http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=915922&category=OPINION White men shun Democrats By DAVID PAUL KUHN First published in print: Saturday, March 27, 2010 Millions of white men who voted for Barack Obama are walking away from the Democratic Party, and it appears increasingly likely that they'll take the midterms elections in November with them. Their departure could well lead to a GOP landslide on a scale not seen since 1994. For more than three decades before the 2008 election, no Democratic president had won a majority of the electorate. In part, that was because of low support -- never more than 38 percent -- among white male voters. Things changed with Obama, who not only won a majority of all people voting, but also pulled in 41 percent of white male voters. Polling suggests that the shift was not because of Obama but because of the financial meltdown that preceded the election. It was only after the economic collapse that Obama's white male support climbed above the 38 percent ceiling. It was also at that point that Obama first sustained a clear majority among all registered voters, according to the Gallup tracking poll. It looked for a moment as though Democrats had finally reached the men of Bruce Springsteen's music, bringing them around to the progressive values Springsteen himself has long endorsed. But liberal analysts failed to understand that these new Democrats were still firmly rooted in American moderation. Pollsters regularly ask voters whether they would rather see a Democrat or Republican win their district. By February, support for Democrats among white people (male and female) was three percentage points lower than in February 1994, the year of the last Republican landslide. Today, among whites, only 35 percent of men and 43 percent of women say they will back Democrats in the fall election. Women's preferences have remained steady since July 2009. But white men's support for a Democratic Congress has fallen eight percentage points, according to Gallup. White men have moved away from Obama as well. The same proportion of white women approve of him -- 46 percent, according to Gallup -- as voted for him in 2008. But only 38 percent of white men approve of the President, which means that millions of white men who voted for Obama have now lost faith in him. The migration of white men from the Democratic Party was evident in the election of Republican Scott Brown in Massachusetts. His opponent, a white woman, won 52 percent of white women. But white men favored Brown by a 60 percent to 38 percent margin, according to Fabrizio, McLaughlin & Associates polling. It's no accident that the flight of white males from the Democratic Party has come as the government has assumed a bigger role, including in banking and health care. Among whites, 71 percent of men and 56 percent of women favor a smaller government with fewer services over a larger government with more services, according to ABC/Washington Post polling. Obama's brand of liberalism is exactly the sort likely to drive such voters away. More like LBJ's than FDR's, Obama-style liberalism favors benefits over relief, a safety net over direct job programs, health care and environmental reform over financial reform and a stimulus package that has focused more on social service jobs -- health care work, teaching and the like -- than on the areas where a majority of job losses occurred: construction, manufacturing and related sectors. This recession remains disproportionately a "he-cession." Men account for at least seven of 10 workers who lost jobs, according to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Nearly half of the casualties are white men, who held 46 percent of all jobs lost. In 1994, liberals tried to explain their thinning ranks by casting aspersions on the white men who were fleeing, and the media took up the cry. The term "angry white male" or "angry white men" was mentioned 37 times in English-language news media contained in the Nexis database between 1980 and the 1994 election. In the following year, the phrases appear 2,306 times. Tarnishing their opponents as merely "angry" was poor politics for the Democrats. Liberals know what it's like to have their views -- most recently on the war in Iraq or George W. Bush -- caricatured as merely irrational anger. Most voters vote their interests. And many white men by the 1980s had decided the Democrats were no longer interested in them. Think about the average working man. He has already seen financial bailouts for the rich folks above him. Now he sees a health care bailout for the poor folks below him. Big government represents lots of costs and little gain. Meanwhile, like many women, these men are simply trying to push ahead without being pushed under. Some once believed in Obama. Now they feel forgotten. Government can only do so much. But recall the Depression. FDR's focus on the economy was single-minded and relentless. Hard times continued, but men never doubted that FDR was trying to do right by them. Democrats should think about why they aren't given that same benefit of the doubt today. David Paul Kuhn is chief political correspondent for RealClearPolitics and the author of "The Neglected Voter: White Men and the Democratic Dilemma." He wrote this for the Los Angeles Times.
