August 26, 2008
What Exactly Does He Have to Say to Them?
Obama and the Working Class
By MICHAEL D. YATES
A recent New York Times article ('Rural Swath of Big State Tests Obama,' August 21, 2008) described life in the dead mill towns of western Pennsylvania and asked why Barack Obama's presidential bid was not catching fire there. The article mentioned Beaver Falls, Aliquippa, Raccoon Township, Hopewell, Hookstown. It might have named dozens more. These are devastated places, where, the article points out, 'Decades of job loss have created a youthful diaspora—you can knock on many doors without finding anyone under age 45. Declining enrollments forced Raccoon Township to close its elementary and middle schools.' Barack Obama should find fertile ground there for his presidential bid. But he hasn't. Hillary Clinton defeated him badly here, and his campaign has failed to gain traction since he sewed up the nomination. It seems that the white working class voters of western Pennsylvania are divided between their economic interests and their prejudice.
This account interested me. I am from Western Pennsylvania; I was born in a mining village and grew up in what is now a very dead mill town. I taught for thirty-two years in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, which while not quite in the western part of the state, has all of the demographic and social characteristics of Beaver Falls and Ambridge. For thirteen years, I lived in Pittsburgh, the mother of all mill towns.
In my book, Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate: an Economist's Travelogue, I say this about Johnstown and Pittsburgh:
The distance between Pittsburgh and Johnstown, Pennsylvania, is about seventy-five miles. Most of the trip is on Route 22, a dismal and depressing stretch of highway that perfectly mirrors the drab ugliness of much of western Pennsylvania. Gene & Boots Candy shop, Dick's Diner, Dean's Diner, Zoila's Western Diner, Country Kitchen (with 'broasted' chicken), Dairy Queens, Crest Nursing Home, Spahr Nursing Home, 7-11s, car dealerships, a strip mine, the Cheese House, motels, strip malls, two adult video stores (a clerk was murdered in one of them, but the killer was never found), the country's only drive-thru 'Gentlemen's Club' (aptly named Climax), the smallest house I have ever seen, feed stores, Long's Taxidermy, Monroeville, Murraysville, New Alexandria, Blairsville, Dilltown, Armagh, Clyde, Seward, Charles, bad curves, black ice, fallen trees, wrecked big rigs, school buses stopping on the highway, kids walking slowly to the trailer parks and country shacks, mobile homes for sale, a power plant belching smoke and steam in the distance—not an eye-pleasing scene until you get to the Conemaugh Gap, where the waters raged in the Great Johnstown Flood of 1889.
When I was young, parts of this highway were three lanes, and you could pass in the middle lane from either direction. If you were traveling east and started to pass a car, you never knew when someone going west might have the same idea. After many accidents, the third lane was converted into a turning lane or a fourth lane added. Progress! Back then, Pittsburgh and Johnstown were steel cities, dirty, yes, but there was work at high wages. And a little pride too. Now both towns are in the rust belt. The famous Homestead Works of U.S. Steel, built by Andrew Carnegie and site of the Homestead strike, where the picketers set the barges filled with Pinkerton strikebreakers on fire with flaming arrows, have been torn down, replaced by an upscale shopping complex. Johnstown's Bethlehem Steel plant, once the center of the industry's technological advances, has been sold piecemeal. Train wheels, steel rods, and wire are still made there, but the size of the workforce is a tiny fraction of what it was when I started work in the 'flood city.' Hard times have become a way of life. I would wager that there are more drug addicts and alcoholics in Pittsburgh and Johnstown than there are steelworkers. A lot more.
I say much the same about my hometown, Ford City, once the plate-glass-
It is true that there is abundant racism in these parts. Hillary Clinton knew this, and she, her husband, and governor Ed Rendell subtly played the race card in the primary election. Rendell said that there were whites in the state who would not vote for a black man. Hillary Clinton said that Obama would have a hard time winning support from 'white Americans.' In my fifty-five years in the region, I heard thousands of racist remarks—in bars, bowling alleys, on basketball courts, in college classrooms, in worker education classes, and in the faculty dining room. More than once, someone threatened to beat me up when I challenged such comments. A few weeks ago, my sister was doing voter registration and campaigning for Obama in our hometown. A group of teenagers standing across the street from her spewed out racial epithets.
