The best piece on the Biden choice--

--by far, is Al Giordano's.

Yet the words in that 1988 speech were essentially true, if not original. He was the first Biden to go to college. He did descend from coal miner country. This was a man with the class resentment that comes naturally to being born from below. And as the national media vetting process will disclose in the coming days, after 36 years in the US Senate, he's still one of the poorest US Senators: he never availed himself of the back-door personal enrichment techniques that most of his colleagues - Democrat and Republican - have utilized. Beyond class resentment, he retains a sense of class solidarity. His wife since 1977 never went into Washington lobbying: she remained a public schoolteacher.

Biden has also lived personal tragedies that would have splat most people like watermelons tossed from the sixth floor of a Wilmington tenement: between his first US Senate election in 1972 and being sworn in, his first wife and three small children were in a gruesome car accident. Mrs. Biden and his daughter died, his two boys were wounded, and he became a single father. Biden never quite entered the Washington DC culture so seductive to his peers: commuting from Delaware to DC, always coming home at night.

...I think [Obama and McCain] are going to get along splendidly, and have a lot of infectious fun using John McCain as a punching bag. Apollo Creed has now signed on as coach and sparring partner with Rocky Balboa. Multi-racial class warfare - there's a place for us, somewhere a place for us - now becomes the wedge against the millionaire McCain. ...

Yes, I would have preferred the "three point shot" - that Obama pick a running mate from outside of Washington - but as DC insiders go, it's interesting that Biden chose all these years to refuse to live inside it, or meet with its lobbyists. ... The 2008 election now has its very own "Comeback Kid," and his name ain't Clinton. Oh, yes, I can live with that.

Go read.

Real Wages Still Declining

To pivot from the horserace for a minute -- here's a reminder, from the invaluable Economic Policy Institute, of what our eventual nominee (whoever it is) will be up against:

(click for full size)

This tracks yearly change in real earnings for non-management service and blue-collar workers. Notice which direction they are moving. This will be the issue of 2008.

...Remember in August when everyone said the subprime crisis was just a blip, an isolated case, and there was nothing wrong with the economy? Yeah, about that...

(via Chris Hayes)

Obama's finally talking economic justice

This is a good start, anyway:

We are not standing on the brink of recession due to forces beyond our control. The fallout from the housing crisis that’s cost jobs and wiped out savings was not an inevitable part of the business cycle. It was a failure of leadership and imagination in Washington – the culmination of decades of decisions that were made or put off without regard to the realities of a global economy and the growing inequality it’s produced.

It’s a Washington where George Bush hands out billions in tax cuts year after year to the biggest corporations and the wealthiest few who don’t need them and don’t ask for them – tax breaks that are mortgaging our children’s future on a mountain of debt; tax breaks that could’ve gone into the pockets of the working families who needed them most.

It’s a Washington where decades of trade deals like NAFTA and China have been signed with plenty of protections for corporations and their profits, but none for our environment or our workers who’ve seen factories shut their doors and millions of jobs disappear; workers whose right to organize and unionize has been under assault for the last eight years.

[...]So today, I’m laying out a comprehensive agenda to reclaim our dream and restore our prosperity. It’s an agenda that focuses on three broad economic challenges that the next President must address – the current housing crisis; the cost crisis facing the middle-class and those struggling to join it; and the need to create millions of good jobs right here in America– jobs that can’t be outsourced and won’t disappear.

YES OBAMA! MORE! MORE! MORE!

Hardcore populists like yours truly have kind of been in the weeds since Edwards dropped out; neither frontrunning candidate has done much of anything to address class and economic issues. Like Edwards himself, reportedly, I'm torn between Clinton and Obama. (For the record, in the Massachusetts primary I voted for Hillary, but completely without enthusiasm.) So it's very nice to see Obama -- who thus far has been pathologically averse to anything that even hints at class consciousness -- finally stepping up and delivering a real, solid, Democratic economic message. Or at least part of one; this is still pretty timid stuff, and I'd like to hear him address corporate control of politics (plus, in a dream candidacy, the problem of right-wing market orthodoxy), but at this point you take what you can get.