The bounce is over? http://www.gallup.com/poll/113980/Gallup-Daily-Obama-Job-Approval.aspx Obama approve/disapprove: 46-46 http://www.rasmussenreports.com/pub...ministration/daily_presidential_tracking_poll Obama strongly approve: 28%, strongly disapprove: 44% Overall approve: 47%, disapprove: 53% http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/president_obama_job_approval-1044.html RCP Average Approve: 47.5%, Disapprove: 46.5%
Frank Rich's take. How does the initial white male support for Obama square with Rich's POV? http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/opinion/28rich.html The Rage Is Not About Health Care By FRANK RICH THERE were times when last Sunday’s great G.O.P. health care implosion threatened to bring the thrill back to reality television. On ABC’s “This Week,” a frothing and filibustering Karl Rove all but lost it in a debate with the Obama strategist David Plouffe. A few hours later, the perennially copper-faced Republican leader John Boehner revved up his “Hell no, you can’t!” incantation in the House chamber — instant fodder for a new viral video remixing his rap with will.i.am’s “Yes, we can!” classic from the campaign. Boehner, having previously likened the health care bill to Armageddon, was now so apoplectic you had to wonder if he had just discovered one of its more obscure revenue-generating provisions, a tax on indoor tanning salons. But the laughs evaporated soon enough. There’s nothing entertaining about watching goons hurl venomous slurs at congressmen like the civil rights hero John Lewis and the openly gay Barney Frank. And as the week dragged on, and reports of death threats and vandalism stretched from Arizona to Kansas to upstate New York, the F.B.I. and the local police had to get into the act to protect members of Congress and their families. How curious that a mob fond of likening President Obama to Hitler knows so little about history that it doesn’t recognize its own small-scale mimicry of Kristallnacht. The weapon of choice for vigilante violence at Congressional offices has been a brick hurled through a window. So far. No less curious is how disproportionate this red-hot anger is to its proximate cause. The historic Obama-Pelosi health care victory is a big deal, all right, so much so it doesn’t need Joe Biden’s adjective to hype it. But the bill does not erect a huge New Deal-Great Society-style government program. In lieu of a public option, it delivers 32 million newly insured Americans to private insurers. As no less a conservative authority than The Wall Street Journal editorial page observed last week, the bill’s prototype is the health care legislation Mitt Romney signed into law in Massachusetts. It contains what used to be considered Republican ideas. Yet it’s this bill that inspired G.O.P. congressmen on the House floor to egg on disruptive protesters even as they were being evicted from the gallery by the Capitol Police last Sunday. It’s this bill that prompted a congressman to shout “baby killer” at Bart Stupak, a staunch anti-abortion Democrat. It’s this bill that drove a demonstrator to spit on Emanuel Cleaver, a black representative from Missouri. And it’s this “middle-of-the-road” bill, as Obama accurately calls it, that has incited an unglued firestorm of homicidal rhetoric, from “Kill the bill!” to Sarah Palin’s cry for her followers to “reload.” At least four of the House members hit with death threats or vandalism are among the 20 political targets Palin marks with rifle crosshairs on a map on her Facebook page. When Social Security was passed by Congress in 1935 and Medicare in 1965, there was indeed heated opposition. As Dana Milbank wrote in The Washington Post, Alf Landon built his catastrophic 1936 presidential campaign on a call for repealing Social Security. (Democrats can only pray that the G.O.P. will “go for it” again in 2010, as Obama goaded them on Thursday, and keep demanding repeal of a bill that by September will shower benefits on the elderly and children alike.) When L.B.J. scored his Medicare coup, there were the inevitable cries of “socialism” along with ultimately empty rumblings of a boycott from the American Medical Association. But there was nothing like this. To find a prototype for the overheated reaction to the health care bill, you have to look a year before Medicare, to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Both laws passed by similar majorities in Congress; the Civil Rights Act received even more votes in the Senate (73) than Medicare (70). But it was only the civil rights bill that made some Americans run off the rails. That’s because it was the one that signaled an inexorable and immutable change in the very identity of America, not just its governance. The apocalyptic predictions then, like those about health care now, were all framed in constitutional pieties, of course. Barry Goldwater, running for president in ’64, drew on the counsel of two young legal allies, William Rehnquist and Robert Bork, to characterize the bill as a “threat to the very essence of our basic system” and a “usurpation” of states’ rights that “would force you to admit drunks, a known murderer or an insane person into your place of business.” Richard Russell, the segregationist Democratic senator from Georgia, said the bill “would destroy the free enterprise system.” David Lawrence, a widely syndicated conservative columnist, bemoaned the establishment of “a federal dictatorship.” Meanwhile, three civil rights workers were murdered in Philadelphia, Miss. That a tsunami of anger is gathering today is illogical, given that what the right calls “Obamacare” is less provocative than either the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or Medicare, an epic entitlement that actually did precipitate a government takeover of a sizable chunk of American health care. But the explanation is plain: the health care bill is not the main source of this anger and never has been. It’s merely a handy excuse. The real source of the over-the-top rage of 2010 is the same kind of national existential reordering that roiled America in 1964. In fact, the current surge of anger — and the accompanying rise in right-wing extremism — predates the entire health care debate. The first signs were the shrieks of “traitor” and “off with his head” at Palin rallies as Obama’s election became more likely in October 2008. Those passions have spiraled ever since — from Gov. Rick Perry’s kowtowing to secessionists at a Tea Party rally in Texas to the gratuitous brandishing