Getting to the Heart of the American Heartland-My Take:
The Harris-Walz Campaign Has a Major Needle to Thread With Voters. And No, Joe Biden's Not the Problem.
Feel free to check the entire blog archives from “Political Pulse” & “Salzillo Report” on the 2024 primary cycle, rural outreach, redistricting litigation, base dynamics, campaign organization, the current media landscape, the issues at stake, Project 2025, Build Back Better, the progressive movement, the true story about former 2024 VP contender Gina Raimondo, and much more.
I encourage everyone to follow Aaron Rupar. To be sure, Mr. Rupar is a well-known liberal commentator. He is not Walter Cronkite. However, he is doing something most larger scale media outlets are struggling to do: accurately depict Trump’s incoherent campaign rallies. Why? Because he features (a.k.a., runs) actual Trump rally clips and does not sanewash them in normal pundit talk.
I must also challenge the false equivalencies made between Harris-Walz and Trump-Vance. No one, much less myself, says we shouldn’t scrutinize both presidential tickets where it does matter. Yet the idea that we can put the serial lies and flip-flopping of JD Vance on Springfield, Ohio, “Childless Cat Ladies,” Hurricanes Helene & Milton, Donald Trump, and 2020 election denial in the same league with Tim Walz’s “misstatements” on IVF, Tiananmen Square, or his precise National Guard rank is beyond absurd on its face.
Also, I know it is a little late, but let us remember the lives lost a year ago on October 7th. Beyond prayers, let’s do the hard work to get the hostages back home, end the obliteration of the Gaza Strip, and combat Islamophobia and Anti-Semitism alike at home.
Those are just the appetizers everyone. Onto the main dish:
It is not breaking news to you that I am a Harris-Walz supporter. That doesn’t mean I blindly follow them 100%. Still, neither does Dick Cheney. The fact that he has endorsed the Vice President speaks to the wide range of this pro-democratic, pro-patriotic coalition.
We need to see this broad coalition fully in action. I was one of many voices who encouraged more media appearances and time with the voters. For my part, I have tried to dedicate a lot of space here to discuss the policies that the big networks haven’t covered as much or that the campaign itself has not discussed to the depth and extent that it could have.
Let me take it to another level. “You can walk and chew gum at the same time.” So why isn’t the Harris-Walz ticket doing it more?
Maybe I should explain. Should the VP distance herself from Biden? In one sense, yes. There is certainly more she can do to bring the change voters want. She can put a much greater focus on consumers. As she has already done. She can offer a new vision of bridging the red-blue divide. As she has already done with her statements on Republicans in her Cabinet and on her proposed “bipartisan council of advisers.”
On the other hand, why run away from the successes of the Biden Presidency? If you look at the legislative record of Build Back Better, it speaks for itself in many instances. We’ve added millions of jobs. Unemployment is down. Poverty rates are decreasing. Wages are rising. Energy production is up. Crime is down. Union membership is climbing. Border crossings are much lower from the earlier peak. We are not in lockdown mode anymore. The United States has seen the strongest post-COVID economic recovery of all other major nations and its leadership is back on the global stage. We are still a very strong and vibrant country.
Why hide from that? Especially when you can blame Congressional Republicans and their corporate interests for blocking the rest of the transformative Biden agenda at every turn?
I love when people like Frank Luntz rhetorically ask us “are we better off now than we were 4 years ago,” like everything was roses under Trump. Forget the pandemic darkness, the chaos abroad, the all talk, do-nothing mantra on the kitchen table issues, the post-George Floyd crackdowns, Charlottesville, the “perfect” phone calls with Zelensky and Raffensperger, and January 6, 2021. Those are hardly the good ole days people want to go back to. Hardly memories of joy or unity or even success.
Having said that, we shouldn’t dismiss people’s feelings outright. But those feelings are rooted in something deeper than how things were 4 years ago. As Bruce Springsteen might say, people want to go back to “the glory days.” Put another way, we should not be asking ourselves merely if we were better off than we were 4 years ago. The better question is, will the Biden-Harris agendas help us Build Back Better from 40 years of colossal damage?
No, the times before were not perfect times either. But the story of American economic success is one very resonant in places like the Northeastern Corridor, including my hometown of Providence, Rhode Island. The same goes for the Industrial Midwest and the American Heartland at large.
It was not that long ago that the United States was the envy of the world as a global manufacturing hub, a pivotal agricultural producer, and an economy unrivaled by anyone. It is hard to fully encapsulate what success really meant to a lot of these places.
Texas and Pennsylvania dominated the oil boom of the late 1800s and early 1900s. Without the oil boom, they may not have been the states they have become today—and neither would states like New Mexico, Colorado, or Oklahoma. Oil Country was a real thing. West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee embodied the global influence of America’s Coal Country.
Then there is the American Breadbasket concentrated especially in the Great Plains region. Farming was an active livelihood and a prosperous business even in the age of the Industrial Revolution. Agriculture is still a central part of life in Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. All of the Midwestern states teemed with agricultural jobs, from Pennsylvania and Ohio, to Illinois and Missouri, and all the way down to the South.
Never forget the story of the 100-year-old peanut farmer turned President (Happy Late Birthday President Jimmy Carter).