Of course, this could just be a strategic move to peel off more of Hillary's white working-class base (which he's already been doing with some success), but what the hell. Like David Sirota said today, opportunism is not really a problem if it leads us to the right policies. I don't give a damn if Obama is sincere or not; every minute he spends saying this to his supporters is a step forward for progressive populism. He's got a lot of ground to cover yet before I'll buy it, of course, but this is a heartening beginning.

...Along similar lines, here's Obama showing some uncharacteristic rhetorical muscle (directed at McCain, no less) in Baltimore on Monday. The tough-guy stuff works for him, believe it or not:

This is not Obama the friendly hopemonger; this sounds like a candidate who's ready to close the deal and lead his party into battle. It's just what skeptical voters like me are looking for. And with Hillary's campaign seemingly stuck in second gear, now would be the perfect time for him to make that move...

Economist, Analyze Thyself

Nothing scares an ivory-tower liberal like facing the reality of a failing economy. Today's example: UC Berkeley's Brad DeLong, a gifted and insightful "reality-based" econoblogger who took quite a leap -- off a cliff -- the other day in trying to criticize the NYT's Bob Herbert.

Herbert wrote a typically understated column (and if you don't read him regularly, you should; he and Paul Krugman are usually the only voices of sanity on the Times editorial page) arguing that the economy is in severe trouble, and that Washington's statisticians and Fed functionaries are in abject denial about it. This is self-evidently true to anyone who's been to the Midwest lately (or really, anywhere other than Cambridge, Manhattan/Westchester, northwest D.C., and coastal California); but it prompted DeLong to call (quite literally) for Herbert's forcible retirement.

Specifically Herbert wrote this:

Bankruptcies and homelessness are on the rise. The job market has been weak for years. The auto industry is in trouble. The cost of food, gasoline and home heating oil are soaring at a time when millions of Americans are managing to make it from one month to another solely by the grace of their credit cards. The country has been in denial for years about the economic reality facing American families. That grim reality has been masked by the flimflammery of official statistics (job growth good, inflation low) and the muscular magic of the American way of debt: mortgages on top of mortgages, pyramiding student loans and an opiatelike addiction to credit cards at rates that used to get people locked up for loan-sharking...

All of which is true. DeLong, however, wants to argue that "this is at most one-quarter true", and goes on to rebut exactly one of Herbert's points (on weakness of the job market, which is endlessly debatable) as well as a couple things Herbert never said (DeLong is right, real disposable income is not falling, though it's not exactly growing like gangbusters either -- and yes, inflation has been low, but Herbert's not talking about 2002). DeLong never discusses bankruptcies, homelessness, the auto industry, cost of food & fuel, the debt crisis, falsification of statistics, or any of the other inconvenient truths Herbert raised; instead, he adds a pedantic note about defining the word "recession" (missing Herbert's point entirely), smugly points out that Herbert confused CPI with core inflation (a mistake two degrees from a typo), and calls it a rebuttal. Convincing it's not.

As for the statistical reality of the situation, DeLong's commenters do a much better job of discussing the details than I could, so I'll just refer you there. Except for this one graph (from the Economic Policy Institute), which basically sums up the problem:

So if you're in the top quintile -- which means, as of 2004, that your family earns over $88,000 a year -- things are peachy keen. But everybody else has been seeing their income slide; and the poorer you are, the faster you're sliding (and thus more likely to get buried under mountains of debt just to keep your house, car and fridge). Households in the bottom quintile, which earn under $18,500, are on a steady and steep path downwards. (To underscore the gravity of that: 41% of the bottom quintile households are families with children. The poverty line as of 2006 for a family of three is $17,170, which is just below the maximum for that quintile. So yes: the fastest-declining group in our society is families in poverty.)

