Pres. Obama’s popularity with working-class white Americans increasingly grows during presidency?

Rather than have a obvious savings or rainy day fund astute city administrators will fudge around with the next years budget and sandbag extra funds inside project accounts and roll the surplus around to another pending project. Locally the Tea Party member of the county council was lacking in any business or basic bookkeeping knowledge so he never caught on to what he was looking at in the county budget/finance reports.
Very disappointing that a large enough percentage of fellow citizens . . . are suspicious of something as straightforward as a simple contingency fund? ? And it's not lack of intelligence, not by any stretch. It's more lack of any kind of frustration tolerance and willingness to make the effort to think things through, and admit things are complicated, and try new things in medium steps and see how they work out.

And plus, it's that we teach George Orwell's Animal Farm in school, about governmental tyranny, as well we should teach. But that we don't also teach books like Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, in which corporations have far too much power, there's a thin, fig-leaf government, and many of us live as serfs. At least not when I was in public school back in the 1970s. It would have been considered too edgy and controversial.
 
A lot of this is driven by parents wanting to live in "good" school districts, and yes, race is definitely one factor. I think my United States missed a tremendous opportunity to start making all schools equally good, hopefully post-Sputnik late '50s and into the '60s, but this didn't happen.

Unlike in the first 2/3 of the 20th Century there has been a growing dismissal of public education for children or teenagers as important. Like the rest of the middle-class, teachers wages have been stagnant or falling at times in the past four decades. Consolidation of facilities into mega school campuses has been pushed on a fiscal efficiency & savings basis, but the evidence for academic success is poor. I remember one business man commenting on teacher salaries and education quality as calling Indiana "the Alabama of the North".

The popularity of school 'consolidations' was supposed to be part of a improvement, but so many of the other items needed to improve education were not added in, at least not to the level needed. What we got are a bunch of modern looking masonry piles that resemble minimum security prisons. These have further removed the schools at a distance from the communities making it ever more difficult for parents to influence or participate in their children's education.
 
City Of Tulsa Starts Issuing Layoff Notices

News on 6, Jan 22, 2010

http://www.newson6.com/story/11864452/city-of-tulsa-starts-issuing-layoff-notices

' . . Firefighters met at the Tulsa Fire Department's training center where 147 firefighters were given layoff notices. . '

' . . Mayor Dewey Bartlett said if the FOP and the city cannot reach a deal today at Noon, 155 [police] officers will be notified they will be laid off effective next Friday. . '
Was the city able to hire back that many experienced, seasoned firefighters and police officers, and who worked well with the existing team?

I wish more municipalities would have seen that they were deepening an economic downturn, and that a medium amount of deficit spending was probably a better alternative.
 
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I don't know what pre portion it is, but a number of cities are, like many state constitutions, prohibited in their charters or bylaws from significant borrowing. its difficult in those cases to run a significant deficit.

Back in the late 1970s a friend of mine was on the Kansas City (Missouri side) fire dept. The city had slashed the maintenance budget several years in a row. The result was 14+ people dying in a high rise apartment building fire. The ladder trucks were rendered inoperable when the worn out hydraulics failed in the winter temperatures, so the firefighters could only evacuate by ladder the second and third floors. The reaction of the city was to step up its union busting campaign for the public safety employees.
 
There's no polite way to put this.

With the endemic racism in American society, there is no way an exceptionally smart, socially mobile constitutional lawyer can have the support of working class white Americans if he's black.

Like Bill Clinton, Obama was a get along to go along politician, except that he was from Chicago rather than Arkansas. His instinct was to cut deals, but regrettably he was dealing with the rancid remains of Nixon's Southern Strategy, which meant that there were no deals to be cut in the Senate with a black President.

The man literally saved the lives of tens of thousands in Appalachia and the rest of the districts inhabited by what used to be called "poor white trash". And they still hated him.

Because he was smart, and successful, and black.

Obama was never social mobile, he was born into the elite, his father had a master, his mother had a PhD, his stepfather had a master[1] and his grandmother was vice president of the bank of Hawaii, he was no Bush or Kennedy, but to pretend he wasn't born into the top 5% would be a joke.

[1]this may not seem that impressive today, but it was the 60ties, when a minority ever came near a university.
 
