I have watched expectations rise around Biden with trepidation. A lot of Democrats have set their hopes on him. They anxiously eye Bernie Sanders’ strong standing—as a candidate they believe to be too far left. They see a Biden candidacy as a way to recapture the white working-class part of the Obama-Biden magic and win back those Obama voters who turned to Trump. All the while, there’s a nostalgic appeal to a Biden presidency: His folksy ways feel like a tonic, an assurance that things can return to “normal.” A President Joe Biden, the thinking seems to go, would reduce President Donald Trump to a bad dream. Now, suddenly, nothing about a Biden candidacy seems inevitable, including whether there will even be one.
Rep. Mia Love (R-Utah), the GOP's first African-American woman in Congress, conceded defeat in an incredibly close re-election campaign this week. But in her concession speech, she delivered a bracing post-midterm analysis of the Republican Party's shrinking footprint, calling on President Trump and the GOP to pay more attention to minority voters, or risk more defeats like hers in the future. Republicans would be wise to heed her advice.
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When it became apparent that Love was in trouble, Trump put the blame on her arms-length treatment of him. "Mia Love gave me no love and she lost," Trump said in a post-election press conference. "Too bad. Sorry about that, Mia."
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The problem for Republicans isn't a lack of rallying around Trump, but a lack of appeal beyond a relatively narrow party base. Love drove this point home in her concession speech, arguing that both Trump and the Republican Party take an exceedingly disingenuous approach to people, especially those in minority communities.
Chase Bank fired off a tweet last week staging a hypothetical conversation between one of its customers and her bank account. The customer asks why her account balance is low, and the bank tells her not to go out for food or coffee when she can make it at home instead, or to spend money on a cab when she can just walk. The customer pretends not to listen. "I guess we'll never know," she says, brushing off her low balance and the bank's "advice" on how to manage her money.
Here's the thing — I grew up on the ragged edge of the middle class in a family with a tight budget and no room for error. My parents worked hard and did the best they could, but when I was 12 years old, my Daddy had a heart attack. Everyone thought he was going to die. He came back home, but he couldn't work. There was no net to catch my family. We lost our station wagon and would have lost our house if my mother hadn't saved our family by going out and getting her very first job outside the home — a minimum wage job answering phones at Sears.
It wasn't until later in life that I realized how lucky my family was. After I became a law professor, I started studying what drives families into bankruptcy. I poured through records in courthouse after courthouse, and found that most of the families who ended up in front of a bankruptcy judge were just like mine. They worked hard and did everything right, scraping by until an unexpected medical bill or a divorce pushed them over the edge.
In the years since I started immersing myself in this topic, things have only gotten worse for working families. For 50 years, the price of housing, education and child care has skyrocketed while wages for most workers have barely budged. The economy has grown and workers' productivity has increased, but their share of corporate profits has fallen. The gap between incomes and costs is so gaping that 40% of Americans can't come up with $400 in an emergency. Hard-working families have become adept at stretching their paychecks to the breaking point, skimping on necessities just to make ends meet.
KaiserJeep wrote:Meanwhile some of her "facts" are in error. The price of consumer goods has increased modestly, not skyrocketed. Some stuff like computers and HDTVs is way cheaper than it used to be. Cars, energy, healthcare, and food cost more, thanks in no small part to meddling from the various legislators.
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