This divide is a serious problem, because the vast majority of our policymakers and opinionmakers fall into that top quintile; somehow I doubt there are very many members of the Fed who make less than $88,000/yr. And (more importantly), these elites inevitably surround themselves with more of the same; people like Brad DeLong in Berkeley or Ben Bernanke in Washington, D.C. are highly unlikely to ever see economic instability firsthand. To compound the problem, the purported empirical reality-check for these segregated elites -- statistics -- are unfailingly skewed by self-interested administrations in order to minimize or hide whatever problems may arise (and sorry folks, Clinton was just as shameless about this as his Republican counterparts). The result: nothing exists to force our policymakers out of their economic bubbles, and meanwhile working Americans suffer in silence.

(Don't get too cocky, Harvard students: this place is an egregious example of precisely the myopia we're talking about. Did you know that, as of 2004, over 85% of our student body came from the top two income quintiles? Summers' financial aid reforms helped, I'm sure, but it's telling that among the Class of 2011 -- "the most economically diverse to date" -- just a quarter of students were eligible for the financial aid programs given to households under $80,000/yr. Besides, Harvard is incredibly bubbled-in; I realized a while ago, and this blew my mind, that I don't know what the price of gas is anymore because there's not a single gas station in Harvard Square. Nor do we buy our own food; I doubt that many of us could pass the gallon of milk test. And we're the people who are supposed to graduate and lead the nation's economy? God help us.)

Thus, I think, we see the extent to which someone like Brad DeLong will repress his considerable intellect in order to ignore the reality of economic collapse -- since, absent clear and tangible evidence to the contrary, it's MUCH more comfortable to assume that everything is fine and the country is functioning properly. (This is especially likely to happen to economists, since the facts on the ground stand in direct opposition to so many of their discipline's basic principles. The cognitive dissonance must be awful.) But it is absolutely critical to defeat that assumption -- especially for Democrats, not only because of our ideological obligation to economic fairness (we are, after all, the party of the working American), but also because if we fail to recognize this disastrous economic situation before it metastasizes, we will be right there with all the Republicans on the list of its political casualties. And we cannot let the biases that affect Brad DeLong -- and the Harvard Economics Department -- get in our way.

A Friendly Note to My Buddy Noam Scheiber

Noam Scheiber of the New Republic:

It's pretty clear that working-class voters favor Hillary over Obama largely because they value experience. But it's the reason they value experience that's so interesting: Working-class Democrats, and particularly unionized Democrats, tend to see seniority as the only acceptable way of divvying up sought-after work. (And what is the presidency if not the most sought-after job on the planet?) For them, the problem with an inexperienced candidate isn't that he or she is unprepared to be president. It's that such a candidacy flies in the face of their basic sense of fairness...

Many of Hillary's most loyal supporters lack college degrees and toil away at low-skilled jobs. Now if you happen to be a poorly educated worker who's nonetheless eking out a decent living, no prospect is more alarming than the thought of losing out one day because someone a little younger, a little flashier, leapt ahead of you in line. There is a comforting order to the world you know. And that order demands that people pay their dues before getting promoted. The alternative is a bitter competition between you and your co-workers — and who knows how you'll fare in that?

In the eyes of working-class Democrats, Hillary is someone who's paid her dues — first in the White House, where she weathered a terrific, eight-year assault from conservatives, then as the scrupulously dependable senator from New York. If, after all this, Hillary doesn't win the nomination, then the system they've bought into their entire working lives will have been turned upside down.

Dear Noam Scheiber,

Take your stupid, patronizing generalizations about how "working people" think and shove them up your ass. While you're at it you can do the same with your M.A. from Oxford, you arrogant, pompous, elitist twat.

Thanks,

Markus.