. . The popularity of school 'consolidations' was supposed to be part of a improvement, but so many of the other items needed to improve education were not added in, at least not to the level needed. What we got are a bunch of modern looking masonry piles that resemble minimum security prisons. These have further removed the schools at a distance from the communities . .
As a humorous aside, around school year ‘71-72 my family had just moved and my sister and I were attending a new suburban Houston elementary school. My sister was in second grade and the teachers were trying some new team teaching approach. So, basically 50 kids would be in one large room with 2 teachers.

My sister had trouble seeing the blackboard. You’d think it wouldn’t be a particular big deal to allow a child to move closer to the board, but . . . as my mom tells the family story, my dad had to take the day off from work so that the two of them could go down and “fight” the school. All just to sit closer to the blackboard!

My sister may have had something like dyslexia. And that summer she did these eye and coordination exercises which seemed to help some.

And the irony is, team teaching may well be worth experimenting with, but not in some clunky, stilted, wooden fashion. :openedeyewink:
 
Circa 1965 a acquaintance was a newly licensed and hired teacher in a small Indiana town. Her First Grade class room was not provided with enough desks for the students. Her requests were ignored for a week. She found out one of the children was the daughter of the most wealthy and powerful family in town. So, she made sure that girl and a couple other select children were moved out of their desks. That evening the phone rang multiple times with inquiries and explanations. Next morning she found the necessary number of desks in her classroom and a serious hatred on the part of the school Principle.

I've git a whole short story anthology of similar anecdotes but we digress.
 
Very disappointing that a large enough percentage of fellow citizens . . . are suspicious of something as straightforward as a simple contingency fund? ? And it's not lack of intelligence, not by any stretch. It's more lack of any kind of frustration tolerance and willingness to make the effort to think things through, and admit things are complicated, and try new things in medium steps and see how they work out.

And plus, it's that we teach George Orwell's Animal Farm in school, about governmental tyranny, as well we should teach. But that we don't also teach books like Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, in which corporations have far too much power, there's a thin, fig-leaf government, and many of us live as serfs. At least not when I was in public school back in the 1970s. It would have been considered too edgy and controversial.

That's the toxic side effect of the American Dream.
 
Back in the late 1970s a friend of mine was on the Kansas City (Missouri side) fire dept. The city had slashed the maintenance budget several years in a row. The result was 14+ people dying in a high rise apartment building fire. The ladder trucks were rendered inoperable when the worn out hydraulics failed in the winter temperatures, so the firefighters could only evacuate by ladder the second and third floors. The reaction of the city was to step up its union busting campaign for the public safety employees.
sad, tragic, infuriating, all at the same time.

In hard times, people recourse to what they know. That part is sincere. But then there’s another part which I’m sure you and I are both familiar with. Whether corporate executives or government officials, there’s almost a self-hypnosis in which the person focuses on something which lets him or her off the hook. And then it becomes like that old saying, “It’s difficult for a man to see something when his livelihood depends on him not seeing it.”

And citizen journalism can help. We can get better. And we can set an example of being matter-of-factly respectful to persons who have lost a family member, that mainstream journalism would do well to follow.
 
Wait, did anyone notice that this thread has been moved to After 1990?

@CalBear , is this an intentional move? Given the time period we are discussing and the implication to the current politics, perhaps this should stay in chat?
 
Obama was never social mobile, he was born into the elite, his father had a master, his mother had a PhD, his stepfather had a master[1] and his grandmother was vice president of the bank of Hawaii, he was no Bush or Kennedy, but to pretend he wasn't born into the top 5% would be a joke.

[1]this may not seem that impressive today, but it was the 60ties, when a minority ever came near a university.
So, it was the fact that he was from the academic elite, rather than the money elite? Or the suspicion that he must have benefitted from affirmative action somewhere along the way?

I would like to better understand the thinking and psychology of the fraction of my fellow citizens who objected to Senator, Democratic nominee, and then President Obama so strongly, and why, over and above the fact that he’s an African-American fellow.
 

Ian_W

Banned
So, it was the fact that he was from the academic elite, rather than the money elite? Or the suspicion that he must have benefitted from affirmative action somewhere along the way?
.

When you say that, you are saying

1. He is middle class. He needs to work for a living, or he gets homeless and starves.

2. He's black. See also racism.
 
Wait, did anyone notice that this thread has been moved to After 1990?

@CalBear , is this an intentional move? Given the time period we are discussing and the implication to the current politics, perhaps this should stay in chat?

