"Marcy Kaptur’s warning": https://www.post-gazette.com/opinio...ouse-Government-Politics/stories/202102070118 Marcy Kaptur’s warning THE EDITORIAL BOARD Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Feb. 7, 2021 Marcy Kaptur is the longest-serving woman in the current Congress. She has also been in the U.S. House of Representatives longer than any woman has served there, in all of U.S. history. She came to the Congress in 1983. She is 74 and has been a Democrat her entire voting life. You might think she is worth listening to. As it happens, she has a message for her party: Wake up. Wake up or you will lose the House in the next election and maybe not regain it for many years. Wake up or you will lose the working class to the Republicans, for good. It is already happening. Ms. Kaptur points out that leadership in the House is dominated by members from the two coasts and from wealthy districts. A political realignment is taking place. Rural America is already Republican and, more specifically, Trumpian. Now more and more working-class and working-poor Americans are leaving the Democratic Party and voting Republican. Why? Because they feel their plight, their reality, has at least been recognized by Donald Trump’s GOP. Mind you, Ms. Kaptur thinks Donald Trump did nothing for these voters, and never seriously intended to. She also thinks he is psychologically “unbalanced.” But she recognizes what he recognized: what has happened to manufacturing and the working class in places like Toledo, Lorain, Lordstown and Youngstown, Wheeling, the Mon Valley, as well as parts of Greater Cleveland, and Buffalo, and large swaths of Greater Detroit. She represents a district characterized by economic decline — Toledo, Lorain and parts of Greater Cleveland. But these places and the people who live in them, says Ms. Kaptur, are largely invisible to her Democratic colleagues in the House who are busy forming caucuses around identity politics. They don’t get her part of America and they aren’t interested. She says that one colleague told her people should just move away. And there is no one like her, no one from a district like hers, in Democratic leadership. “It’s been very hard for regions like mine, which have had great economic attrition, to get fair standing” in leadership, she says. Instead, Ms. Kaptur says her colleagues tell her, upfront, that they don’t get her or her voters. Why don’t people just move away from a place like Lorain, Ohio? Well, maybe because they were born there and their families are there. Ms. Kaptur still lives in the same simple house where she grew up, in Toledo. She is an old-fashioned Roosevelt-Truman Democrat. But does she feel like a minority, a lonely voice, in the House caucus and in her party? “Yes, I do,” she says. Well, Ms. Kaptur is not going to retire or change parties or become a congresswoman without a party. She will keep on, and keep fighting for what she believes. Her latest cause is to establish an infectious disease unit in the National Institutes of Health. But she, like many Democrats, is disillusioned and alienated. A devout Catholic, she cannot share the obsessive enthusiasm of her party for abortion. She is for women’s rights and rights to privacy, but not for government funding of abortion or late-term abortion. She is an environmentalist, passionate about saving Lake Erie, but she also wants to save the auto industry — all that is left of industry in Toledo or Detroit. Cultural questions are tough ones, morally and politically, but most people seek a balance. And, no small thing, Ms. Kaptur has been seriously disrespected by her party. She has been denied a major committee chairmanship after all these years — 20 terms in the House. Think about that and what it means to disrespect that. “I think economics can bind us. I think that when we divide into too many subgroups, we lose the overarching theme,” says the congresswoman. She’s right. Dead right. The overarching theme should be opportunity, not identity. Democrats in the House need to respect Marcy Kaptur, respect the people she represents, and respect what she identifies as the right and resonant overarching theme: opportunity, jobs. They need to counter the GOP’s appeal to the working class, and not simply surrender the field. Ms. Kaptur has watched her beloved Ohio, once the ultimate swing state, become more and more deeply red. The Dems will lose a lot more people if they do not start to listen to, and represent, middle America. They will wish they had first listened to Marcy Kaptur. First Published February 7, 2021, 12:00am
But here, look through our heavily annotated 23 bullet points for addressing the plight of the working class. (pushes designer eyewear up nose) Truth is, you can either lie to people (Trump), kinda take them for granted (DNC), or think waaay outside the box (Yang). But good-paying blue collar jobs don’t seem to await us.
There aren't any easy answers...automation and job outsourcing will continue for the foreseeable future. I'll work my current job in O&G until I drop dead or get fired.
That she's "only" 74 but the longest-serving woman in Congress surprises me. Pelosi's 80 and Sen. Feinstein's 87 yet Congresswoman Kaptur has 4 and 9 years more service time than either of these two. And, she's right. Focusing on the woke costal politics will erode the D's of voters.
Diane says she'll run again... Free education and a monthly stipend has its limits. Many people derive their meaning/worthfor living mostly through work or religious works. Cons have been consistent about promoting their value beliefs even if it promotes inequality and winner takes all thinking. Libs don't really address how people in non coastal areas can maintain their dignity. It allows Cons to promote nonstop Grievance politics while stoking long dormant resentments of immigrants, successful minorites and other nations.
Thanks, Marcy. Who did the $1400 stimulus package help if not the poor and working class? The legislation that got not a single Republican Senator's support. Unfortunately the poor and working class, particularly the whites, do not vote their economic interests which is why a trash human being like Mitch McConnell can be in the Senate forever.
She answered your question though and addressed your point. Messaging! Did you read the article in full?