"The Bourgeois Revolt"

I want to draw everyone's attention to Chris Hayes, a guy I've never heard of, writing at TPMCafe. Emphasis mine:

Much of the post 1970s decline in organizing (and indeed the fate of the Democratic party and progressives) can be tied, I think, to the unraveling of much of the social capital our constituencies used to have. This process has been documented quite famously by Robert Putnam and Theda Skocpol. So can the internet reverse the trend? I used to be aggressively skeptical on this score, but the innovations of the last few years have made me more optimistic. MoveOn, for example, has been finding ways to use the internet to actually, physically bring people together and build organization and capacity. The potential of this is just beginning to be tapped.

But there's a problem with the internet as well. Very few poor and working class people are spending their time on progressive blogs or attending MoveOn vigils. There's no single demographic profile of the "netroots" but the closest data we have -- a Pew survey of committed Howard Dean supporters from 2004 -- reveal a constituency that is overwhelming white, educated and upper-middle class. [...]

In short: The netroots phenomenon is a bourgeois revolt. Look at the inequality data for the last six years and you see that the concentration of wealth in the upper-most portion of the distribution has come at the expense, chiefly, of the upper middle class. Like the restless activists in the Third Estate of France, the people driving this new organizing resurgence and participating in it are people that are not generally used to feeling disempowered. This is a tremendous asset since half of what organizers do is teach people to demand things, and the upper middle class is already habituated to do just that.

Yes. Yes yes yes yes yes. Hayes puts his finger right on the button -- blogs and blogliberalism, specifically the kind that is taking over the Democratic Party, did not develop spontaneously in a vacuum. It is an economic class-based reaction. Concerns about the mass disempowerment (even disenfranchisement) of Americans have existed in the working class and minority groups for decades, but it's only now that they have spread so far up the ladder; and it's only now that people with more political and intellectual heft than Michael Moore are talking about them.

(Comparison: this is much the same function as opposition to Vietnam, which metastasized only after the draft began sending middle-class kids off to war -- as opposed to the largely poor groups that had previously made up the bulk of the troops.)

With that in mind, consider Eric Massa, netroots hero who lost his 2006 race (NY-29, upstate) in a squeaker, who today wrote the following on DKos:

Nationally speaking, Alan Blinder, the noted economic expert who is credited with being the architect of the North American Free Trade Agreement and its close cousin the Central American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA and CAFTA, the latter of which my opponent Randy Kuhl cast the deciding vote for. Without Randy Kuhl voting for corporate America there would be no CAFTA.), now believes that between 42 and 56 million jobs are potentially offshorable in the near term future. The Wall Street Journal reported on their front page on 28 March that "Mostly he (Alan Blinder) wants to shock politicians, policy makers and other economists into realizing how big a change is coming and what new sectors it will reach." "This is something factory workers have understood for a generation," he says. It’s now coming down on the heads of highly educated, politically vocal people, and they not going to take it." (Sound familiar? -ed.) The "it" is watching their jobs sent to China, India and Vietnam.

But even though specifics are hard to come by here in NY-29, it is more than obvious that open door burn-down-the-barn Free Trade has destroyed much of what the greatest generation built for the three generations of Americans who have followed in their footsteps. Many of the above-mentioned factory jobs are gone. No longer can the "Made in America" label be found in clothing stores on Market Street in Corning, New York nor in the software development offices in Rochester to the north. As replacement for these lost jobs, my opponent’s vision of economic policy for the 29th Congressional District is focused on near total dependence on addictive Washington handouts, which would make us virtual slaves to professional politicians. I believe that if we are to stand at all it must be on our own two feet and we will not be able to do that as long as corporate interests prevail over the interests of working Americans.

Massa takes the same argument Hayes lays out and puts it in political terms -- very powerful ones at that. (He's already announced his intention for a 2008 rematch, and should be nominated easily.) Did you catch the bit about "software development offices"? This is not a Joe Lunchbucket issue anymore, it is everyone's issue. I have said it before and I'll say it again: economic populism is the most powerful and relevant mode we have as liberals, especially now that it encompasses more than just a few disadvantaged demographics.