There is no doubt that a not insignificant number of white working class voters will not vote for a black man for president under any circumstances. Some may vote for McCain, although those interviewed in the Times story had little use for him or for the war in Iraq. Some may go for the Libertarian candidate. Some may not vote at all.
But there is more to the antipathy that some in the white working class in the rust belt have for Obama.
What exactly does Obama have to say to them? Is he going to fight for their lost pensions? Make sure that the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation has adequate funds? Is he going to do battle for their health care? Is he going to get the unemployment insurance system fixed? Is it possible to believe that he will go afer all those anti-worker trade agreements? Will he ensure that social security is never privatized? That it be made more generous, as it easily could be? Is he going to reverse the Bush administration's draconian labor policies? Put people on the National Labor Relations Board who take the purpose of the labor laws—to promote collective bargaining—seriously
Will he make the Occupational Safety and Health Act a real law and not the dead letter it is now? Will he engineer a public works program that rebuilds the infrastructures of these forgotten towns and puts their citizens to work? Will he look for creative ways to bring these places back to life? Will he do something about public education and get rid of the corporate-inspired and ultra authoritarian No Child Left Behind legislation? Will he fight for college grants for those with little income? Will he bring home the working class wives, husbands, mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters from Iraq and Afghanistan? Stop wasting billions of dollars on these criminal wars? Demand that unions be made legal in Iraq?
Obama has failed to say anything meaningful about these matters, and as the campaign drags on, he moves ever further to the right. And if he doesn't speak to the white working class, how could it be said that he speaks to the black or Hispanic working class either? What about the more than one million black men and women in prison? The gutted and ruined inner cities? The lost manufacturing jobs? The millions of immigrants now being treated as criminals, imprisoned and sometimes tortured before being shipped off to their native lands?
I doubt that we will get much from Obama to inspire working men and women, of whatever part of the country, of whatever age, race, or ethnicity. Now he has chosen a pathetic old hack, Joe Biden, to be his running mate. What exactly has Biden done for workers in his more than thirty years in the Senate? That a man who has been in this elite body (whose members' stock portfolios have performed better than almost anyone else's) this long can be called 'working class' by Obama himself tell us just how lame U.S. politics are.
It is a shame that some white workers are racist. I chalk most of this up to the abject failure of the labor movement to attack the race issue head on many years ago. But Obama might have won over the voters Hillary Clinton got by pretending she was still a working class woman from Scranton, while she slugged down shots and a beers in local bars. He could have intertwined his hand with the hand of a white worker, like in the emblem of the old Packinghouse Workers union, and gone out on the stump and told the truth about the class struggle. A lot of white workers would have eaten this up.
Between 1980 and 2001, I taught over 1,000 workers in labor education classes held throughout western Pennsylvania—
Michael D. Yates is Associate Editor of Monthly review magazine.He is the author of Cheap Motels and Hot Plates: an Economist's Travelogue and Naming the System: Inequality and Work in the Global Economy. Yates can be reached at mikedjyates@
http://www.nytimes.
Rural Swath of Big State Tests Obama
RACCOON TOWNSHIP, Pa. — Wander up a gravel road and ask George Timko about Barack Obama and John McCain and he wrinkles his nose. Neither of those guys strikes him as a prize.
Mr. Timko is a burly fellow, with close-cropped white hair and a Fu Manchu mustache, and a gold necklace that rests on his bare chest. "Barack Obama makes me nervous," said Mr. Timko, a 65-year-old retiree with a garden hose in hand. "Who is he? Where'd he come from? "
As for Senator McCain? He shook his head. "He keeps talking about being a prisoner of war back in Vietnam. Great. The economy stinks; tell me his plan."
To roam the rural reaches of western Pennsylvania, through largely white working-class counties, is to understand the breadth of the challenge facing the two presidential candidates. But this economically ravaged region, once so solidly Democratic, poses a particular hurdle for Senator Obama.
