The Working Class Can Kiss My Ass, I Got the Foreman's Job At Last.

For all my talk about how Kamala ran the second, worst-managed Presidential campaign (the absolutely worst-managed campaign was Hillary’s effort,) I think John Fetterman got it correct when he stated earlier this week that the election was basically over when Trump was shot.

I remember the public reaction to the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan back in 1981. The Presidential campaign had ended the previous year, but after he survived the shooting attempt by John Hinckley, Reagan could have been appointed President for life.

Meanwhile, what we are now getting from the liberal side of the Fake News plus assorted blogs and other media outlets are the various prescriptions of how we ‘fix’ the political problems on our side of the aisle, particularly the so-called lack of contact with the so-called ‘working class.’

Now that he has tired of teaching us how and why Trump is such a Fascist, we are getting prognostications from Robert Reich about what liberals should be doing to reconnect with all those working-class voters who are fully behind Donald Trump.

In his Thanksgiving Substack message, Reich tells us that what we need to do is “speak to the real needs of working people,” which Reich understands because he was Labor Secretary under Clinton, so of course he knows better than anyone else what a conversation with members of the working class should be all about, right?

It just so happens that when a Republican President named Ronald Reagan won the working-class vote in 1980, he also won the votes of just about every other group. But the idea that liberalism had become detached from its working-class ‘roots’ not only became the standard explanation for Reagan’s electoral victory, but then stuck, at least in the vernacular of so-called experts like Robert Reich.

I went to hear Reich give a campaign speech when he briefly ran for Governor of Massachusetts in 2002. He came out to Springfield, where I happen to live, and made a complete fool out of himself by telling the audience that he would try to close the ‘wage gap’ between the working class and the top ‘five percent’ by immediately increasing the minimum wage.

At the time, I owned a retail sporting goods shop in Ware, a crummy, little town in Western Mass., and I paid Cousin Frankie $15 an hour to show up once a week to sweep up the store. The minimum wage (I think) was $11 bucks.

Cousin Frankie swept up the store in two hours, but I had to pay him for four hours’ work, for which he took a 15-minute break every hour to cop a smoke. He swept up four other retail stores each week which gave him a weekly ‘salary’ of $300, all of course paid in cash.

If Cousin Frankie needed some extra dough, from time to time he could show up on Friday night at the local Wal Mart where he and some other folks formed a shape-up crew that unloaded and stacked the deliveries of goods for the special sale held that weekend – work that was also done for cash.

Cousin Frankie represented the working class not only in Ware but in hundreds, if not thousands of cities and towns throughout the United States. And Robert Reich believed he could close the ‘wage gap’ between Cousin Frankie and the top 5 percent by increasing the minimum wage?

I happen to believe that the most significant changes in American society during my lifetime (I was born in 1944) have been the legal equality achieved by liberals first for blacks, then for women, then for gays and now for LGBTQ. And I also believe that liberals should go out of their way to defend these achievements even if such a defense costs them some support from the so-called working class.

I’ll have more to say about the gender and sexual preference equality of every American over the next couple of days, but if Reich is so bothered by how liberals have failed to protect the interests of the working class, how would he feel if we also had laws restricting the economic and civil rights of adults who are less than 5 feet tall?