If you want to know why white working people are no longer simpatico with the Democratic Party, look no further than the media and progressive think tank response to President-elect Trump's saving a thousand U.S. jobs.
As Kirsten Powers notes in a must-read column today, the carping began immediately after the job save was made public:
New York Times columnist Charles Blow tweeted, “Trump does a still-secret deal to save 1k Carrier jobs — media fawns. Obama saved 1 mil+ jobs with auto bailout — ambivalence #BarSetTooLow.” Think Progress, the blog of the Democratic think tank Center for American Progress, ran a story headlined, “Don’t be fooled by Trump’s deal to save some Carrier jobs,” and blasted the tax incentives Trump offered to keep the jobs. Sen. Bernie Sanders fulminated in The Washington Post that it is “not enough to save some of these jobs” and carped about tax breaks for Carrier.
A little more savvy, White House press secretary Josh Earnest faintly praised Trump's achievements but allowed as how he needs to do it 804 more times to meet the supposed record of President Obama. Earnest said that the "metric" Trump was using to claim success was jobs protected, while the metric for President Obama is jobs created (the administration has had a sluggish record of job creation, but that isn't the topic at hand).
First off, before I quote from Powers, let me intrude and an observation of my own: if the Carrier deal succeeded because of tax breaks, then that is an indication that corporate taxes drive corporations abroad and thus let's hope that all corporations get tax breaks through the reform of the tax code.
Powers astutely writes:
Is it any wonder really that white working class voters don’t feel connected to the Democratic Party? While it’s true that picking up the phone to keep some 1,000 jobs is not in itself a policy to reinvigorate the manufacturing sector — after all, 85% of manufacturing jobs have been lost due to automation, not globalization – dismissing “saving” jobs as lacking meaning is tone deaf, at best.
For that matter, complaining about tax incentives that, when broken down over ten years, equal about $700 in tax credits per employee per year is a bizarre argument coming from a party that claims to want to use the government to better people’s lives. If this is “corporate welfare,” then it’s the kind of corporate welfare Democrats should support: rather than giving someone a hand-out, the government is helping people keep their jobs as well as their sense of purpose, all for a relatively small cost.
Perhaps just as problematic is the inability of too many Democrats to understand the power of symbolism. The complaints that Trump got credit for the Carrier deal, but Obama didn’t for the auto bailout (a debatable claim), completely miss the point. As the maxim goes, “a million deaths is a statistic, but one death is a tragedy.” This is true of jobs as well. Trump gets this.
I heard some Democrats on TV talking about how Trump saved "only" a thousand jobs, but only people who are above it all can see this achievement that way.