demand candidates whose religious views mirror theirs. And they make up a significant portion of the Democratic electorate.
All that means that over time the chances of one of the two parties nominating someone who doesn’t believe in God will continue to rise. It will probably be a Democrat, and it might be a Jew, since atheism may go down a bit easier with a candidate who simultaneously has membership in a religious group (since Judaism is a religion but also a cultural affiliation born of tradition and heritage, many Jews comfortably think of themselves as both Jewish and atheist).
To come back to where we started, I may have my own suspicions about what Bernie Sanders believes deep in his heart. But his rather broad conception of God not as a guy with a long beard sitting on a cloud but as a force running through all living things — in other words, something that doesn’t punish you for your sins or hear your request for a good grade on your algebra exam — is still at odds with what most Americans believe. But to his voters, and most in the Democratic Party, it just isn’t all that important. His candidacy isn’t based on an argument that Sanders is just like you; rather, it’s trying to be a movement of those fed up with the fundamental course of American politics. There are many reasons why you might not support Sanders, but he could help make the idea of a non-religious candidate less controversial and anomalous.
And consider this: if Donald Trump wins the GOP nomination, the party of religious Christians will have nominated someone of laughably insincere religious belief. Despite his claim that he finds the Bible to be an even greater book than The Art of the Deal, Trump doesn’t appear to believe anything even vaguely related to Christianity (among other things, he’s such a high-quality performer at life that he has never asked God for forgiveness). So while a candidate’s faith still matters a great deal to many people, maybe the 2016 election will find voters in both parties relatively unconcerned with whether their favored candidate worships — or doesn’t — in the same way they do.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, January 28, 2016
“Mutual Back-Scratching Session With Donald Trump”: Where’s Bill O’Reilly’s Full-Throated Defense Of Megyn Kelly?
Fox News is an organization famous for loyalty. The culture starts from the top, where boss Roger Ailes sits. When anchors come under fire for some reason or other, Ailes is there to back them up. A year ago, for instance, ratings king Bill O’Reilly struggled to respond to a plume of reports documenting how he’d misled people about past reportorial exploits. Whereas other news organizations would audit such a situation, Ailes supported O’Reilly and waited out the storm.
On his program last night, O’Reilly demonstrated how not to return the favor. In a highly anticipated quasi-interview/mutual back-scratching session with Donald Trump, O’Reilly carefully avoided a full-throated endorsement of his colleague Megyn Kelly. Trump has been hammering Kelly ever since the Aug. 6 GOP debate in Cleveland, when she sought an explanation from Trump about how he’d mistreated women over the years. In tweets and interviews, Trump has called Kelly a “lightweight” and cheekily used the term “bimbo” in criticizing her, among other insults — conduct that speaks to the righteousness of Kelly’s Cleveland question.
In recent days, Trump renewed his rips against Kelly and on Tuesday his campaign announced he wouldn’t be showing up for tonight’s Fox News debate, at which Kelly, Bret Baier and Chris Wallace will serve as moderators. Trump will hold his own event in Iowa at the same time as the Fox News debate.
A way-too-long conversation on “The O’Reilly Factor” accorded the host a great number of opportunities to rebuff Trump for invoking the term “bimbo” in a tweet about Kelly; to stand foursquare behind Kelly’s Aug. 6 question; and to otherwise stand up for journalism. He turned them down, perhaps preferring not to rupture his decades-long friendship with the real-estate mogul.
Sure, O’Reilly gave the three moderators a vote of confidence, telling Trump that they’d treat him fairly if he decided to show up for the contest. And he did say that Kelly’s question was “within journalistic bounds.”
That said, O’Reilly did some retroactive editing of his prime-time Fox News colleague: “If I had been debate moderator last August, I would have asked you about that comment. I wouldn’t ask it the same way. But once you said something about Carly Fiorina, you open the door for it,” said O’Reilly to Trump. There’s a mistake in there: Kelly didn’t ask about Fiorina at the Aug. 6 Cleveland debate. The controversial and very sexist comments from Trump about Fiorina — “Look at that face!” he said in mocking his fellow candidate’s appearance — surfaced in a September Rolling Stone interview. With her famous question one month earlier in Cleveland, Kelly was focusing on other sexist comments by Trump. Here’s the transcript:
Mr. Trump, one of the things people love about you is you speak your mind and you don’t use a politician’s filter. However, that is not without its downsides, in particular, when it comes to women.
You’ve called women you don’t like “fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals.” Your Twitter account … has several disparaging comments about women’s looks. You once told a contestant on Celebrity Apprentice it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees. Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect as president, and how will you answer the charge from Hillary Clinton, who was likely to be the Democratic nominee, that you are part of the war on women?
