Droppin' g's for the Unemployed

Official unemployment went up, again, getting that much closer to a solid ten percent. And don't even get me started on the unofficial rate and the amount of despair that goes along with it. The AFL-CIO did a moving video piece on people running out of unemployment benefits. Made me wonder when the administration is going to turn its attention away from Goldman Sachs long enough to think about working people. 

Oh, I meant "workin' people." I forgot that we now show our solidarity with wage earners not by putting them to work or distributing the national bounty their way, but by dropping our g's. Watch Obama. Ever since the debates, he has been doing some linguistic slumming, proving his working class cred on terms defined by the populist right: by being on the side of strugglin' and hard workin' people facin' an uncertain future. When he addresses other subjects, however, the g's magically return to his Harvard-trained gerund pronunciation. 

I don't mind a little political theater, let's just back it up with substance. In the seventies, as I elaborated here, similar levels of unemployment triggered a national debate over the nature and meaning of economic planning. Even if full employment legislation failed, Carter still pushed for a WPA-Lite jobs program known as CETA. Here the unions blew their opportunity by demanding union-level wages for CETA workers, which was greatly indicative of their assumptions about the amount of power they would continue to have as history unfolded. They were quite wrong, though CETA worked while it worked. As Walter Shapiro, a former aide to Carter's Labor Secretary Ray Marshall, put it in a critical review of Carter's jobs program, "The problem with CETA was not that it embodied Big Government, but that it was not big enough." 

Meantime, Obama has attacked the federal deficit by--of all things--going after the pay of federal workers. “The hard truth is that getting this deficit under control is going to require some broad sacrifice, and that sacrifice must be shared by employees of the federal government,” Mr. Obama told reporters.  His choice demonstrated all of his weaknesses: caving before a fight, fighting the wrong fight, fighting the other guy's fight for him, and not getting anything in the process except for vague hopes of good will from the people you're supposed to be fighting against. As Paul Krugman argued, “This was an announcement that had it all. It was transparently cynical; it was trivial in scale, but misguided in direction; and by making the announcement, Mr. Obama effectively conceded the policy argument to the very people who are seeking — successfully, it seems — to destroy him.”

So the paradigm of working-class politics built in the seventies--culture over economics, finance over manufacturing, Wall Street over Main Street--continues uncontested within the corridors of power. The basic formula: remember your base by droppin' your g's. I'm sure it makes people feel better.