of assault weapons at Obama health care rallies last summer to “You lie!” piercing the president’s address to Congress last fall like an ominous shot. If Obama’s first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. It’s not happenstance that Frank, Lewis and Cleaver — none of them major Democratic players in the health care push — received a major share of last weekend’s abuse. When you hear demonstrators chant the slogan “Take our country back!,” these are the people they want to take the country back from. They can’t. Demographics are avatars of a change bigger than any bill contemplated by Obama or Congress. The week before the health care vote, The Times reported that births to Asian, black and Hispanic women accounted for 48 percent of all births in America in the 12 months ending in July 2008. By 2012, the next presidential election year, non-Hispanic white births will be in the minority. The Tea Party movement is virtually all white. The Republicans haven’t had a single African-American in the Senate or the House since 2003 and have had only three in total since 1935. Their anxieties about a rapidly changing America are well-grounded. If Congressional Republicans want to maintain a politburo-like homogeneity in opposition to the Democrats, that’s their right. If they want to replay the petulant Gingrich government shutdown of 1995 by boycotting hearings and, as John McCain has vowed, refusing to cooperate on any legislation, that’s their right too (and a political gift to the Democrats). But they can’t emulate the 1995 G.O.P. by remaining silent as mass hysteria, some of it encompassing armed militias, runs amok in their own precincts. We know the end of that story. And they can’t pretend that we’re talking about “isolated incidents” or a “fringe” utterly divorced from the G.O.P. A Quinnipiac poll last week found that 74 percent of Tea Party members identify themselves as Republicans or Republican-leaning independents, while only 16 percent are aligned with Democrats. After the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, some responsible leaders in both parties spoke out to try to put a lid on the resistance and violence. The arch-segregationist Russell of Georgia, concerned about what might happen in his own backyard, declared flatly that the law is “now on the books.” Yet no Republican or conservative leader of stature has taken on Palin, Perry, Boehner or any of the others who have been stoking these fires for a good 17 months now. Last week McCain even endorsed Palin’s “reload” rhetoric. Are these politicians so frightened of offending anyone in the Tea Party-Glenn Beck base that they would rather fall silent than call out its extremist elements and their enablers? Seemingly so, and if G.O.P. leaders of all stripes, from Romney to Mitch McConnell to Olympia Snowe to Lindsey Graham, are afraid of these forces, that’s the strongest possible indicator that the rest of us have reason to fear them too.
http://usatoday.printthis.clickabil...n/2010-03-29-health-poll_N.htm&partnerID=1660 Health care law too costly, most say By Susan Page, USA TODAY Nearly two-thirds of Americans say the health care overhaul signed into law last week costs too much and expands the government's role in health care too far, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds, underscoring an uphill selling job ahead for President Obama and congressional Democrats. Those surveyed are inclined to fear that the massive legislation will increase their costs and hurt the quality of health care their families receive, although they are more positive about its impact on the nation's health care system overall. Supporters "are not only going to have to focus on implementing this kind of major reform," says Robert Blendon, a professor of health policy and political analysis at Harvard. "They're going to have to spend substantial time convincing people of the concrete benefits of this legislation." The risk for them is that continued opposition will fuel calls for repeal and dog Democrats in November's congressional elections. The bill was enacted without a single Republican vote. In an interview airing Tuesday on NBC's Today, Obama acknowledges concerns about cost. "It is a critical first step in making a health care system that works for all Americans," he said of the law, adding, "We are still going to have adjustments that have to be made to further reduce costs." Obama's approval rating was 47%-50% — the first time his disapproval rating has hit 50%. In the survey: • A plurality predicts the law will improve health care coverage generally and the overall health of Americans. But a majority says it also will drive up overall costs and worsen the federal budget deficit. • When it comes to their families, they see less gain and more pain: Pluralities say it will make coverage and quality of care worse for them. By 50%-21%, they predict it will make their costs higher. Opponents of the health care bill are a bit more likely than supporters to say the vote will have a major impact on their vote for Congress in the fall. Three in 10 are much more likely to vote for a candidate who opposes the bill. One in four are much more likely to vote for a candidate who supports it. The poll of 1,033 adults, taken by land line and cellphone Friday through Sunday, has a margin of error of +/–4 percentage points. Half call passage of the bill "a bad thing" and 47% "a good thing." That differs from a one-day USA TODAY poll taken March 22 — a day after the House approved the legislation — in which a 49%-40% plurality called the bill "a good thing." "Any one-day poll in the immediate aftermath of a major event is likely to be subject not only to sampling error but also to very short-term effects," says political scientist Charles Franklin of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. At the time, "the news cycle was dominated by the positive side of the story, and only a little bit by the Republicans' rebuttal to that." There was a strong reaction against the tactics Democratic leaders used to pass the bill. A 53% majority call Democratic methods "an abuse of power;" 40% say they are appropriate. And when asked about incidents of vandalism and threats that followed the bill's passage, Americans are more inclined to blame Democratic political tactics than critics' harsh rhetoric. Forty-nine percent say Democratic tactics are "a major reason" for the incidents, while 46% blame criticism by conservative commentators and 43% the criticism of Republican leaders.
