Desperately seeking 'the white working class,' Edsall is afraid democrats have lost them-NY Times op-ed

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Were the 41% of whites who didn't vote for Romney in 2012 the 'white working class' that Edsall's side had in 2012 but lost in 2014?

11/11/14, "The Demise of the White Democratic Voter," NY Time op-ed, Thomas B. Edsall

"It has not escaped the notice of political analysts that 72 percent of whites without college degrees — a rough proxy for what we used to call the white working class — believe that “the U.S. economic system generally favors the wealthy.” Or that on Nov. 4, these same men and women voted for Republican House candidates 64-34.

Similarly, the overwhelmingly white electorates of Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska and South Dakota voted decisively in referendums to raise the minimum wage while simultaneously voting for Republicans, whose party has adamantly rejected legislation to raise the minimum wage.

There is an ongoing debate among politicians, political scientists and partisans of both parties over the dismal support of Democratic candidates among whites. Does it result from ideological differences, racial animosity or a perception among many whites that they are excluded from a coalition of minorities, the poor, single women of all races, gays and other previously marginalized constituencies?

Arguably, the poor Democratic showing among whites does not represent naked race prejudice, as Obama’s election and re-election attest. But it can be seen as a reflection of substantial material interests that affect the very voters who carry greater weight in low turnout midterm Congressional elections.

Whites as a whole, who made up 75 percent of this year’s electorate, voted for Republican House candidates by a 24-point margin, 62-38, the exact same margin by which they supported Republican candidates in the 2010 midterms. In 2006, when opposition to President George W. Bush was intense, Republicans won white voters by eight points, 52-44."...

[Ed. note: It got worse. After Nov. 2008, there were almost no Republicans left in the House and deservedly so.]

(continuing): "The opposition of whites to the Democratic Party is visible not only in voting behavior, but in general opposition to key Democratic policy initiatives, most tellingly in hostility toward the Affordable Care Act. A November 2013 National Journal poll found, for example, that 58 percent of whites said Obamacare would make things worse for “people like you and your family,” more than double the 25 percent that said that Obamacare would make things better.

Asked whether the Affordable Care Act would make things better or worse for the country at large, 60 percent of whites said worse and 35 percent of whites said better.

Obamacare shifts health care benefits and tax burdens from upper-income Americans to lower-income Americans, and from largely white constituencies to beneficiaries disproportionately made up of racial and ethnic minorities. The program increases levies on the overwhelmingly white affluent by raising taxes on households making more than $250,000."...

[Ed. note: This doesn't begin to describe ObamaCare is about and that most Americans have opposed it (per Reuters poll). The seizure of one seventh of the US economy only proceeded after two events: a Supreme Court judge rewrote the law to say it was a tax, and the GOP House refused to allow a standalone up or down vote to defund ObamaCare to come to the floor. Only the House can originate tax bills. And here.. In June 2012 a 5-4  Supreme Court decision said ObamaCare is only legal as a tax. As of 11/13/14, the House still hasn't voted to approve ObamaCare as a tax, though the June 2012 5-4 Supreme Court ruling was "based on the power of Congress to impose taxes."

(continuing): "To achieve its goals, Obamacare reduces spending on Medicare by $500 billion over 10 years, according to the Medicare board of trustees, which oversees the finances of the program. Medicare serves a population that is 77 percent white. Even as reductions in Medicare spending fall disproportionately on white voters, the savings are being used to finance Obamacare, which includes a substantial expansion of Medicaid. Medicaid recipients are overwhelmingly poor and, in 2013, were 41 percent white and 59 percent minority.

In addition to expanding Medicaid, the overall goal of Obamacare is to provide health coverage for the uninsured, a population that, in 2010 when the program was enacted, was 47 percent white, and 53 percent black, Hispanic, Asian-American and other minorities."...

It’s not hard to see, then, why a majority of white midterm voters withheld support from Democrats and cast their votes for Republicans."...

