Blue Collar Conservatives: Recommitting to an America That Works (2 page)

As filtered through the media, Romney was wrongly portrayed to America as an aloof Wall Street millionaire—like the
guy “who fired your dad,” as Jon Stewart put it.
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Obama, by contrast, was the one who cared. The Americans I met all across the country were worried about the economy, the pace of change in the workplace, and the coarsening culture. They liked it when the president talked about their plight, but they didn’t like his remedy of government handouts. Romney offered the solutions that Republicans have espoused for more than thirty years: cut taxes, slash government, and everyone will be fine. Low taxes and lean government are good macroeconomic policy, but it’s hard for ordinary people to see how that policy will affect them and their families. Republicans like to quote John F. Kennedy’s observation that “a rising tide lifts all boats,”
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but Romney never got across how he would help the people—and there are millions—whose boats are full of holes.

In my campaign for president, I traveled to corners of this country that national politicians rarely visit, including rural communities with double-digit unemployment. I was down on the Gulf Coast where they are still recovering from Katrina and in the mill towns of Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin where manufacturers are fighting for their lives against foreign competition and a hostile federal government. I was in the oil and gas fields where they’re drilling as fast as they can in the fear that President Obama might shut them down. That’s what he did to the coal towns I visited in Ohio, West Virginia, and Illinois.

The folks I heard from most in my travels were hardworking Americans worried about losing their jobs. Their towns are the America I grew up in and where I’ve spent most of my life. This is the proud America that once thrived and is now tragically broken and largely forgotten in today’s political debates. In these places, millions of blue-jeaned workers have been left behind and see little hope for the future. Skilled laborers who once had good salaries and pensions now seek part-time jobs at big-box retail stores or have even been enticed onto public assistance.

I talked to many people on the campaign trail who just want to hear there is still opportunity for a good life in America. They seek some stability and security for themselves and opportunity for their children to go to good schools, get decent jobs, and build families of their own. They want reassurance that despite all of the terrible economic news and pain, the American Dream is still alive for them. It seems to them that neither party hears them. They don’t want more government benefits, and they don’t want to work sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, to grab the brass ring at the top of some corporation or firm. They want someone out there to lift up the people who work a shift, go home to volunteer at the animal shelter, church, or PTA, spend time with their families, and enjoy their leisure time. They want someone to recognize that they are just as important to the success of our economy and culture as the entrepreneur or corporate
executive who puts in all of his time at work. We must be the party for them, because America will fail without them.

The United States must do everything it can to nurture the inventors and entrepreneurs who are the creative spirits of our free economy, and here the case for Republican policies is strong. But that’s not enough. We Republicans must show the unemployed, the underemployed, and the struggling worker that we are on their side and want their support. We cannot forget the blue collar conservatives who are the backbone of this country. We have an obligation to restore the American Dream for them and their families. And until we internalize this as a party, we will continue to lose national elections.

Republicans are waking up to some startling new realities in American politics. The demographic profile that propelled them to victory in five out of six presidential elections from 1968 to 1988—white and married voters—is an ever-smaller portion of the population. If the ethnic and racial composition of the United States were the same as it was in 1992, Mitt Romney, who carried the white vote by more than 20 percentage points, would have beaten Barack Obama in a landslide. We’ve been using a badly outdated playbook.

My friend and former colleague at the Ethics and Public Policy Center Peter Wehner has assembled for his fellow conservatives a mound of demographic and electoral data that
makes our political challenges stark and unmistakable.
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“Republicans,” he concludes, “at least when it comes to presidential elections, have a winning message for an electorate that no longer exits.”

The minority share of the vote in 2012 was 28 percent, more than twice what it was when Bill Clinton was elected in 1992.
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If the minority share of the vote reaches 30 percent of the total in 2016, as expected, and if the Democratic candidate carries 80 percent of that vote, the Democrat will need only 37 percent of the white vote to win.
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I don’t like electoral calculations based on race, and I’m happy to leave racial politics to the other side. The American Dream should be color-blind, and so should our politics. The fact remains, however, that unless the Republican Party broadens its appeal to minorities, its prospects are grim.

Still, the Republicans didn’t lose the presidential election of 2012 only because blacks and Hispanics and Asians voted against them. As many as six million blue collar voters stayed home from the polls, and there’s good reason to believe that a large majority of them would have voted Republican if they had voted.
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Those voters—many of them in the rural and small-town Rust Belt—didn’t hear anything in the Republican message to inspire their confidence in our party to make their lives better. If anything, they detected a note of contempt.