Okay, some of the ideas we’ve had so far is that Pres. Obama should have:

1) straightforwardly pursued putting some of the big bankers in jail,

2) legislation that banks can’t pay executives more than X number of dollars until said bank pays back all the bailout money [some bank executives may take jobs overseas, so be it],

3) early on, as nice sweet extra gem, extend overtime pay to all persons making less than $47,000 whether classified as salary or hourly, will spread out available jobs,

4) major infrastructure projects [This Was Done!],

5) more visible infrastructure projects,

6) skillfully underselling infrastructure since people believe in it so much anyway,

7) Pres. Obama playing the FDR card much more directly,

8) . . .

9) . . .

10) . . .

Your ideas please! :)
 
Biden Begs: No Swimming Pools!

CBS News, Mark Knoller,
March 18, 2009

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/biden-begs-no-swimming-pools/

.

.

.

"No swimming pools!" he implored. "No tennis courts!" he begged. "No golf courses!" he pleaded. "No Frisbee parks!" he exhorted.

"This can't be government as usual," he told an assemblage of local officials invited to the White House from around the country.

Even if they can promise him that building their projects will create jobs and generate revenue, Biden wants none of it.

"The answer is no, no, no!" He said "it's got to pass the smell test."

He urged the officials to think about how their constituents would react if the projects they launched were plastered on the front page of their biggest local newspaper.

.

.

"I'll show up in your city and say this was a stupid idea," he promised. "You think I'm kidding? This is the only part the president was right about: don't mess with Joe!"

A couple weeks ago, President Obama designated Biden as overseer and guardian of the stimulus bill funds.

.

.

.
So, Vice-President Biden was pretty active in advocating that stimulus projects have to pass the smell test.
 
I wish these guys all the best! The first guy doesn't look at that young, the third guy a little younger.

The labour pool is younger than the industrial riders; largely as this is a churn and burn until they've fucked the labour-force. It is one reason these services only operate in areas of high endemic unemployment and/or mass temporary migration ("international cities").

The plastic face plates I guess are for insects or kicked up rocks?

Rain.

A server in a restaurant can make good money if they know how to cheat the system just a little bit for the benefit of the customer. I imagine it's the same for these delivery riders. There's a lot of luck, some days are definitely better than others.

Not really. You give HR the dataset and watch the rates drop below union, below average, below minimum and then below poverty. Riders get fucked in summer, restaurants get fucked in winter.

But no way is risking road accidents safer than working in a factory.

Depends on the factory, depends on the road.

yours,
Sam R.
 
When you say that, you are saying

1. He is middle class. . .
That's not what I meant to say. Barack Obama graduated from Harvard Law School, so maybe . . . upper-, upper-middle class! :cool:

Look, a goodly number of our fellow citizens had a ton of resentment toward the guy, which of course was a swirl of rational and irrational.

------------------

Obama first attended Occidental College in Los Angeles from 1979 to '81 and then switched to Columbia University in New York City where he graduated in '83. And then he worked and did other things for five years and began Harvard Law School in 1988. If these facts had been better known, I think it might have helped to humanize him.
 
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A SMARTER STIMULUS

The New Yorker, James Surowiecki, Jan. 26, 2009.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/01/26/a-smarter-stimulus

' . . . the equivalent of an extra forty dollars or so a month. . . '

' . . . But the very things that seem unusual about Obama’s rebate plan—that it will be handed out by reducing withholding, instead of in one lump sum, and that it will add a small but steady amount to Americans’ take-home pay—are precisely why it’s more likely to succeed. . . '

' . . . because many people tend to base their spending not on their long-term earning potential or on their assets but on what they think of as their current income, . . . '
During a serious economic downturn, I think a tax cut including a cut on withholding is a great way to pump more money into the economy within a matter of weeks. And this is saying it dovetails nicely with human psychology in which people base spending on current income.
 
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updated 6:24 p.m. EST, Wed February 13, 2008
Bush signs stimulus bill; rebate checks expected in May

http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/02/13/bush.stimulus/

‘ . . . The package will pay $600 to most individual taxpayers and $1,200 to married taxpayers filing joint returns, so long as they are below income caps of $75,000 for individuals and $150,000 for couples. There is also a $300 per child tax credit [Emphases added]. . . ’
Okay, so Pres. Bush’s tax rebates went out in checks around May 2008.

And thus, well before Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, Merrill Lynch bought by Bank of America, and AIG rescued by a loan from U.S. Treasury, all of which happened in mid-Sept. 2008.

* of course the May ‘08 tax rebates was Congress, too, but we’ll say Pres. Bush for shorthand time description.
 
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