From the desolation of Aliquippa — where the Jones & Laughlin steel mill loomed at the foot of the main boulevard — to the fading beauty of Beaver Falls to the neatly tended homes of retired steel workers in Hopewell, one hears much hesitating talk about Mr. Obama, some simply quizzical or skeptically political, and some not-so-subtly racial.
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York ran 40 percentage points ahead of Mr. Obama here during the Democratic primary. With its neighborhoods of white working-class laborers and retirees and fraying party loyalties, it has become a most uncertain political terrain and an inviting target for Mr. McCain — and one that could tip the electoral balance in Pennsylvania, a place packed with electoral votes.
Labor operatives line up behind Mr. Obama, and about a third of the 35 white voters who were interviewed leaned toward him. But no one feels confident predicting how many white Clinton voters will transfer their affections to Mr. Obama.
Raccoon Township, with a population just over 3,000, sprawls atop a hill in Beaver County, a 92 percent white and deeply blue-collar province. For a century it formed a stud in the Steel Necklace, a stretch of Pennsylvania and Ohio defined by belching steel mills and robust union wages. But as the mills shuttered, voters tipped Democratic by ever-narrower margins: Al GoreGeorge W. Bush by eight percentage points in 2000; John Kerry took Mr. Bush by fewer than three in 2004. bested
Political scientists tend to paint Pennsylvania in broad swaths: There is Philadelphia and its liberal-to-centrist suburbs; the middle of the state, which is rural, gun-loving and rightward-leaning; and the western third, which, except for Pittsburgh, tends to hold ever-so-tenuously to Democratic loyalties.
The Center for Politics and Public Affairs at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa., in a poll conducted last week, found Mr. Obama piling up big margins in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, but lagging in these western, working-class counties.
"This is not an easy land for any candidate, and you might say a black one has more trouble than most," said G. Terry Madonna, the center's director.
To what extent white voter concern has become a surrogate for racial anxiety is unclear.
Many voters talk of reading a stream of false and shadowy rumors purveyed by e-mail: Mr. Obama does not put his hand on his heart during the national anthem, he is a Muslim, he did not say hello to enlisted men in Afghanistan. Some disregard these rumors; some do not.
Mr. Obama is an Ivy League-educated lawyer campaigning in towns where an eighth-grade education and a sturdy back once purchased a good life. And he talks of soaring hope to people mistrustful of the same.
"People around here want pragmatic, practical language," said Tina Shannon, the 49-year-old daughter of a steel-mill worker and a liberal activist. "They don't want high-flown talk."
This said, Mr. McCain quickens few pulses. Vietnam, where he served in the military and was held captive for more than five years, seems distant. And not all laugh at his commercials poking fun at Mr. Obama's "celebrity" status.
Fifty yards down the gravel road from Mr. Timko's home, Brenda Goff, 55, a pharmacy worker who describes herself as a "Hillary girl" but is fine with Mr. Obama. As for Mr. McCain?
"I don't like his commercials — it's like he thinks we're stupid," Ms. Goff said.
Issues might seem to break toward Mr. Obama. Only 2 of 38 people interviewed — most in random door-knocking — favored remaining in Iraq. (Mr. Obama advocates a 16-month withdrawal timetable; Mr. McCain vows to stay until the war is won but suggests that he would have troops out by 2013.)
Few want a handout, but fewer want government to abandon them. A simmering hurt suffuses their words, a sense that neither hard work nor their unions could save them.
James Stanford, a retired and still heavily muscled steel worker, stood at his door and spoke of a pension that had evaporated. "Obama got one thing right," he said. "We are bitter here."
John Sylvester, 76, remembers when you could not find a parking space in Beaver Falls. You danced Saturday night at the Sons of Italy Club and drank with Dutch Town and River Rat neighborhood boys.
Mr. Sylvester labored in a steel mill for 42 years. Then the mill owner declared bankruptcy. Now he was bent over a chipped fire hydrant, putting down a coat of yellow paint for $7 an hour.
