What's Happened to John Edwards

[Plaid Adder]

I have not been around the primaries much because, as I said in my last post here, I find the whole thing depressing. I am particularly annoyed by the minute attention being paid by the media to the Clinton and Obama campaigns' interactions, and who said what about whom and who needs to apologize. If these people think that by dissecting a comment Bill Clinton made about Jesse Jackson for evidence of possible racial bias they are in any way furthering the cause of racial equality, they are more deluded than I thought they were. Racial inequality is perpetuated in this country by a number of bedrock economic injustices that neither Obama nor Clinton is talking about addressing, and although it would be nice if we could train everyone to be polite to each other, that by itself will never eradicate racial inequality.

Strangely, the only candidate coming at all close to addressing these issues is John Edwards--because he's taking on class, and not just race or gender. But since the MSM is really giving him no air time whatsoever, and since I no longer have the time to go digging through LBN like I used to, I really don't know too much about the specifics he's proposing. But let me tell you what, from my point of view, is really wrong with this country, the electorate, and in particular this primary race:

We can talk about race, we can talk about gender. But in general, as a society, we cannot talk about money or class. We do not have the vocabulary, the concepts, or--and here I'm talking about the Democratic party elite and their two front-runners--the courage.

The first problem you encounter when you try to talk about class is that most of the people you try to talk to will tell you it doesn't exist--at least not in America. The second problem is that to the extent that people know and use the term "class," it is to describe themselves as "middle class." If you listen to Americans on the subject you would get the idea that they live in a country that's 100% middle class, with no upper or lower. All politicians ever talk about is doing things for the middle class. The closest anyone ever gets to uttering the words "working class" is "working families," as if the work "worker" is so scary it cannot be uttered unless it is immediately domesticated by the word "family." And of course a lot of things are actually done to benefit the rich; but no politician ever admits in public that they work for "the rich." All this capital-gains stuff somehow benefits "the middle class," even though large chunks of "the middle class" have never come near a stock portfolio.

But class divisions in this country are deep, and they are harder to bridge than any other kind. Their causes are not obvious and their remedies are neither clear nor easy. But I'll tell you, when you start raising a kid for the first time, you start to notice these things a lot more.

It starts before birth, really--not just in terms of prenatal medical care, which of course the un- or under-insured often cannot afford, but basic things like prenatal nutrition. It's no good telling people what they have to eat to help their babies develop if they can't afford it or can't get to a store that sells it. Then once the baby's born, the divisions deepen. The American medical establishment--finally--agrees that breastfeeding is better for infants under 6 months than feeding them on formula. (Outside of America, it's usually recommended to breastfeed exclusively for a year, but that's a rant I'm not going into right now.) It is also far cheaper. And yet, the way things are now, breastfeeding is a realistic option mainly for the children of women who don't work outside the home, or women who work in the professions. My partner, for instance, took her 12 weeks of FMLA leave, and thereafter took her $350 breastpump to work where she pumped 3 times a day in the privacy of her own office which has a door that closes. She still only made it through 5 months. Most working-class women cannot afford to take the 12 weeks of *unpaid* leave guaranteed by the FMLA; they'll maybe have two weeks right after the delivery and then they're back on the job, or more likely the jobs, since more and more working-class women are having to work two or three jobs. That's not long enough to establish breastfeeding in the first place; and if you are working, say, as cook at Burger King or a housekeeper in an office building, where are you going to pump? No, you're probably going to wind up having to switch to formula, which will cost you an arm and a leg. So, because you do not work the kind of job that pays well enough to allow you to take a real maternity leave, you *also* get stuck paying more for baby food than your better-off fellow-working women do. And this is how the poor get poorer; and it's also why, in our neighborhood, all the drug stores that sell infant formula put it in locked cases. Because otherwise, people steal it. And really, I cannot blame them.

Anyway. So even before these kids can walk or talk they are at a disadvantage; and then we get to the school system. With all the talk about 'education reform,' I don't know why we can't get anyone to revisit the way we fund our public schools, which guarantees that the more your kids *need* a good education, the less likely they are to have it. No, I take it back, I do know why; it's because ever since the Reagan revolution, "education reform" has really been about breaking public education rather than fixing it. School vouchers and school choice siphoned off the kids of privileged families to special magnet schools or to parochial schools while everyone else was left to flounder in the struggling public schools. Then came the push for "standards" to the exclusion of everything else, with the result that public school kids were not so much educated as trained to take exams; then on top of that came No Child Left Behind, which imposed an unholy bureaucratic burden on schools while also enabling the withdrawal of money from schools that were already in trouble, thus ensuring that they would never recover. And why? Because providing anything good free of charge to the public at large in equal measure is obnoxious to conservative ideology; but also because families in the middle and upper classes want to preserve economic privilege for their own kids and not to share it with everyone else. This dovetails with racism, which is an unacknowledged motivation for a lot of white parents who don't want their kids in the (now integrated, at least on paper) public school system; and the result is that when the public system fails, it fails primarily for minority students. At least in Chicago, most of the white students in the public system are concentrated in the magnet schools, which are always going to make out all right.

Anyway. These basic injustices, and the divisions that grow out of them, are silently accepted and smoothed over by our entire political establishment and by the mainstream media. As Americans, we are discouraged from paying attention to class, from understanding it, or from listening to anyone who wants to talk about it. The last time class consciousness was really part of the American experience was in the 1930s and 1940s. The Cold War killed that, and now we're left with identity politics. Talking about race without talking about class limits the kind of change we can contemplate--let alone actually accomplishing it--just as talking about class without talking about race would.

John Edwards is the only candidate I've sent money to because he's the only candidate who seems to me to have any understanding of class or how it connects to our society's other problems. Sure, he's personally rich; but so are all prominent politicians. And I was really hoping he would win South Carolina; but he hasn't. I will hold out hope for Super Tuesday; but I don't think it's realistic. By all means I encourage all the Edwardsians to continue standing by him to the bitter end; when it's my turn, I intend to vote for him. But I do not think he is going to win.

That is partly, certainly, because the media simply refuses to cover his campaign; and I don't think that's accidental, or that it can be attributed purely to the horse-race frenzy generated by the Clinton/Obama back and forthing. But there is also the problem that Edwards, charismatic speaker that he is, is speaking a language that this generation of Americans has forgotten, and is only going to pick up again slowly and painfully. Ultimately, he is promising a remedy for a disease that most Americans do not believe exists in this country. The fact that they are manifestly wrong about that doesn't necessarily mean that Edwards is bound to win through in the end. The process of getting America ready to vote for a president who wants to do something about *economic* inequality is going to take much longer than this election cycle.

Discussing the primaries with me a couple months ago, my mother's response to my mention of John Edwards was, "Did you see that video of him getting his hair done?" I am afraid I kind of went ballistic. The substance of my response, minus the ranting, was, "That is an unbelievably stupid reason for making a decision about who you want as President of the United States." But then we live in the country of stupid reasons that produce stupid decisions. Nevertheless, the media picture of Edwards has now broadened somewhat, at least judging by my mother, who now says she doesn't like Edwards because he promotes "class warfare" and is "divisive." So, either he's a featherweight pretty boy who cares only for his blow-dried coif, or he's a dangerous radical menace inciting the dispossessed to rise up in revolution. Because the only two modes in which our media can deal with someone talking about class are trivialization and demonization.

Ah well,

The Plaid Adder