The Middle Class Squeeze
pledged his loyalty to union voters, telling them, “There was an expression when I was growing up: ‘You go home with them that brung you to the dance.’ And labor brought me to the dance a long time ago.”
the Great Recession,” he told voters. That same year, America heard Obama tell Steve Kroft on 60 Minutes that this slow growth, lower-wage economy was just “the new normal.” It was a message the Obama administration tried to sell America... The jobs were just gone – for good. According to a Herald Tribune, in 2012 Obama asked the late Steve Jobs at a private dinner, “What would it take to make iPhones in the United States?” To which Jobs allegedly said, “Those jobs aren’t coming back.” And the Obama-Biden administration? They accepted that... So much so that by July 2014, Obama was trying to pitch his “dose of reality” to Michigan voters, telling them the jobs lost in the auto industry would not be coming back. “They are casualties of a changing economy,” he said on a trip to the region. “And that only underscores the importance of generating new businesses and industries to replace the ones we’ve lost, and of preparing our workers to fill the jobs they create.” Even as late as June 2016, it was a message Obama kept on pitching... At a televised town hall event in Indiana, he told a steel worker union official “some jobs are just not going to come back.” And yet today, Biden is singing a very different tune… His new platform is manufacturing. In August, he said that he didn’t “buy for one second that the vitality of American
And then he honed in on the elephant in the room... the reality that this group, like so many hard-working Americans, have felt neglected by their party. “A lot of people around here voted for Donald Trump the last time, and I get it,” the former vice president added. “I hear them.”
“Make America Great Again” was and is an aspirational slogan... It’s nostalgic. It speaks to a simpler time when you didn’t need a PhD to feed your family.
Well, he better keep listening… Because so many people in this so-called rust belt part of the country – Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin – assumed that Biden and Obama and other party elites had given up on them. And it certainly seemed as though they had... In 2010, at a fundraising event for Russ Feingold in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Biden told the people gathered for the dinner they just had to accept the “new normal.” “There’s no possibility to restore 8 million jobs lost in
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October 2020
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