The stories white guys tell themselves

St. Petersburg - Tampa Bay Times ^ | August 12, 2012 | Robyn E. Blumner,

[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.

[MarkL]

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.

Robyn is a moron. Nevermind the blind repetition of the class-warfare mantras, the above statement is refuted by ANYONE who have ever had any sort of success. Just ask anyone who has tried to succeed, and you'll find that they failed often. They used those failures as learning experiences. And the only character flaw they saw as being tied to failure would be to give up and stop trying. I would suggest Robyn read a book on Thomas Edison.

My guess is that Robyn hasn't ever really succeeded at anything, and needed support (affirmative action, etc...) to accomplish anything in her worthless life.

Mark

[CSM]

Guilty beyond any concievable reasonable doubt!

[MarkL]

I thought I'd take a look at the comments on her article, and after reading the incredible stupidity of many of them, I now understand how Robyn manages to get away with writing her tripe. It's like watching "Idiocracy," something I've never been able to sit through for more than about 3 minutes at a time.

Mark

[BobL]

Notice that there are two themes that NEVER come up:

1) Perhaps white voters care about the country they leave to their children.

2) Perhaps white voters see the country changing in a way that scares the hell out of them.

So it’s sure fun to watch the liberals try to figure them out...

[American in Israel]

While I may not quite believe that working hard will automaticly make me a rich man, I firmly believe that sitting on my arse and trying to live on welfare does not lead to independence and wealth.

So I guess that makes me a foolish whitey.

[kcvl]

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.