Age limits seem obvious for our most critical positions in government, in all three branches. Humans change as they get older. I would disqualify Trump, Biden, Feinstein, McConnell, and would have RBG too if I'd had the chance. Oh well.
I'd disqualify the radicals like Cruz, Taylor Greene, and the lot of those who incited the riot on the Capitol, the Covid hoax BS, the election fraud BS, and all the blatant lies and propaganda they feed their following to keep their power, at any and all cost. It's a deadly and dangerous new type of Republican Party, and I don't like it.
Let’s address some of the language in this: 1) “Obsessive enthusiasm for abortion” - who the hell is enthusiastic about abortion? The Democrats are passionate about defending the right for women to end their own pregnancies (within limits), because they know the dangers inherent in removing that right. And let’s be 100% honest here - much of the liberals’ passion is tied to the obsession by right wingers to eliminate all access to abortion (and with it most birth control access and education as well). When was the last time you heard about a left winger protesting or calling in a bomb threat to an organization dedicated to limiting abortion? Like we’ve seen in the past, conservatives mislabel a defense of one’s rights as “intolerance” against those who would usurp those same rights. By their logic, a conservative who defends him/herself against a crime is actually intolerant of the criminal’s beliefs. 2) Forming caucuses around identity politics - isn’t this exactly what the GOP has done? Rather than makes attempts to govern for the whole nation, the GOP has made it abundantly clear that they care only for the very wealthy, the very white and the very Christian. Their lack of respect for anyone outside of this very narrow demographic is baldly apparent. In contrast, Democrats have welcomed a much more diverse population into its party yet somehow again, idiots like the writers of this article mistake the juggling of various groups’ needs as “identity politics.” But given the fact that the Democrats have spent enormous time and capital on promoting ideas such as fair wages and taxation, voting access, affordable health care and spending on social welfare - all things that would greatly benefit Congresswoman Kaptur’s constituents - while the Republicans have done nothing but cut taxes for the wealthy and given a few crumbs to everyone else, I find this charge baseless. 3) The Congresswoman wants to save the environment and the American auto industry. Guess what? One party has worked to do exactly that in recent years and it wasn’t the ****ing GOP. If the GOP has its way, Lake Erie would still be flammable and Ford would have gone down in 2008. But thanks to the Democrats, that didn’t happen. The problem as I see it is not that the Democratic Party stopped listening to Middle America, but that Middle America stopped voting for the Democratic Party as soon as other demographics started being made political priorities. Research has show over and over that the leading cause of Trumpism is not economic struggle, but racial grievance. The Democrats have offered the possibility of a country where yes, opportunity is available to everyone, but in order for that to happen, there is a great deal of remedial work to be done. Yet rather than embrace this potential for true equal opportunity, voters fitting this narrow definition of “Middle America” chose to embrace the GOP’s “the colorleds are coming to get you” hysteria. I am truly sympathetic to anyone whose job was lost due to offshoring the past 30 years, but make no mistake - this was not the result of the Democratic Party. It was inevitable that America’s post World War 2 economic dominance would diminish as other countries rebuilt and that American companies would inevitably seek ways to maintain growth while facing much smaller market shares. Rather than seek to protect or adapt those workers who would be affected by this, the GOP did everything they could to remove all the workers’ protections. And because the voters overwhelmingly chose to follow the GOP, the Democratic Party was forced to adapt and concede many parts of their core policy in order to maintain a presence at all. It was political cowardice - make no mistake - but they don’t deserve the bulk of the blame for the economic plight that followed. It does seem unfair that the Congresswoman has never led a committee, although I’d be interested in learning whether such is true for other long-standing representatives. But rather than b**** about her own party, I’d like to have seen her articulate specifically how the Democratic platform is failing her constituency other than vague claims that “nobody cares.” What type of legislation does she want to see? What has she proposed that isn’t getting traction? What does she want and what does her constituents want? The real irony of this article is that it accuses the Democrats of playing identity politics while simultaneously bemoaning the plight of a particular identity group (white rural voters). I don’t expect much from the OP, but this article isn’t even remotely intelligent. It’s not outrageous or misleading - it’s just lame.
I read it and I think she's a whiny bozo but more importantly to her point the notion that the GOP marketing of guns, hatred, fake patriotism, and fake religious fealty causes middle America to sacrifice their own economic prosperity speaks more to how poorly educated they are and the poor choices they are making than to what geniuses there are in the GOP or to what lack of geniuses there are in the Democratic Party. The GOP marketing strategy is mostly antithetical to the Democratic Party's and most of the world's vision of progress. There is no first world country on Earth that operates in the fashion that the GOP envisions our country should operate. As progressives I feel we are the party of working people and the poor because we support those policies that impact them most but it will be incredibly difficult to get through to people who will not accept basic facts. As some point they have to figure that **** out for themselves if they want better lives for their children. Doubling down on stupid doesn't work no matter how many times you do it.
Kaptur has always been one of my favorite reps. She's a real bad ass who has been speaking truth to power since the Iraq War days.
You have to convince and ask people for their vote. You cannot take them for granted because you think they are uneducated hicks. They will never figure it out if they don't have any guidance. Instead you create a vacuum for a snake oil salesmen to swoop in and snatch them. As as you mentioned, they are too "stupid" to realize it or get out of it. She wants her party to be better, more compassionate, to those folks not mock them and then lose them. Why is that a bad thing or considered whining?