[Ed. note: Mr. Edsall twists himself into a pretzel to prove his desired result: "It's not hard to see, then" that working class whites are racist.]
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(continuing): "Republicans are not satisfied with winning 62 percent of the white vote. To counter the demographic growth of Democratic constituencies whose votes threaten Republican success in high-turnout presidential elections, Republicans have begun a concerted effort to rupture the partisan loyalty of the remaining white Democratic voters. Their main target is socially liberal, fiscally conservative suburbanites, the weakest reeds in the Democratic coalition. These middle-income white voters do not share the acute economic needs of so-called downscale Democratic voters and they are less reliant on government services.

The Republican strategy to win over these more culturally tolerant, but still financially pressed, white voters is to continue to focus on material concerns – on anxiety about rising tax burdens, for example — while downplaying the preoccupation of many of the most visible Republicans with social, moral and cultural repression."...

[Ed. note: "Republican strategy?" The Republican Party purposely had no strategy as has been widely reported. Individual candidates took positions, but the national party didn't. Look at McConnell. In Kentucky he pledged to repeal ObamaCare “root and branch.” As soon as he got back to DC, he stopped saying it. The GOP has always loved ObamaCare.]

(continuing): "The current effectiveness of the anti-tax strategy was demonstrated in the unexpected victory of Larry Hogan, the Republican gubernatorial candidate in deep blue Maryland, who defeated Anthony Brown, the highly favored Democratic lieutenant governor."...

[Ed. note: Mr. Hogan's "effectiveness" wasn't the result of national GOP "strategy." They couldn't have financed him even if they'd wanted to: "He (Hogan) made the unusual choice to finance his run for governor using Maryland's public financing system, the first candidate to do in two decades. The decision gave him a $2.6 million in public money, but curtailed the amount he could spend. The state's Republican Party was allowed to spend another $3.7 million on Hogan's behalf." By mid-October Hogan's democrat opponent had spent $19.5 million.]

(continuing): "“The average Marylander sees a governor and legislature willing to impose record tax increases on the rest of us that we don’t need, don’t want and can’t afford,” Hogan declared at the start of his campaign and repeated relentlessly until Election Day.

Hogan won by decisively carrying all the majority white suburbs surrounding Baltimore city, including Howard County, a former bastion of suburban Democratic strength."...

[Ed. note: These Baltimore "suburban whites" didn't just switch in 2014, they've been known to vote R since at least in 2002: "And Hogan led everywhere else, including in the Baltimore suburbs. That was the region that in 2002 paved the way to victory for Ehrlich (Republican), who hired Hogan as a member of his Cabinet."]

(continuing): "In Colorado, Cory Gardner, the Republican Senate nominee, joined the Republican assault on Obamacare and taxes:

The President’s healthcare law has added countless new taxes to millions of Americans, and economic growth will continue to struggle until we can accomplish real, meaningful tax reform. The future of our economy depends on it.

Significantly, Gardner also stiff-armed the Christian right on issues of contraception and abortion in his successful two-point win over Mark Udall, the Democratic incumbent. Gardner highlighted a more culturally tolerant approach when he endorsed over the counter access to the “morning after” pill – a form of contraception many in the right to life movement consider a form of abortion – and when he renounced past sponsorship of a “personhood” constitutional amendment titled “The Life Begins at Conception Act.”

In a mea culpa comment rarely heard in campaigns, Gardner told The Denver Post:

I’ve learned to listen. I don’t get everything right the first time. There are far too many politicians out there who take the wrong position and stick with it and never admit that they should do something different.

Despite this, not only did the Christian right stick with Gardner, but white evangelicals provided his margin of victory. These religious voters, who made up 25 percent of the Colorado midterm electorate, voted for Gardner over Udall by a resounding 70 points, 83 to 13. This margin was enough to compensate for Udall’s 20-point victory, 57 percent to 37 percent, among the remaining 75 percent of the Colorado electorate.

The clear implication of these results for Republican candidates running in 2016 and beyond is that you can break with conservative orthodoxy on some issues to better appeal to a general election electorate without paying the price of losing white Christian support.

