Ignoring low-wage and low-wealth voters cost Kamala Harris big
In the immediate aftermath of Vice President Kamala Harris‘ defeat the Washington Post editorial board blamed the Democratic Party for its embrace of progressivism. This ignores entirely the decision to move the party to the center to accommodate Liz Cheney and her small army of disaffected Republicans who had been exiled from their own party.
Of course, what actually moves a nation like ours is the confluence of circumstances of the American people who make their choice for president in the privacy of the voting booth and based on their economic reality.
When you have your campaign strategy designed by David Plouffe, who converted his Obama win credentials into being a highly paid tool of Uber, you know you are going to get a top down corporate playbook totally disconnected from the 44 percent of Americans that can’t afford to cover a $1,000 emergency expense.
These professional millionaires plus Democrats can only reference the middle class because it’s their only social frame of reference. If they were to recognize the size of the struggling low wage cohort they would have to question the way they make their living serving the banks and multinationals against the public interest.
The current form of winner-take-all late-stage vulture capitalism has led to unprecedented wealth concentration and income disparity. The post-pandemic increase in wages in no way can compensate for the last opportunity cost of a generation of flat or real wage loss that was replaced by predatory consumer credit and student loans.
Having former President Obama lecture Black male voters about anything is going to backfire. Yes, he won the White House, but how many Americans of every color lost their homes as a consequence of Wall Street’s mortgage-backed security crime wave that hit Black neighborhoods hardest while the former president looked on. That kind of moral injury has generational consequences. It’s just like the lingering anti-labor legacy left by President Clinton’s embrace of all things free trade that gave us NAFTA, which promoted the use of the U.S. tax code to reward corporations to ship jobs overseas.
https://www.salon.com/2024/11/11/progressives-arent-the-problem-in-the-democrat-coalition