Posted on 08/14/2012 8:03:40 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
Joan Didion wrote, "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." I'd modify that slightly for this presidential election year and say, we tell ourselves stories in order to vote. Which is why Mitt Romney maintains a huge lead in the polls among blue-collar white men.
The differential is staggering. Non-college-educated white men give Romney a 37-point advantage over President Barack Obama according to a recent ABC News/Washington Post poll. Why would struggling wage earners support a candidate who would give tax cuts to the top 1 percent, a group that controls 43 percent of the wealth in the country, while adding to the tax burdens of people at the lower end of the income scale? Racial issues aside — and I'm not discounting the significant "black president" factor, it comes down to the power of myth and story.
White men have been fed the myth of the rags-to-riches, self-made man, the quintessential American narrative that says hard work and perseverance will equate to success. The idea cemented in the male cerebral cortex is that people who start from nothing can work themselves from the Horatio Alger mailroom to the corner office.
The unflattering flip side of this is that failure is a character flaw. If you don't succeed, you didn't work hard enough. As the story goes, anyone who takes government help falls into this category.
A recent Romney campaign ad draws on this theme by accusing Obama of trying to take the work requirement out of welfare. (A false assertion, by the way.) As CBS News' Bob Schieffer explained, this ad is designed to shore up support among white working-class men. In shades of Willie Horton, the ad offers a racially divisive subtext while reinforcing the self-made-man corollary that people who need government assistance are lazy moochers.
(Excerpt) Read more at tampabay.com ...
Is there a true sentence in this whole article?
In a real free market, you can succeed or fail entirely on your own merits. It’s only when government gets involved that luck, favoritism, and protectionism become major issues.
Poor Robyn Blummer is living proof that a mind is a terrible thing to waste. Here she starts with a question that is concluded with a false statement. The answer to her question about why struggling wage earners support a candidate who does not want to tax their jobs out of existence should be obvious, but she throws in the false claim that Romney would add to their tax burdens. I guess in the wasted mind of a liberal anything that doesn't punish wealth creators must by definition increase the burden on the poor, but that is just one more reason why a mind truly is a terrible thing to waste.
And 98% of the black vote went to Obama in 2008. Are they racist too?
I'm so sick of this slant against conservatives. Stupid reporters have nothing better to do I guess.
Does it have to be a complete sentence to qualify ?
A jaw dropping pile of racist, class-warfare commie “intellect.”
I guess the only way you can claim this is a false assertion is that since Obama has already by Executive Order removed the work requirement it is a false assertion to accuse him of merely trying to take the work requirement out of welfare.
Romney just wants to keep the Obama Tax Cuts in place. He doesn’t propose to raise taxes on anybody.
BTW, they hate it when you call them the “Obama Tax Cuts”. But they were passed by Democrat supermajorities in both houses of Congress and signed by President Obama, so I don’t know how you could call them anything else.
Ms. Blumner seems so desperately unhappy here, in this country, surrounded by delusional yokels who believe wholeheartedly in its principles and its promise.
I just can't shake the nagging feeling that there's actually something she could do about that, ultimately.
The person that wrote the article is typical of media bias....but it is not going to work this time.. the Giant is awake...and we will clean house -all of them
The self-made man myth needs to be exploded. It dangerously serves the interests of the top 1 percent.
Somehow, when as a young boy growing up in a turn of the century 4 room wood house with no water - for your city folks that means a well and an outhouse too, REA electricity, a coal fired pot belly stove and floorboards so tight you could sweep the dirt through them to the dirt below, I never blamed "the rich white man" for my troubles.
Somehow, when my sharecropper's son father who only finished the 5th grade told me to join the military to get ahead, I didn't blame it on "the rich white man."p> Somehow, when my military pay started out at $94/month and ended up 8 years later at $594/month, I didn't blame it on "the rich white man."
Somehow, when my after-service pay was $150/week and supporting a wife and young son, I didn't blame it on "the rich white man." I instead followed that dream this writer so demeans. I got a second job, applied to Georgia Tech and used something I'd earned - the GI bill.
I graduated exactly three years later. My doomed life of poverty wasn't erased by the "equal outcome" prescribed by this writer or his ilk. It was erased by hard, hard work and a knowledge that the dream is real, at least for those not so lazy to believe this writer's intended meaning of success.
LOL!
The author is the perfect spokeswoman for the bums, deadbeats, losers, and parasites who comprise the Democrat party “base”.
The reason "white working class" people have written 0bama off is that 0bama has written them off.
Obama Publicly Writes Off White, Working Class Voters as Advertisement to His Base
Because "Non-college-educated white men" are the group most disadvantaged by affirmative action, and they predominantly depend on the private sector to provide their jobs. And that "top 1%" are the very people who provide the bulk of the private-sector blue collar jobs, in all the small businesses across the country.
We haven’t seen racism until people like this writer get ahold of the controls.
I would believe this one, as most college educated people have been subjected to four years of merciless socialist indoctrination. It is difficult to resist, but some do (I know, I did).
There is not a single sentence that is true in this article.
This article is literally dripping with hate and racism.
“Blumner is a graduate of Cornell University and NYU School of Law. After working as a labor lawyer in New York, she became executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Utah. In 1989, she took over the directorship of the ACLU of Florida, where she worked until joining the staff of the Times.”
In other words, this article was written by an exceptionally stupid woman who has never done anything like work, and whose career has mostly revolved around serving the communist cause.
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