The demographer Joel Kotkin, a refreshingly clear-eyed observer of American politics though by no means a conservative, offers the best advice to the Republican Party I’ve
heard: remember Lincoln. Kotkin scolds us for having “confused being the party of plutocrats with being the party of prosperity,” and I think he’s closer to the truth than we’d like to admit. The first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, came from the ranks of working Americans and pursued an economic agenda that had their interests at heart. Whether it was expanding the country’s railroads or passing the Homestead Act, his policies “helped people achieve their aspirations.”
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If we really become the party of opportunity for working Americans, we’ll go a long way toward solving the problem of minority voters’ estrangement from us. The elites of the Democratic Party, I’m sorry to say, have raised the politics of racial and ethnic division to an art form. The way for Republicans to win the votes of minorities is not to out-pander the Democrats but simply to appeal to them as working Americans who want to take part in the American Dream—a dream that shouldn’t be the exclusive property of Ivy Leaguers and investment bankers.

Restoring the American Dream does not mean going back in time. Conservatives are often criticized for their romanticized view of the good old days prior to the culture shock that was the 1960s. Having said that, let’s make no mistake about it—the greatest threat to the average American’s achieving his
dream today is a dysfunctional culture. To heal our nation, we must promote the ideals upon which American culture has thrived for over two centuries—ideals based on timeless truths. Our challenge is to redeem and recommit to the timeless truths that set America on a course to greatness and to formulate policies consistent with those truths in a world that has changed dramatically since World War II.

This book is all about what we as a party and a movement can do to help the blue collar conservatives, working Americans trying to set things right for their families, their communities, and their country.

CHAPTER ONE

BLUE COLLAR CONSERVATIVES REALLY DID BUILD IT

T
here was a time not long ago when Americans without college degrees could expect to earn a decent and steady income in exchange for hard work. This income and job stability provided a foundation for families and communities that, with their churches, Little Leagues, Boy Scout troops, and a hundred other civic organizations, fostered the strong values and the work ethic that underpinned American life. Millions of Americans came of age in these communities and took those values with them as they started their own families and thanked God for his blessings.
With good incomes, Americans could afford new cars, kitchen appliances, and trips to Disneyland. Demand for such new goods kept others working and employment strong. With stable marriages, children enjoyed the gift of security and neighborhoods where values were taught at home and in church and enforced by parents.

This is how I grew up. My grandparents came here from Italy in 1930, fleeing fascism and settling in a coal town in the hills outside of Johnstown, Pennsylvania. That’s where they found freedom and the opportunity to earn decent pay for hard work in the mines. They found a gritty but overall wholesome place to raise their kids and taught them that in America there was no limit to what they could become. I know the American Dream was real because my grandparents lived it.

Their son Aldo, my father, was seven when his family left Italy for America. He served in the U.S. Army Air Corps in the South Pacific in World War II, and when he came home from the war, he earned advanced degrees in clinical psychology. He worked for the Veterans Administration (now the Department of Veterans Affairs) counseling World War II, Korea, and Vietnam vets for almost forty years. At his first post, in Martinsburg, West Virginia, he met and married my mother, Catherine, an administrative nurse. I was born in 1958, the second of three children. Unlike most mothers at that time, my mother continued to work as a nurse. It was a great setup because the hospital where she worked was a stone’s throw from our house. My siblings and I spent our childhoods living
in various rented World War II–era buildings, including the post jail that had been converted into apartments. When I was seven, we returned to western Pennsylvania and settled in Butler, among the mines and steel furnaces that were the economic bedrock of that part of the country.

I went to Butler Catholic Grade School and then Butler High School. Like other kids, I played (but not well) both baseball and basketball, and I saw my first major league game, between the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Cincinnati Reds, at Forbes Field. As in most small towns in America back then, families kept their doors unlocked. Kids roamed neighborhoods freely, but there was always a parent nearby, and they didn’t hesitate to enforce the values of the community. And though I wasn’t aware of this at the time, this world was possible in part because Butler made stuff. While my dad didn’t work in the mill, almost all of my friends’ dads did. That and numerous school field trips to local plants drove home the importance of manufacturing to our community. We had thriving manufacturers like the Pullman-Standard Company, which made railroad cars (it was shuttered in the 1980s and demolished in 2005), and an Armco steel plant, which is now AK Steel. There was a job for virtually anyone out of high school who was willing to work an honest day. And those jobs carried benefits and security that formed the core of the community. Looking back, it’s not a very complicated equation.

Those field trips and conversations with my friends’ dads were extra motivation for me, and many others, to hit the
books in school. It was clear then that change was afoot with automation and global competition, so I headed off to Penn State University, where I fell in love with Penn State Nittany Lions football, drank my share of Rolling Rock beer (after I turned twenty-one, of course), and found my vocation in politics and public service. I worked on campaigns and ended up founding the College Republicans club on campus.