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So of course I plugged my stats into the handy-dandy wage gap calculator that Trailhead mentioned, which the Clinton campaign has posted on its Web site in honor of Equal Pay Day (April 22, in case you haven't pencilled it in yet) and the results were predictable. Some hypothetical man of my age and race would earn about one-third more than I do, at least according to Clinton's software program, whose calculations seem rather vague and ballparky, to put it mildly. I know this disparity should make me angry, and I guess, in a hypothetical kind of way, it does. But what really irritates me is something else; before Equal Pay Day comes today, which is Tax Day, and despite the fact that I mailed out a check just this morning to cover the taxes on the salary that I do get, the government persists in refusing to call me a taxpayer. No. My husband, according to the IRS, is the only "taxpayer" in our household. I am the "spouse." So for that matter is Hillary Clinton: Sccording to their jointly filed 2006 tax return, H.R Clinton, whose occupation is listed as U.S. senator, signs on the line for "spouse," while William J. Clinton, whose occupation is listed as "speaking and writing," is the official household taxpayer.
It's a little thing, I know, but it drives me crazy, once a year, that the IRS does not update its forms to acknowledge that women, though our salaries may or may not still be lower than men's, do in fact work hard for the money we get; do in fact have payroll taxes deducted, Social Security, etc. We feel like taxpayers, look like taxpayers—are, in fact, paying taxes, but are not considered bona fide taxpayers, unless we make a big deal about it and force our husbands to take on the "spouse" designation. (Actually, the reverse happened in our household: For a few years after we were married, and both making about $2 a year, I somehow was the taxpayer and my husband the spouse, which we both thought was fine, but then one tax preparer found this so disconcerting that he actually filled out the paperwork to have the titles reversed.) The thing is, how hard would it be for the government to move into the late 20th century, if not the early 21st, and change the form to have a Taxpayer A and Taxpayer B? I know that there are lots of important things the next administration will have to fix—the economy, the war, the mortgage debacle—but I hope that somebody, someday will get around to updating this throwback to an era when wives' earnings were considered to be little more than pin money.
And if I'm not a taxpayer, could I have back, like, you know, all those taxes I paid?
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A guest post from Barbara Ehrenreich:
I spent an hour yesterday trying to persuade Tom Frank, author of What's the Mater with Kansas? and the apparent intellectual source of Obama's remark on white working class "bitterness," to weigh in with an op-ed somewhere. Unfortunately, he'd already had 20 calls before mine on the same theme, so our conversation moved on quickly to the Disney Princess Cult and its pernicious influence on 3-year-olds. Although all this was off the record, I do not think I am betraying a confidence by revealing that Frank judged Bittergate to be "silly."
Because, of course, a lot of people, and not only in the white working class, are bitter, though "pissed off" might have been a better choice of words. Real wages have been stagnant or falling for years; fuel and now food prices are going through the roof; the repo guy is picking at the locks. Sticking to that most exotic of all demographics—white working-class men—and drawing entirely on my own circle of relatives and friends, I can confirm Obama's observation.
There's my old friend Trice, for example, a flight attendant who's bitter that his company's top executives are about to pamper themselves with fresh bonuses while he's taken a 30 percent pay cut in recent years. There's my nephew Shannon, a former delivery-truck driver who's bitter because he's discovered that his recently acquired college education in computer networking gets him only low-paid, short-term, contract work. And then there are the owner-operator truck drivers I've just gotten to know in the course of interviewing them about their nationwide slowdowns to protest $4-a-gallon diesel oil. Actually, they're not "bitter" so much as righteously up in arms because they, and so many other people, can no longer make ends meet.
Where both Obama and Clinton have gone wrong is in their stereotypes of white working class men-involving guns, religion, and now, in Clinton's case, boilermakers. There is no known correlation between the size of one's arsenal and the degree of one's bitterness; and the same goes for religiosity. It should be noted, in fact, that both the Christian Right and the sport of hunting are in precipitous decline. For what it's worth, the most heavily armed white guy I know is a vegan and animal-rights crusader who's always on my case about cheeseburgers.