His blue eyes were piercing beneath a white sun visor. "I got a little money in the end but nothing to speak of," he said.
Decades of job losses have created a youthful diaspora — you can knock on many doors without finding anyone under age 45. Declining enrollments forced Raccoon Township to close its elementary and middle schools. Political wisdom holds that such fractures favor the Democrats.
But Mr. Obama does not sound like a sure bet.
"Obama's very charismatic but if you listen closely, he hasn't said a whole lot," Mr. Sylvester said.
In Raccoon, Kelly Dobbins, a middle-aged factory worker, offered the same. "I'm like a duck in the water — I float there but underneath I'm paddling hard as I can go," Mr. Dobbins said. "What's pushing me toward McCain is Obama. Who is he? Where does he stand?"
Such questions hint at a cultural disconnect. Mr. Obama would invest tens of billions of dollars in retooling mills and factories to fashion windmills and solar panels. He notes that Denmark and the Netherlands have grown fat off the new energy economy.
But environmentalism holds little attraction in a county where soot-covered stoops and dirty rivers were accepted as an unfortunate trade-off of a prosperous industrial age.
"Until people see a factory transformed, they really don't put much store by this talk," said the Rev. Henry Knapp of First Presbyterian Church in Beaver.
Still, two-thirds of Pennsylvanians surveyed in the Franklin & Marshall poll ranked the economy as their No. 1 concern.
Hookstown is surrounded by emerald fields near the West Virginia border. White-haired Art Seckman stepped gingerly off his porch.
Mr. Seckman puts no faith in Mr. McCain. "He looks tired, and he's gung-ho about war," Mr. Seckman said. "I was a Hillary guy, but Obama sounds honest and he's young and he understands the modern economy."
He paused, and laughed, "Maybe, funny as it sounds, it's time for a black man to fix this mess."
For a century, Aliquippa formed the primal heart of Beaver County. There was the mill, the company store and the Italian Renaissance library built by the daughter of the mill founder.
Ethnic communities occupied each hill. Croats, Italians, Irish and blacks worked, fought, and drank together. Now the downtown offers swaybacked homes and boarded storefronts, and rubble. Aliquippa is 35 percent black, the highest percentage in the county. Glenn Kimbrough, 65, with a silver-tipped goatee and a neat Afro, came out of the mills after 37 years.
Mr. Kimbrough is an Obama supporter but he would not hazard a guess as to how his white buddies will vote. He said economic disaster had exacerbated racial tensions. With the mills closed, the work force is resegregating.
Carl Davidson, a white friend and an Obama supporter, sat in Mr. Kimbrough's living room. "My father voted for Edwards in the primary and now he wants McCain," said Mr. Davidson, whose father and grandfather labored in the mills. "Without realizing it, he's wrapped up in white-identity politics."
Sorting out white-voter discomfort with Mr. Obama is tricky business. Most speak of unease with his newness. But one in five primary voters surveyed in the Edison/Mitofsky exit poll in Pennsylvania said race was a factor.
Ivan Stickles, a carpenter, worked on his motorcycle in his driveway in Hopewell. Mr. Stickles, 57, is not taking what he sees as a gamble on Obama.
"There's this e-mail that he didn't shake hands with the troops," Mr. Stickles said of a rumor that is false. "I don't have the time to check out if it's true, but if it is, it's very offensive."
In Hookstown, Kristine Lakovich, 48, works the counter at Kiner's Superette. She likes Mr. Obama, a preference she keeps to herself. "If you ask people around here, he's not exactly the right answer," Ms. Lakovich said. "People are split between their politics and their prejudice."
Nationally, the Obama campaign shies from talk of race, preferring to argue that the poor economy will dominate this election. Such delicacy holds no purchase here. An organizer with the United Steelworkers met with 30 workers in Beaver. He could not have been blunter. Mr. Obama, he told them, stands for national health care, strong unions and preserving Social Security.
"Some of you won't vote for him because he's black," the organizer concluded. "Well, he's a Democrat. Get over it."
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