WHO’S OUT OF TOUCH?

FROM THE LAND OF GUN RACKS & PICKUPS:

YOU’RE THE RUBES, NOT US

         Attacks on Governor Palin for hailing from a small town and having small town values has again raised the issue of how provincial the mainstream media and the Obama campaign thinks us voters in fly-over country are. And predictably, the conservative media has kept the issue alive by coming to our defense.  Well, thanks, but it's a mistake to think voters in small-town and rural America are meaningfully disturbed by such put-downs. We're not that sensitive. Most of us who live out here have a solid psychological supporting sense, based upon what we witness each day of Metro-Elites (“MEs”) like Senator Obama, that people who come from big cities or select college campuses actually lead far more provincial lives than we do.

        The opposite view, of course, is an article of faith among MEs themselves. But in fact the people who have access to the widest diversity of views and voices in America are not ME’s like Senator Obama but the caricatured NASCAR  Gun-Rack-In-His-Pickup hayseed in flyover country sprawled on his scruffy sofa in front of the idiot box tossing a few beers after work. (No doubt in the cartoon imagination of ME’s, half in the raw). The snooty, unflattering view from the cities and faculty lounges is likely that of a man simply exhausting himself in intellectual inactivity before stepping over his bowling bag and collapsing in bed for the night. In fact, night after night, whether it’s the tube or the silver screen or leafing through national magazines, this inelegant Yahoo clutching a beer in his hairy fist is actually drinking in, sip by sip, year after year, the whole urban cocktail of congestion, indifference, energy, homelessness, incivility, excitement, and frenzy. Trash talk, loiterers, hustlers, vacant lots, side-by-side housing, iffy neighborhoods, glittery street lights, gleaming skyscrapers, board rooms, gilded luxury hotels, sweaty delis, jack-hammers, mobsters, urban music and urban chic and double-parked delivery trucks is this Neanderthal’s daily cup of tea.

Over the years he gets a pretty good sense of the heartbeat of city life.  No one can wholly get into someone else’s life, but even though this yokel may be a landscaper or snowplower or handyman or nurse or retail clerk or farmer or small shop owner or in the trades who lives in the middle of nowhere, each of them ends up, without any special effort, being grounded in a much wider context of what America looks like than people who live in cities. They’re not only regularly exposed to how-to articles in the local paper on the proper butchering of deer, know the taste of the pump and appreciate the aesthetics of a well-worn tool (in a much deeper place than people who have a token hammer in their kitchen junk drawer), they also know a good bit about crack houses and cat houses and penthouses and flop houses, about hailing cabs, about the challenges and grievances of homosexuals and other minorities, about apartment buildings with security buzzers on inner vestibule doors, and about the various struggles for survival of city folks - from junkies and teenage street thugs dodging police to working-stiffs much like them (with jobs) fighting for seats on buses and subway cars as well as working-stiffs not much like most of them (with positions) fighting for cabs and promotions.

While the lives of most so-called cosmopolitan Americans take place almost wholly without the presence of people who live in small towns and on farms, my neighbors hang with city people almost every night.  If they don’t have access to major league sporting events or concerts or gourmet coffee or wine shops or bagel shops, they still know about these things.

In other words, the national metro/coastal-centric entertainment and news media, expands our life experiences beyond our own community and culture on a daily basis. In contrast, the media almost totally separates ME’s from the reality millions of their fellow Americans are living. ME’s are only infrequently enriched in terms of a larger American culture by the country’s dominant media outlets.  ME’s who feed their minds and souls every day after work on gallery art or literary movements or street life or museums or ethnic foods or bookstores or the theater or surviving the Hood, may promote and revel in the diversity of a busy city life, but in actual fact they don’t gain the same feel for the texture of America as a pluralistic society as everyday people who live in my neck of the woods. People out here have a better sense of what life is all about in America because news about how tens of millions of Americans live their lives never reaches ME’s. The same big city TV and Hollywood glass screens that are windows into urban culture in every home in my town mostly reflect back to ME’s the scenery ME’s see around them every day. For them it’s mostly all darkness behind the picture screens. Shut in on themselves watching and reading national media that mostly provides them with information only about their own lives, ME’s never really become acquainted with the landscape of America. Living in a house of mirrors, they have no view of it.

A simple example. Former New York Governor, Mario Cuomo was once asked to relate the incident from his childhood that best illustrated the kind of man he remembered his father to be. What stood out in his mind was the aftermath of a stormy day when the almost 40 foot blue spruce in the Cuomo’s front yard fell over in heavy winds. A lesser man would have written the tree off. Not “Poppa.”  He told his sons, ‘we gonna push ‘im up, he’s gonna grow again.”  Though the governor and his brother were skeptical, their determined father directed them to get ropes and by God, the three of them pulled that tree back up.

This icon of the urbane, polished American, despite the fact he has probably traveled the world and despite his obvious broad intellectual instincts and his extraordinary reassuring measure of sophistication, still viewed his father rescuing a 40 foot pine tree, as a defining, dramatic, singular event in the universe.  What “Poppa” did that day still stood out in his mind, decades later, as an heroic act.

I’m not criticizing the respect the governor accorded his father’s resolve. However, it so happens that pines have relatively shallow roots and are upended by strong winds or the weight of wet snow quite often.  When they fall, my neighbors routinely pull them upright and re-plant them by themselves.  It’s certainly not an everyday event, but I’ve raised up probably five or six blow-downs thirty to forty feet tall since I moved out here from the city - and yes, all by myself.  It takes a lot of work, but it’s certainly nothing extraordinary at all in the lives of people out here.