When O’Reilly says he wouldn’t have asked that question the “same way,” what he means is that he would have said, “Mr. Trump, my friend of many decades, with whom I’ve gone to many sporting events and bought a great number of milkshakes, would your presidency help women?”
By: Eric Wemple, The Erik Wemple Blog, Opinion Page, The Washington Post, January 28, 2016
“Four Years Of Peace, Love, And Single-Payer Health Care?”: In That Old Volkswagen Bus With Bernie, Rolling Toward 1972
Unpack your old tie-dyed T-shirts, roll yourself a fat doobie, and warm up the ancient VW bus. We’re going to do Woodstock and the 1972 presidential election all over again. And this time, the hippies are going to win! Four years of peace, love, and single-payer health care.
But do take care to clear the path for Bernie Sanders. Because if he steps in something the dog left behind, he’s going to blame Wall Street and start yelling and waving his arms around.
And you know how much that upsets Republican congressmen who are otherwise so eager to oblige his plans to soak the rich and give everybody free college, free health care, free bubble-up and rainbow stew—as the old Merle Haggard song had it.
OK, so I’m being a smart-aleck. I was moved to satire by a couple of moments from last week’s Democratic and Republican presidential debates. First, Sen. Sanders, boasting about a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll that shows him beating Donald Trump by 15 points—54 to 39. Hillary Clinton tops Trump only 51-41.
Both would be huge landslides. In 1972, Richard Nixon defeated George McGovern 61-38. The Democrat won only Massachusetts.
The part Sanders left out and that Hillary was also wise enough to leave unmentioned is that the same poll shows her leading him 59 to 34 percent in the Democratic primary contest nationally. Twenty-five points.
She’d have to be a fool to take that to the bank, although it does demonstrate why a lot of the horse-race commentary has the narrative upside down. See, unless Bernie manages to prevail in the Iowa caucuses, his campaign pretty much goes on life support. A New Englander nearly always wins in New Hampshire, and rarely goes anywhere after that.
Almost needless to say, all polls are individually suspect. Moreover, the national media give far more play to surveys depicting a close contest; they’re better for journalists’ careers.
That would be true even if you didn’t know that bringing Hillary Clinton down has been an obsessive quest in Washington and New York newsrooms for twenty-four years.
During most of which time it’s been “Bernie who?” That Vermont socialist who’s all the time yelling? That guy?
Yeah, him. The guy with the Brooklyn accent and the Wacky Prof look who says “billionaire” the way some people say “Ebola.” Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
The same guy Ohio Gov. John Kasich boldly predicted would lose all 50 states if Democrats were foolish enough to nominate him. Actually, I’m confident Sanders would carry Vermont and probably Massachusetts against any Republican nominee. But New Hampshire and Maine could be out of reach.
Even against Trump? Well theoretical matchups mean next to nothing this far out. And I suspect that Bernie’s big advantage–hard for politically active readers to believe—is that most voters know almost nothing about him except that he’s neither Hillary nor The Donald.
I also suspect that a Trump vs. Sanders matchup would bring a serious third-party challenge. Let the GOP attack machine get to work on Sanders and I’m guessing we’d soon learn that there’s no great yearning among the electorate for socialism—democratic or not.
Did you know, for example, that Sanders took a honeymoon trip to the Soviet Union in 1988? George Will does.
Does that make him disloyal? Of course not, merely a bit of a crank. As Sanders loyalists are quick to remind you, President Reagan went to Moscow to negotiate nuclear arms reductions with Gorbachev that same year.
As a personal matter, I got my fill of Marxist faculty lounge lizards back in that tie-dyed, VW bus era. Disagree with them, and you’re an immoral sellout. That gets old really fast.
Writing in The Washington Monthly, David Atkins does a brave job of trying to explain away a Gallup poll showing that while 38 percent of Americans say they’d never vote for a Muslim president, and 40 percent wouldn’t support an atheist, fully 50 percent said no socialists need apply.
Can Bernie persuade them otherwise? I don’t see how. Most Americans don’t actually hate the rich, and his despairing portrait of contemporary American life doesn’t square with most people’s experience.
“Against these liabilities,” observes Jonathan Chait, “Sanders offers the left-wing version of a hoary political fantasy: that a more pure candidate can rally the People into a righteous uprising that would unsettle the conventional laws of politics.”
Meanwhile, not only has Sanders presented no realistic political scenario for enacting his vaunted reforms, serious observers also question their substance.
Writes liberal MVP Paul Krugman:
“To be harsh but accurate: the Sanders health plan looks a little bit like a standard Republican tax-cut plan, which relies on fantasies about huge supply-side effects to make the numbers supposedly add up.”
During the last Democratic debate, Bernie accused Hillary of failing to take his candidacy seriously. Fair enough. But has he?
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, January 20, 2016
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