The Democrats’ working-class problem

President Obama, ever the gifted orator, has hit some excellent notes as he shapes the Democrats’ message on the deficit. He also has hit some wrong ones — and has failed to correct mistakes Democrats have been making for 40 years. Because when Democrats talk about the poor, they can wind up losing more votes than they win. ¶ A key constituency in any national election is white voters who are neither rich nor poor — the working-class families whose median income is $64,000. This group, overwhelmingly Democratic before 1970, has abandoned the Democrats in large numbers, creating a conservative center in American politics. Obama needs these voters in 2012. And his team needs to learn some basic messages about how this group sees the world, in particular about their attitudes toward the rich and the poor, and about certain phrases that may not resonate with them. The donkey’s tin ear should end here.

“There but for the grace
of God go I”

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Early in his address on the deficit this month, the president noted, “ ‘There but for the grace of God go I,’ we say to ourselves,” and therefore we support social programs for the poor, the sick and the elderly.

Nice touch? It depends on who you are talking to.

This phrase accurately summarizes African Americans’ attitude toward the poor, according to a study by Harvard sociologist Michèle Lamont published in 2000. Working-class blacks tend to be less antigovernment, more receptive to social programs and less judgmental of the poor. In fact, working-class African Americans’ attitudes towards social solidarity are, surprisingly, more like those of the French than their white American counterparts.

So the president’s framing helps him connect with black Americans, but he already has their votes. White working-class voters see the world very differently; they are more likely to be true believers in equal opportunity than to link poverty with social injustice. These families are less inclined to think, “There but for the grace of God go I” and more inclined to attribute poverty to a life of impulse, chaos and a lack of discipline stemming from individual choices.

So when the Democrats focus on the poor, these Americans hear disrespect — disrespect for their lives of rigid self-discipline in jobs of deadening repetitiveness, disrespect for their struggles in which one false step can mean a fall into poverty. Every time Democrats focus their message on the poor, they enhance Republican power.

The GOP lured white workers away from the New Deal coalition with the argument that the only thing Democrats cared about was “big government,” which was equated with liberals handing over their hard-earned money to hard-living ne’er-do-wells (who, racialized discourse intimated, were not white). Alas, Obama reinforced this story line when he kept stressing, during the health-care debate, the need to cover the 30 million uninsured. This may have seemed logical to him — there but for the grace of God go I — but, politically, it played into Republican hands and helped galvanize the tea party movement.