This is but one small example of the many routine things that go on in my neighbors’ daily lives that MEs are not tuned into.  And it’s what puts Obama in a double bind in regard to winning our votes.  Because he lacks leadership experience, because he appears to have done more seat-of-the-pants “informing” than “deciding,” the only way he will connect with us and win our votes is to persuade us he will make right decisions on our behalf because of analytic and process skills he’s developed out of his own personal experiences.  But as far as most everyday people out here see it, that’s as much his weak suit as his unproven leadership experience. Though he may be bright and well-educated and swap stories at political soirees in elite venues about places he’s visited traveling across America and even around the world, from our point of view it seems he hasn’t been around the block. Comments about gun racks and religion and the rest too often reveal what little insight he and his equally uninformed circle of ME advisors, have into the extent to which their own life and experiences in America are not life in its entirety in America.

In our March primary here in Ohio, Senator Obama lost every rural county to Senator Clinton for a reason. Call it reverse-elitism, but it’s really hard to take seriously his adolescent (to us) assurances that if we elect him President he will have the wisdom, experience or perspective to bring good judgment to bear upon policy choices affecting the lives of us voters who live out here in the boonies.

            Senator Obama’s promise to restore fairness to our tax code is one of several recurring themes intended to give force and focus to his message of change. On the campaign trail, as well as his web site, he continually reminds audiences that our tax laws contain loopholes that mainly “remove the burden from the well off . . . [i]nstead of having all of us pay our fair share.” The tax code, he says, “tilts the scales toward the well-off . . . because they’ve got lobbyists in Washington sticking up for their interests” and “nobody lobbies for working people.” 

            He promises that once he’s President, this will change: there will finally be someone powerful in Washington to make sure the peoples’ voice is heard.

            That so many Americans are so passionately convinced the Senator’s “Plan to Restore Tax Fairness to America” is some vital best chance for them, is a classic illustration of how the politics of public despair is such great politics in the hands of a skilled campaigner. Although the apparently soul-stirring appeal of Senator Obama’s gospel of change has been attributed to its upbeat message, at least in regard to his tax message just the opposite is the case. His characterization of the code is actually a distortion of the truth calculated to make everyday Americans bitter about being shafted by Washington and the rich – in fact, so spitefully bitter they would vote for a man to be President of the United States almost solely on the basis of his rhetoric rather than his resume.

       For the real truth is that although the rich clearly have influential friends in Washington and a small few exploit incredibly exotic loopholes, as a regular matter our tax laws carve out far more loopholes for low and middle income taxpayers than for rich taxpayers.

            Consider these highlights from the 2006 income tax returns of two families I’ll call the Eliots and the Upchurches.

            Skip Eliot is a nurse who earns $50,000 a year. Theo Upchurch owns a construction company and at $345,000 a year is among the top income earners in the country. Both families carry mortgages on homes in the same city in Ohio. Each has a ten-year-old living at home plus two older children in college. Both wives are homemakers.

            Each family, of course, is allowed to subtract personal exemption amounts from its income before figuring out what it owes in taxes.  However, while the five people in Skip’s family were each entitled to the full $3200 personal exemption, the income tax laws only recognized each person in Theo’s family as three-fifths of a person. Because of Theo’s high income, each member of his family was limited to a $1920 personal exemption - $9600 for the entire family compared to a total $16,000 exemption deduction for the Eliot family.

                              >     Furthermore, the Eliots claimed a dollar-for-dollar credit of $2400 against their taxes to off-set the college expenses of their two older children. The two Upchurch children at the very same two colleges?  Not entitled to any credit at all.

>      The Eliots got a $1000 credit to off-set their youngest child’s upkeep and care, the Upchurches, nothing.

>    The Eliot family was entitled to a full 100% deduction for what they paid in (1) state income taxes; (2) local incomes taxes; (3) real estate taxes; (4) charitable contributions; and (5) the interest on their home mortgage. In each of these five cases the Upchurches were allowed to deduct only 93% of these costs from their family income.   

            > The unequal tax treatment goes on and on: Mr. Eliot could deduct 100% of his mortgage insurance, Mr. Upchurch not a penny; Mr. Eliot paid only 1.45% of his income in Medicare tax, Mr. Upchurch 2.4%; Mrs. Eliot was allowed to invest in tax-advantaged IRA’s, Mrs. Upchurch was not.

            Of course, all of this is without regard to the fact that Mr. Upchurch’s percentage tax rate against his income, under our progressive system, was far higher than Mr. Eliot’s.

            This is not a criticism of tax breaks for those in lower brackets. The point is that campaign rhetoric that high-income Americans cheat the system by exploiting tax loopholes unavailable to ordinary Americans would have us believing the worst about how our representative government actually functions. The fact is, Congress has been extremely responsive to the needs of those Americans who can least afford a reduction in their income by the burden of high income taxes.

            There’s enough divisiveness in this country today without Americans of limited means resenting how the tax laws are stacked against them when it simply is not true. It’s important for public confidence in our system as an effective democracy that Americans understand, contrary to what they so often hear from politicians whose election depends on knocking the status quo, that their elected representatives do not take all their direction from the rich and powerful but are actually realistic and compassionate about how difficult it is for families like the Eliots to make ends meet.   Senator Obama’s web site claims his campaign is “powered by hope.” The real message of hope and unity is that America is not as bad or unfair as some candidates for office would have us believe.