If Republicans are successful in toning down their candidates, it will take from Democrats a weapon that has proved highly successful in state and federal elections: demonizing Republican Party candidates as a collection of knuckle-dragging Neanderthals.

The Democrats’ portrayal of Republicans has served to motivate both Democratic voters and donors, especially suburban white Democrats, by tapping into their anger and fear of a morally intrusive Republican Party.

“Anger in politics can play a particularly vital role, motivating some people to participate in ways they might ordinarily not,” according to Nicholas Valentino, a professor of communication studies and political science at the University of Michigan, and the lead author of “Election Night’s Alright for Fighting: The Role of Emotions in Political Participation,” a 2011 study of voter motivation.

Anger leads citizens to harness existing skills and resources in a given election. Therefore, the process by which emotions are produced in each campaign can powerfully alter electoral outcomes.

A Democratic tactic designed to focus on mobilizing white voters – the sustained effort led by Senator Harry Reid to demonize the Koch brothers – has not yet, by most accounts, paid off."...

[Ed. note: What about Democrat tactics to create racial hatred against Republicans as a reason to vote in 2014 midterms?]

(continuing): "As they have after past Election Day defeats, Democrats can hope for Republican infighting between the establishment and Tea Party wings. Such internecine conflict, in fact, has already begun.

Democrats can also count on greater voter participation by their loyalists in a presidential year, and on advantageous demographic trends: The share of the electorate held by older and working-class whites, the core of the Republican Party, diminishes every year, while Democratic constituencies continue to grow.

In the aftermath of the 2012 election, the obligation to change fell upon the Republican Party. With the support of Karl Rove, the Republican National Committee, under its chairman, Reince Priebus, pulled the party to the center, with Priebus producing the famous autopsy report calling for political moderation. To the surprise of many, the party’s candidates this year took key suggestions to heart.

Insofar as the Republican Party successfully sandpapers its sharp edges, the necessity for change will now shift to the Democrats. Most recently, this kind of metamorphosis was accomplished by Bill Clinton’s 1992 “Southern governor’s strategy” presidential campaign when he defied liberal orthodoxy on such issues as welfare and the death penalty....

The white vote in the years since 1992 has become consistently more committed to Republican candidates. Mitt Romney carried whites by a 20-point margin, 59-39, larger than either John McCain, 12 points, or George W. Bush, 17 points."...

[Ed. note: This also means 41% of whites didn't vote for Romney in 2012.]

(continuing): "Clinton has her work cut out for her, especially if the Republican nominee heeds the advice of party leaders and makes a concerted effort to further erode — by whatever means necessary — white Democratic support."

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Comment: Edsall says, "If the Republican nominee heeds the advice of party leaders." What "advice" from what "party leaders"? "Republicans didn’t run on an agenda other than antipathy toward all things Obama." The GOP was on the sidelines. 2014 midterms were about the American people:

Rush Limbaugh the day after the 11/4/14 elections:

11/5/14, "The Mandate: Republicans Were Elected to Stop Barack Obama, Not to Work with Him," Rush Limbaugh transcript

"The Republican Party now has one of the most important and unquestionable mandates a political party has ever had at its junction with American history, especially a political party which did not run on a national agenda.  

The Republican Party purposely stood mute nationally....
 
Many Republican candidates ran specifically against Obamacare, and that is an important note to make and an important thing for you to remember. Individual Republican candidates won, and they won big. They won in a wave landslide running against Obamacare. The national Republican brand or image didn't say a word, which makes the mandate that they have all the more incredible.

It is rare that a political party running for office in a midterm election not standing for anything ends up with a mandate, and they have one, and it is the biggest and perhaps the most important mandate a political party has had in the recent era, and it is very simple what that mandate is. It is to stop Barack Obama. It is to stop the Democrats.

There is no other reason why Republicans were elected yesterday....

This was the people of America "standing athwart history and yelling, 'Stop!'" There's only one entity that can do that, and that's the Republican Party. They were not elected to "get along." They were not elected to "reach across the aisle."

