Obama, Bitterness, Meet the Press, and the Old Politics

I was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania,
61 years ago. My father sold $1.98 cotton blouses to blue-collar women
and women whose husbands worked in factories. Years later, I was
secretary of labor of the United States, and I tried the best I could –
which wasn’t nearly good enough – to help reverse one of the most
troublesome trends America has faced: The stagnation of middle-class
wages and the expansion of povety. Male hourly wages began to drop in
the early 1970s, adjusted for inflation. The average man in his 30s is
earning less than his father did thirty years ago. Yet America is far
richer. Where did the money go? To the top.

Are Americans who
have been left behind frustrated? Of course. And their frustrations,
their anger and, yes, sometimes their bitterness, have been used since
then — by demagogues, by nationalists and xenophobes, by radical
conservatives, by political nuts and fanatical fruitcakes – to blame
immigrants and foreign traders, to blame blacks and the poor, to blame
"liberal elites," to blame anyone and anything.

Rather than
counter all this, the American media have wallowed in it. Some, like
Fox News and talk radio, have given the haters and blamers their very
own megaphones. The rest have merely "reported on" it. Instead of
focusing on how to get Americans good jobs again; instead of admitting
too many of our schools are failing and our kids are falling behind
their contemporaries in Europe, Japan, and even China; instead of
showing why we need a more progressive tax system to finance better
schools and access to health care, and green technologies that might
create new manufacturing jobs, our national discussion has been mired
in the old politics.

Listen to this morning’s “Meet the Press”
if you want an example. Tim Russert, one of the smartest guys on
television, interviewed four political consultants – Carville and
Matalin, Bob Schrum, and Michael Murphy. Political consultants are paid
huge sums to help politicians spin words and avoid real talk. They’re
part of the problem. And what do Russert and these four consultants
talk about? The potential damage to Barack Obama from saying that lots
of people in Pennsylvania are bitter that the economy has left them
behind; about HRC’s spin on Obama’s words (he’s an “elitist,” she
said); and John McCain’s similarly puerile attack.

Does
Russert really believe he’s doing the nation a service for this parade
of spin doctors talking about potential spins and the spin-offs from
the words Obama used to state what everyone knows is true? Or is
Russert merely in the business of selling TV airtime for a network that
doesn’t give a hoot about its supposed commitment to the public
interest but wants to up its ratings by pandering to the nation’s
ongoing desire for gladiator entertainment instead of real talk about
real problems.

We’re heading into the worst economic crisis in
a half century or more. Many of the Americans who have been getting
nowhere for decades are in even deeper trouble. Large numbers of people
in Pennsylvania and across the nation are losing their homes and losing
their jobs, and the situation is likely to grow worse. Consumers are at
the end of their ropes, fuel and food costs are skyrocketing, they
can’t go deeper into debt, they can’t pay their bills. They aren’t
buying, which means every business from the auto industry to housing to
even giant GE is hurting. Which means they’ll begin laying off more
people, and as they do, we will experience an even more dangerous
downward spiral.

Bitter? You ain’t seen nothing yet. And as
much as people like Russert, Carville, Matalin, Schrum, and Murphy want
to divert our attention from what’s really happening; as much as HRC
and McCain seek to make political hay out of choices of words that can
be spun cynically by the mindless spinners of the old politics; as much
as demagogues on the right and left continue to try to channel the
cumulative frustrations of Americans into a politics of resentment –
all these attempts will, I hope, prove futile. Eighty percent of
Americans know the nation is on the wrong track. The old politics, and
the old media that feeds it, are irrelevant now.