Posted on 03/30/2010 3:56:54 PM PDT by ksm1
Frank Rich's column "The Rage Is Not About Health Care" got a lot of attention this weekend. It ran through the examples of Republican overreaction and right-wing rage in response to the passage of healthcare reform – all of it well-covered in Salon -- and concluded the rage mainly stems from the fact that whites are about to become the minority in this country.
Rich isn't wrong (although calling last week's uprising a "small scale mimicry of Kristallnacht" was a little shrill). The "I want my country back!" rhetoric does reflect a mind-set in which one's country has been taken away by ... others. But in thinking about race this weekend, I got more out of a column by Ron Brownstein, which examined poll data showing that white voters -- wrongly -- tend to believe healthcare reform helped "other people," not themselves.
Even though the Obama administration tried to stress the bill's benefits to all families -- insurance for folks with preexisting conditions, restrictions on companies dropping you when you get sick, letting kids stay on parents' policies until they're 26, as well as subsidies that will mainly go to middle- and working-class families (the poor are already covered by Medicaid) -- a Gallup survey found that 57 percent of white respondents said that the bill would help the uninsured, and 52 percent said that it would improve conditions for low-income families. Only a third of whites thought it would benefit the country, and shockingly, only 20 percent thought it would benefit their family. (Nonwhites polled were more likely to say the bill would help their families.)
Those doubts were especially pronounced among white voters with less than a college education, Gallup found -- the group that most resisted candidate Obama in 2008. They're the least likely to say the plan would benefit the country, even though they're more than twice as likely to lack health insurance as college-educated whites. We can shake our heads at their ignorance, perhaps even racism, or we can try to understand the roots of their doubt. Brownstein points to a Stanley Greenberg poll that found these whites are reaching a tipping point that could send them even more enthusiastically toward Republicans this year. He also notes that among the 34 House Democrats who opposed the healthcare reform bill, 28 percent come from districts with a higher than average percentage of non-college educated whites in their districts.
I've written before about Lane Kenworthy's research tracing the decline of Democratic support among white working-class voters between the mid-'70s and 1990s. "Beginning in the mid-to-late 1970s," Kenworthy and his collaborators found, "there was increasing reason for working-class whites to question whether the Democrats were still better than the Republicans at promoting their material well-being." By the time of the Clinton recovery in the late 1990s, those voters were already too down on Democrats, and taken with divisive GOP us-vs.-them rhetoric, to give Democrats any credit for the improved economy.
So there's a long history here of Republicans preying on white working-class insecurity, and Democrats mostly ignoring it, that shapes the response to healthcare reform. That's why, to me, it was so important for Democrats to pass the bill, flawed as it was. Democrats need to deliver on their promises, with tangible benefits for their voters, and if whites remain suspicious now, maybe watching the bill's colorblind protections help all groups can change white opinions about social spending. Maybe not. But Democrats are going to have to do a better job of selling the bill's benefits to everybody to prevail in November, and Brownstein's column framed the problem without name-calling.
Where do they dig up these people as columnists?
Holder is too much of a pu$$y to call me and invite my to a beer summit with barry to discuss race.
i don’t believe i can state in writing what this “white man” thinks!
They just say that because we’re White folks ...
Sheesh! Next they’ll be calling us “uppity” and casually mentioning that some of their best friends are white.
Pot meet Kettle....I was going to go over all of the yada yada, durka, durka 'preyings' by Dems on Coloreds, Negroes, AFROs, Blacks, African Americans, Amfrericans, and who knowswhatelsenextthey'llcallthemselves hypen-somethings......but I won't. It isn't worth the time.
If Dorothy’s house lands on Joan Walsh White people will be improved. Cooties won’t bite her.....Professional Courtesy.
obama is racist, thats why he’s taxing tanning salons only white people go to tanning salons. LOL
the writer of the column must have overlooked that the only thing bi-partisan about the healthcare bill was the opposition to it.
Myself? Why, I tend to perk my ears up when I hear “Cracker Motherf@cker” myself.....
There. Little truth-in-urinalism correction.
Government taking over one sixth of the nation’s economy and forcing people to buy insurance is, to liberals, essentially a race issue. Just wait until they lose the House in November.
Where the white women at?
Let this idiot wait until everybody (Blacks and Hispanics included) discover that the country can no longer afford their federal health insurance plan because everybody decided there was no point in working anymore.
Thanks for my biggest laugh of the day!
What do you expect from Salon?
It’s like trying to find a positive story about Jews on StormFront....
My pleasure!
What’s wrong with lib assholes who write this puke? Walsh can go Biden herself!
“What’s the matter with white people?”
White people can’t jump
White people can’t dance
White people need to tan to become black
White people have no soul
White people don’t own rims
White people don’t understand what repression is
White people have never been slaves...here it comes...
White people are racists...incoming....
White people don’t eat collards
White people are usually guilt ridden
White people don’t know how to scratch...turntable...
White people aren’t capable of understanding “the black experience”
White people aren’t black.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.