Most white males who voted for Obama but don't like the healthcare bill are opposed to 2 main points. 1. The mandatory requirement to buy insurance. This is the single reason Obama won over Hillary in the primary election. She said she wanted it, Obama criticized her for it and said he wouldn't do it. He bought a lot of votes with that lie, mine included. When she runs against him in the next primary, she will beat him with that lie like a baby seal. This mandatory requirement to buy insurance is an old Republican Party idea so no help for their dying party there. 2. No public option was included. Without it, there is no true free marketplace with price competition. The insurance companies have acted as a monopoly since their inception, and price-fixing will always be the norm until the public option comes about to provide true competition. The public option will obviously never come from the Republican side of the fence so looks like the Republicans have no chance of getting any converts over this. As I've said before, both parties spit on their constituents and will lose voters to 3rd party candidates. I still think the Republicans came out of it looking worse by taking salaries for an entire year where they refused to actually do any work or even offer alternative ideas, and my 2 most right-wing friends have both said they are so pissed about that alone that they are becoming independents next time around.
For a generation, the Republican-owned media has run articles about white men being disporportionately for Republicans (which doesn't mean the majority are, by the way). Since Democrats continue to be elected all over the country, it sure is a shock that the Republican-owned and controlled media doesn't run any articles about the necessary fact that white women are disporportionately for Democrats.
I agree that those are probably the main two sticking points. However, I see a different reasoning for #2. Obama has never hid from eliminating health care companies (non unionized), and the public option is the avenue for doing that. That's why the GOP didn't want it. They do not want a single payer health care system.
Actually, I think Obama won as he did something no other recent democrat had done- he went and courted the "religious right". And to a certain degree, he had some success. Granted, he has lost them now, but it was a gutsy and brilliant move.
What a crock. The Republican Party is in the pocket of the Insurance industry. That's why they fought so hard against the public option. Because it would have cost their supporters money. That's why there was never any meaningful anti-trust talk against Insurance companies. The Health Care Bill was a big fucking giftwrapped boondoggle in favor of the Health Care Insurance Companies, who now have the law behind them that says you MUST buy from them. No price controls. No forced competition between providers. Nothing to level the playing field. Tell me again how this is a "win" for the American People? Oh and just so we are clear that I'm not playing favorites, the Democrats are in the pocket of the AMA and trial lawyers, so that's why there was never any meaningful tort-reform discussion.
You don't quite make sense. The guys in the pocket of the insurance companies passed a Bill mandating everyone buy from them, and without an opposing party vote.
Let me be clear: The Republicans knew that the Demos were going to pass something regardless of what they wanted. So they focused their energies on demonizing and killing the public option, which they did. And with all of the TeaBagger fringe foolishness going on right now, the GOP can't even hint that it was actually WORKING with the Democrats on this issue. I suspect that most of this bill was really hammered out behind closed doors, with it's authors lighting up cigars with hundred-dollar bills provided by Insurance Company lobbyists. Anyone that thinks there's any good guys in Washington has his head very far up his own ass.
We were already broke long before the election. The economy was dead in the water for 2 full years before Obama was sworn in, and millions of homes were already in the foreclosure process. The money we're spending now to fix it is simply payment on the bill that Bush/Cheney dropped in the mail on their way out the door. That's a reason to vote Dem, not Rep.
I've seen enough of both parties. Days of Malaise with Democrats in power, compassionate conservativism when Republicans are in power. I favor a gridlocked government that can't pass much in the way of anything. Short of electing libertarians.
He went direct to large churches... and frankly did a good job convincing them to vote for him. It was a very shrewd move.