Maybe this doesn't fly yet in Cambridge, Mass, or the leafy Westchester suburbs so many of us Harvard kids were plucked from. But you go to the majority of middle-class America -- your generic suburb, land of Reagan Democrats, or even more upscale than that -- and these concerns are palpable. People worry about their debt and their job security. Their kids' tuitions. They worry about out-of-control tax cuts for everybody but them. They worry about not having a stake in their country anymore, and having a government that doesn't give a shit. These are the concerns that Democrats can and must address.

It is deeply sad, and makes me somewhat uncomfortable, to write that these core issues of our time only become politically salient once they apply to privileged white people. In the long term this is obviously something that needs to change, in our culture and/or our political system. But meanwhile, given the cards we've been dealt, it makes sense for Democrats and liberals to voice these concerns wholeheartedly and fullthroatedly: we want our America back.

And returning to Hayes' point, online organizing seems the best way to do it. Daily Kos (and MoveOn, and ActBlue, and yes, to an extent Dem Apples) today are what the union halls were in 1932 -- a bunch of people who are mad as hell and aren't going to take it anymore. So if we're in the business of making historical parallels... well, you can figure out where that one leads. And it bodes very well for the Democratic Party -- so long as we play our cards right.

Good and Bad Populism

Thanks to Markus for posting that video below. I think it highlights what will be one of the key challenges for Democrats in the new Congress: responding to the (entirely valid) economic concerns of the public that produced the current wave of populist sentiment without resorting to self-destructive or myopic policies.

I happen to agree with most of what Jim Webb says in the video: the middle class really is facing some severe challenges, and the poor and working class aren't benefiting from the current economic expansion. The GOP lost in large part because it continues to deny this basic reality. But there are huge--I repeat, huge--differences between some of the solutions one can foresee to address this problem. Lou Dobbs proposes, among other things, giving up on free trade and stopping immigration cold. Other Democrats propose implementing a single-payer health care system and jacking up taxes on investment.

I think these solutions all share a common flaw: they're highly intrusive, heavy-handed attempts at government intervention in the economy that aren't particularly well-targeted to actually solving the problems that working people face. If we implement them and they have unpalatable side effects (as they almost certainly will), the Democrats will be punished at the ballot box, and rightly so. Accepting Lou Dobbs's diagnosis of the problem facing the public doesn't mean we have to accept Lou Dobbs's solutions, which amount to economic nationalism (see Peter Beinart's excellent take on this).

Here are some examples of what I consider to be far better solutions: implement the Mitt Romney/Massachusetts legislature health care plan on a nationwide level, and fund it sufficiently so that the poor get their care fully paid for and all working families get a little help buying their health insurance plan. You could pay for this by ending the preferential tax treatment of employer-sponsored health care, which subsidizes expensive plans for the wealthy to the tune of over $100 billion a year. Pass a massive expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit, so that a job paying $6 an hour ends up paying maybe $10 or $11 an hour--far more than any minimum wage increase would ever do. Instead of closing our borders to trade, make real (rather than superficial) investments in job retraining, and increase unemployment benefits conditional upon successful completion of a retraining program. I'm sure there are plenty of other good ideas out there along these lines that I'm not even aware of.

I guess my main point is this: to Democrats, I'd say let's not let the arrogance of power get to us before our new majority is a week old. Markets work and we abandon them at our peril. I'm proud to call myself a liberal in no small part because the word implies an unflinching belief in the power of people to make their own choices, economic and otherwise. Yes, working people face real problems that we have a moral obligation to do something about. But the difference between a market-friendly approach to solving social problems and a market-unfriendly approach is akin to the difference between setting a broken arm and amputating the whole damn thing.

Also, to Republicans, I respectfully say: please do yourself a favor, get your head out of the sand, and stop ignoring the plight of working people. (As always, conservatives Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam are making sense.) If you don't deal with pro-market Democrats, sooner or later you're going to find people like Lou Dobbs and Sherrod Brown setting national economic policy, and that's in nobody's interest.