As for boilermakers: The drink apparently originated among the copper miners of my native city of Butte, Mont., and it is by no means universal, as I discovered when I ordered one a couple of years ago in a Holiday Inn lounge in rural Ohio. I did not order it for purposes of pandering to the construction workers at the bar, but because I'd had a long, hard day at the podium. It turned out that my bar-mates found my choice of beverage so fascinating that I could not drink in peace. They'd never heard of the drink, so I had to explain, with increasing clarity as the drink went down, that where I come from, boilermakers are a comfort food.
When they either pander to or attempt to analyze white working-class men, the candidates risk tripping over some nasty stereotypes—as in, hard-drinking, white-bread-eating, gun-bearing bigots. When I blogged about the truck drivers' protests last week, I got comments complaining about my sympathy for "rednecks." This is class prejudice, and it is just as ugly as misogyny or racism.
The only thing you can say for sure about the white—or black or brown—working class is that it is being driven ever further down into poverty. Other than that, no generalizations, please—either from the $10-million-a-year Clinton or from the merely upper-middle-class Obama.
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Rachael, I wholly agree with 50 percent of what you say. Obama’s message about our tendency to hunker down behind extreme identity differences (religious, ideological, racial) would have been better delivered directly to the group he was addressing. Just as U.S. Rep. Geoff Davis, R-Ky., might have been better off talking to the 3Ls at Harvard when he said of Obama at a fundraiser last Saturday night, “That boy’s finger does not need to be on the button.” Davis went on to compare Obama to a “snake oil salesman” who “probably doesn’t understand normal Americans” because he went to Harvard. (Hat tip to Steve Benen.) (Davis has since apologized.)
It can’t possibly be true that Obama’s biggest sin—like Davis’—was simply that he addressed a like-minded audience. Unlike Davis, whose audience evidently LOVED his insights about out-of-touch private-school liberals, Obama is being clobbered for the extra sin of elitism. That’s because it’s only condescension when liberal intellectuals reduce groups to stereotypes. When salt-of-the-earth blue-collar Americans like Davis or Bill Kristol or Rush Limbaugh skewer Harvard grads, it’s heroic anti-intellectualism. Me, I’d rather live in a world where we stop caricaturing both pro-gun groups and pro-choice groups. But my point is that it’s equally reductive and mean-spirited in both directions, and whether you choose to call it “condescension” or “sham populism,” it’s still just misdirection.
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Until he walked into a manhole with his remarks about bitter bumpkins, the genius of the Obama campaign was in throwing away the playbook. He regularly violated the time-honored wisdom of Rules #1 (Treat voters like idiots at all times.) and #2 (When all else fails, almost any diversion will do: "Look, it's an immigrant; run for your lives!'') Instead—not always, but often enough to make him at least a potential Real Deal—Obama went with what he'd learned as a community organizer: Real change cannot be imposed, or come from some think tank; it can only happen from the inside out and come from the bottom up. Which is radical, of course. And not something he got from David Axelrod.
I'm in California this week, and yesterday was talking about Obama's woes (is there any other subject?) with my friend Robert Tobin, who runs transitional housing programs for (formerly) homeless people in Sacramento. He says the reason they have so many success stories—ex-cons and addicts turned homeowners with stable jobs—is that the "participants''—not recipients—are treated like and then become responsible people who make hiring and firing decisions, enforce the rules, and hold down jobs while they work on whatever landed them on the street in the first place. And from one Alinsky-inspired Chicago boy to another, here's Robert's way-out-there thought for Obama:
He shouldn't go by the playbook he threw away, or resort to whining "Hillary and John McCain are even worse.'' What if he was just honest and said that we're all a product of this society of -isms, a society that needs to be changed. We all have unconscious biases, and they won't go away by magic; we've all got to do better, myself included. I've inadvertently, and yes, regrettably, stumbled onto a teachable moment here (and Alinksy says that's the moment of opportunity). So let's not waste it; let's learn from my mistake.
I told you it was radical. A conversation on class, anyone?
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