paying-attention

Geraldine Ferraro is an Italian-American politician and ex-officeholder who understands identity politics. Like many Americans she comes from a background and belief that governance is the ultimate zero-sum game. In this context it is as impossible for Barack Obama to care about white people as it is for Bill Richardson to consider the needs of Anglo-Americans -- or, by the same logic, for Hillary Clinton to represent males. In Ferraro's universe of racial and ethnic interest groups and tightly controlled machine politics, the name of the game is patronage. There is only so much pork to be handed out, and if anything at all goes to a previously ignored or devalued group of people, it is at the expense of the group who used to be on top.

In today's Boston Globe, she writes "As for Reagan Democrats, how Clinton was treated is not their issue. They are more concerned with how they have been treated........ It's not racism that is driving them, it's racial resentment." I'm not sure how this qualifies as "not racism," but everyone likes to believe that as bad as their lives get, there is always someone beneath them on the stairway to success. Like Ferraro, the voters she claims to represent are not interested in a flood that lifts all boats. They think they know from previous experience that any change that comes from Washington will be to their detriment. Why should they think otherwise? Every politician runs on a message of improving life for some group or other, and the lives of high school educated working people stay the same or get worse. It must be that dark-skinned guy's fault, or maybe them people who don't speak English so good.

Ferraro writes: "Hope, change, and inspiration don't do it." Really? Are we just crabs in a bucket, or are we the most imaginative species ever put on the planet?

Labels: geraldine ferraro, obama, reagan democrats