What about the American industrial base? Scranton, Pennsylvania, Youngstown, Ohio, and Gary, Indiana, classic hallmarks of the American steel industry. Flint, Michigan, and South Bend, Indiana, a bedrock of the automobile industry. Omaha, Nebraska, Wichita, Kansas, and Waterloo, Iowa, home of the meatpacking stockyards. Duluth, Minnesota and Racine, Wisconsin, shipping centers for American-made products, especially iron and iron ore. Grand Rapids, MI, Rochester, NY, Syracuse, NY, and Worcester, Massachusetts, large furniture-manufacturing outlets. Akron, Ohio made its name off of rubber, just as Hartford, CT, New Haven, CT, and Springfield, MA did off of guns. Lowell, Massachusetts, the birthplace of the First Industrial Revolution. Providence, Rhode Island, “The Jewelry Capital of the World.”
Or what about the industrial titans of the mid-1900s? No, not just New York City or San Francisco, but also Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Cleveland, St. Louis, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Baltimore, Boston, Indianapolis, Buffalo, Kansas City, Newark, and St. Paul. Indeed, contrary to what you might think, industry did take hold for a long time in the South, with Birmingham, Alabama and Atlanta, Georgia making their names first off of steel and textiles respectively.
In the present day, some of these areas hold onto the legacies of the past, although it is nothing nearly like before. The manufacturing base has hollowed out and disappeared over a span of at least 70 years, and even earlier in some places. Manufacturing companies outsourced factory jobs to the south and then overseas for lower costs and cheaper labor because companies were so used to union-busting games and hiring strikebreakers (a recommended documentary watch from my Sociology class: Detropia). Some people have to work two or more lower-paying (and likely service sector) jobs just to make ends meet.
As larger-scale agriculture became more profitable and economically convenient, mechanization and technology decreased the need for farm laborers. Less workers meant more profits and bottom lines. Instead of creating support systems for the displaced workers, the support went to large agribusinesses and factory agricultural enterprises. Family farms and small farmers got no support systems either, leading to further consolidation in agriculture. All of this decreased market competition, drove up food prices, closed up locals, and contributed to the surge of farmer suicides and the opioid/fentanyl epidemics.
As for fossil fuels, running our economies on coal just won’t work anymore. If only because of a dwindling supply. At our current pace of extraction, we will run out of fossil fuels by 2060. That concerning statistic does not count the environmental destruction from the fossil fuel economy, whether through mountaintop removal or other forms of exploitation that would poison water supplies, pollute the air, and inflict even more terrible health effects on all frontline communities.
The private sector has driven many of the concerning trends we see today. Unfortunately, the government has assisted with this, starting and accelerating the problem greatly under Ronald Reagan’s presidency. How? Via “free trade agreements” (backed mostly by Republicans as well as Democrats) handwritten for corporate interests and unfair to workers, farmers, environmentalists, healthcare advocates, and even to fellow nations.
Free trade did not have to be so pro-Big Business and Wall Street-esque as it turned out to be with NAFTA, CAFTA, PNTR with China, and the TPP. We should not have incentivized companies to outsource American jobs and supply chains instead of insourcing them. We should not have let these companies increase our trade deficits since the 80s and 90s. And never, ever should we have let them union-bust like they did, after Reagan set the example by breaking up the air traffic controllers strike in 1981.
Government didn’t have to increase federal subsidies to large agribusinesses, even as it rejected assistance to small farms, a policy Reagan infamously defended on the principle of “free markets.” Predictably, no one in the Reagan Administration warned how consolidation in meatpacking would hurt the economy and raise prices either. Thank God for Jim Hightower keeping the pressure on “the welfare kings” in big business.
And it speaks to a broader message of discontent with politics as usual and how people do feel left behind. Tax cuts for Corporate America. Deregulation for Wall Street. Degradation for Big Oil and Big Coal. Protections for Big Pharma. Privatization for the Big Charter Schools. Immunity for Big Tech. Support for Big Crypto. Leeway for irresponsible Corporate Landlords and Real Estate Moguls—producing, alas, the Great Recession and the rise of Donald Trump.
Inequality in this country matches the Gilded Age and then some (what a startling video on this from 11 years ago). All the while, federal judges don’t have to disclose all their potential conflicts of interest in pending cases, and members of Congress can still trade stocks using inside information. Progress in 4 years still seems small compared to the devastation of the last 40 years, and longer in some places.
Capitalism can be a very effective system until it becomes unfettered and uncontrolled. So what is the solution? And who is the team to bring us closer to the solution?
The Harris-Walz campaign, unlike Trump-Vance, has an opportunity to articulate that vision much more clearly, especially on agricultural & industrial policies. To offer something fresh and new for Rural America and Urban America alike in rejecting top-down socialism for the rich and powerful. To meet people where they are in their ongoing struggles, especially on the cost of living, but also to not discount the real progress made not just in numbers, but in headlines and personal stories from across the country these past 4 years.
Trump-Vance is incapable of doing that, because they represent the top 1%. Instead of talking about the real culprits (i.e., the corporations), they scapegoat the small targets (i.e., the immigrants) like the bullies they are. And for all their neat 5-word phrases and sloganeering, they have almost absolutely nothing to offer beyond divide-and-distract-and-conquer. In their extreme, anti-democratic Project 2025 agenda (which they try to conveniently distance themselves from even though many top White House alumni co-authored the 900+ page manifesto), you will see no discussion, never mind solutions, to the issues covered above. It’s not rocket science. They don’t have a plan for you.
That is what the Harris-Walz ticket has to make clear in the next 3 or so weeks to November 5.
But, to take a lesson from 2022, progressive populism can’t hurt over divisive, irrelevant culture wars. Let’s bring the power to the people, and the 2022 message to the 2024 airwaves.