They were not elected to "compromise." They were not elected to "end gridlock." They were elected to stop the policies of Barack Obama and the Democrat Party. Too much damage has been done to too many people. Because of a president of the United States, people are having their jobs converted from full time to part time. The American people didn't think that was on the table."...

Rush Limbaugh, 11/5/14   

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Links for my notes in NY  Times article:

10/28/14, "Another round of racially tinged political fliers in North Carolina," Washington Examiner, T. Becket Adams

2014 Democrat campaigns attempted with fliers to incite racial hatred against Republicans in hopes it would win them elections. Image from Washington Examiner

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The GOP used the same tactic in Mississippi so it must work: 

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11/5/14, "Republicans Must Denounce Racial Politics and Acknowledge Constitutional Conservatives are Not Racist," Jen Kuznicki

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11/5/14, "Rx for ObamaCare: Republicans must perform radical surgery," Betsy McCaughey, NY Post, opinion

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11/5/14, "Hogan defeats Brown," Baltimore Sun, Eric Cos, Michael Dresser

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11/5/14, "Republican Larry Hogan wins Md. governor’s race in stunning upset," Washington Post, John Wagner, Jenna Johnson

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11/6/14, "Dana Milbank: Republicans have majority, but no clear purpose," Washington Post, opinion

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9/17/13"The Obama-Boehner Project," Angelo M. Codevilla, Liberty Law Site

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Reuters report on 6/28/12 5-4 Supreme Court decision approving ObamaCare only as a tax:

6/28/12, "U.S. top court upholds healthcare law in Obama triumph," Reuters, James Vicini and Jonathan Stempel

"The U.S. Supreme Court upheld President Barack Obama's healthcare law on Thursday in an election-year triumph for him and fellow Democrats and a stinging setback for Republican opponents...


In a 5-4 ruling based on the power of Congress to impose taxes, the court preserved the law's "individual mandate" requiring that most Americans obtain health insurance by 2014 or pay a tax....

The court was deeply divided on this issue, but the majority ruled that Congress' taxing power was more important.

The law's "requirement that certain individuals pay a financial penalty for not obtaining health insurance may reasonably be characterized as a tax," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court's majority.

"Because the Constitution permits such a tax, it is not our role to forbid it, or to pass upon its wisdom or fairness," wrote Roberts, who was joined by the four most liberal members - Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor - in upholding the law's key provision.

The four dissenters, all from the court's conservative wing, were Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. They would have struck down the entire law....

In another part of the decision, the court said Congress went too far in a part of the law that requires states to expand the government's Medicaid health insurance program for the poor in order to extend coverage to many uninsured people.

The court said this problem was addressed by precluding the federal government from withdrawing existing Medicaid funds from states that do not comply with the expansion....

It was signed by Obama in March 2010....
      
About 56 percent of Americans said they opposed the law in a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Sunday. When asked about its individual provisions, however, most respondents said they strongly supported them, except for the individual mandate, which was opposed by 61 percent of those surveyed."...
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Reuters article written a day later, 6/29, includes comment from Justice Kennedy:

6/29/12, "U.S. top court upholds healthcare law in Obama triumph," Reuters, by James Vicini, Jonathan Stempel and Joan Biskupic

Scroll to one paragraph above subhead, "Characterized as a tax:'

"(Justice) Kennedy, summarizing the dissent from the bench, accused the court majority of  

"vast judicial overreaching. It creates a 

debilitated, inoperable version of healthcare regulation that Congress did not enact and

the public does not expect.""...
 

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Article 1, Section 7 of the Constitution:

"Section 7 - The Meaning"
 
"The House of Representatives must begin the process when it comes to raising and spending money. It is the chamber where all taxing and spending bills start....Only the House may introduce a bill that involves taxes."
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The House of Representatives unilateral power to defund:

"The House of Representatives cannot only refuse, but they alone can propose the supplies requisite for the support of the government. They, in a word, hold the power of the purse."...And there's no such thing as "mandatory spending:"

8/30/13, "Founders made defunding 'the most complete and effectual weapon'," Washington Examiner, Mark Tapscott, Executive Editor

"It's not often that I've had the opportunity or inclination to take up my pen in recent months, owing to the Washington Examiner's transformation earlier this year from daily print newspaper to online media. I do so now only out of concern about a persistent myth that is heard daily in the ObamaCare debate.

