The dueling appeals to the white working class

Beyond these fairly obvious if sometimes underestimated aspects of the general election campaign, there’s something about the competing appeals to the middle class that’s more of a simple identity test: it gets to competing understandings of who created the economic mess in the first place.

By that I don’t just mean “Barack Obama” or “George W. Bush,” but the people they are thought to represent. Because it is axiomatic to progressives that the housing and financial crises and the Great Recession that ensued were mainly the product of an underregulated Wall Street drunk on debt and greed, they sometimes fail to understand or remember that to most of the conservative movement, it’s equally axiomatic that those people abetted by socialist politicians and government-dependent, rent-seeking bankers were at fault.

This was, lest we forget, the master narrative at the heart of the Tea Party Movement from the very beginning (as dramatized by its original cri de couer, the Santelli Rant): the Alinsky Coalition of irresponsible poor and minority folk, given official advantages by the Community Reinvestment Act and egged on by ACORN and Freddie/Fannie, created a housing bubble that predictably burst and then demanded “relief” in the form of government bailouts and handouts coming right out of the pockets of virtuous white folk (many older people with paid-off mortgages) who saw their wealth dissipating, their tax liabilities (it’s a myth, but many believe it fiercely) going up, and their children and grandchildren losing opportunity. The fact that many serious conservatives are willing to apportion part of the blame to George W. Bush and/or to the banks saved by TARP shouldn’t obscure the fact that the main blame is fixed on those people and their political representatives. Indeed, Bush and the banks are objects of right-wing fury precisely because they cooperated with the poor/minority/socialist shakedown game, or at least did little to fight it.

So the “kick down” efforts of the GOP are not just based on mischaracterizations of Obama’s record as part of the obsessive drive to make the election a “referendum” on the last four years, but also on the powerful beliefs of conservative activists about the period prior to 2009. Because these beliefs are not that widely shared beyond Tea Folk circles, Republicans are vulnerable to the very counter-argument Democrats are seeking to make: we know wealthy predators like Romney and the people financing his campaign are to be feared and avoided because they got us into this mess in the first place. And so the GOP appeal to “kick-down” class resentment has had to get cruder and more racial as the campaign has proceeded, with Obamacare and “gutting welfare reform” presented as a new threat to white middle-class families, even as they represent continuations of the assault on America building for years to the “base.” That’s one reason GOP efforts to half-heartedly suggest they think Obama is feckless rather than evil are not very convincing: to big elements of “the base,” the terrible things he’s done since taking office are exactly what they expected, and will be read into everything he says and does whether or not it makes sense to the non-initiated.