That myth is that Congress cannot repeal or otherwise change "mandatory spending," and therefore Obamacare cannot be defunded via a continuing resolution, as proposed by Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas, Mike Lee of Utah and Rand Paul of Kentucky.

People on all sides of the "defund, delay or repeal Obamacare" issue have solid arguments, and this column isn't about whether one or the other side ought to prevail in that discussion.

What this column most certainly is about, however, is that the Congress can repeal, increase, reduce or otherwise modify any "mandatory spending" measure at any time. In fact, James Madison, the "father of the Constitution," made it clear in Federalist #58 that the Founders specifically gave the House of Representatives the power of the purse with the expectation that it would on occasion use that power to stop unwise acts by the Senate or either of the other two branches.

I was reminded of this today by J. Christian Adams, who briefly alludes to Madison in a Washington Times column. Madison's observations about the House of Representatives make it absolutely clear that there is no such thing as "mandatory spending" that cannot be changed as Congress, and in particular at the insistence of the lower chamber.

First, Madison points to the superiority of the House over the Senate with regard to funding issues, noting that "notwithstanding the equal authority which will subsist between the two houses on all legislative subjects except the originating of money bills" and praising the "continual triumph of the British House of Commons over the other branches of the government whenever the engine of a money bill has been employed."

In other words, the prospect of the House standing firm and refusing to fund something favored by the Senate and the president was understood by the Founders to be a very real possibility because they had seen just such a conflict stretching over many decades in Parliament.

But Madison didn't just acknowledge the similarity of fiscal power between the House of Representatives and the House of Commons, he praised the singular exercise of the power of the purse as "the most complete and effectual weapon" available under the Constitution to any of the three branches of the federal government.

Madison's point here bears serious, deliberative study by anybody who has an interest in the Obamacare debate:

"The House of Representatives cannot only refuse, but they alone can propose the supplies requisite for the support of the government. They, in a word, hold the power of the purse — that powerful instrument by which we behold, in the history of the British Constitition, an infant and humble representation of the people gradually enlarging the sphere of its activity and importance, and finally reducing, as far as it seemed to wish, all of the overgrown perogatives of the other branches of the government.

"This power over the purse may, in fact, be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people, for obtaining a redress of every grievance, and for carrying into effect every just and saluatory measure."

From his glowing description of how the House of Commons expanded its power as a result of its exercise of the power of the purse, Madison clearly anticipated that the House of Representatives would use its power of the purse to similar effect. And not merely on occasion but regularly and over a long period of time.

So were Madison here to advise us, he would say that not only can Congress do whatever it chooses to do with funding for any federal activity, Obamacare not excepted, the House of Representatives can, if it chooses to stand firm, properly refuse to fund any federal activity because that is exactly what the Founders expected the House of Representatives to do.

And one more observation: It is well to remember that the U.S. Constitution established a legislative supremacy federal government. The three branches are co-equal only as long as Congress chooses to allow them to be. And it is to the House of Representatives that the Constitution gives "the most complete and effectual weapon" in any contest with any other part of the government.
Some folks don't like it that way, but that's the way it is.

"Mark Tapscott is executive editor of The Washington Examiner."

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Democrats were clearly lost in coal country:

Obama coal policies have brought new life to the Republican Party in coal country: Republican McConnell won majority democrat counties in Kentucky he's never won before. Just a few years ago, Republicans didn't even bother running in West Virginia-Politico:

"Just a few years ago, a (W. Va.) Democrat running for office might not have even faced a Republican challenger."...Obama coal policies gave McConnell historic win in Kentucky: “I’m not sure some of those counties he’s won ever,” said coal exec.
 
11/8/14, "Dems may face long exile from coal country," Politico Pro, Erica Martinson   

 

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