I Want a President Who Cares About People Like Me
It is, I think, scandalous that Barack Obama won the "cares about people like me" sweepstakes over Mitt Romney by 81% - 18% in 2012. The New York Postreported that it wasn't an accident:
The entire Obama campaign was designed to tell swing voters that Romney and the Republicans did not care about them. You're a single woman? They oppose your use of contraception -- they don't care about you. Hispanic voter? They oppose immigration reform and even oppose the DREAM Act -- they don't care about you.
Don't forget about class, Posties. The Joe Soptic ad said: Are you working class? They don't care about you.
Now what the Dems were doing, of course, is appealing to specific identities, people that they have taught to feel separate and victimized, and saying that Mitt Romney didn't care about them as an identity. The Dems were doing that because that's what they do. And they were right! Mitt Romney and the Republican Party just don't care about the neo-feudal subordinate victims of cultural Marxism and their race and class and gender identity.
The limp-wristed RINO response to this is always to say that we must show women we care, show Hispanics we care. But this is madness. The Dems will always win when the battlefield is defined by identity politics. And why not? It is who they are!
But the Republican Party is not the party of subordinate victims, Steve Sailer's "Coalition of the Fringes." The Republican Party, according to Michael Barone, has always been the party of "typical Americans."
The core of the Republican Party throughout its history has been voters who are generally seen by themselves and by others as typical Americans -- but who by themselves don't constitute a majority of what has always been an economically, culturally and religiously diverse nation.
Yes, but here's an idea. Why not appeal to the voters as typical Americans, inviting the "culturally and religiously diverse" hordes in the fringes to come on in? It's using the technique of a revival meeting. We want you to join the fellowship of typical Americans, and we think you will be surprised to find how nice and welcoming Republicans will be, but first you have to make the decision to join us.
How about it GOP candidates? How about playing the "cares about people like me" game according to different rules – rules that favor Republicans. How about shaping your message to show that you care about people as Americans, people who obey the laws, go to work, and follow the rules?
I'm not a political technician, so I don't know the details of how to do this. The general idea is that the GOP candidates show that they care about people like you, responsible people that work hard, get ahead, save for their kids' education, give back to their communities. That's the positive message.
The negative message says, with James S. Robbins, that "Democrats don't really care about the little guys and gals." Greedy bankers? Liz Warren (D-MA) was flipping houses before she ginned up her Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Minimum wage? Labor leaders think unions should get a loophole on that. Deck is stacked for the rich? The Clintons would know about that.
So the airwaves from now till November 2016 should reverberate with attack ads that show that Democrats only care about cronies, pay-to-play billionaires, shakedown race hustlers. They pile huge costs upon ordinary people with their expensive delusions about green energy and high-speed trains in the middle of nowhere. They prosecute FIFA and let the Clintons go free. They beat up on the little people and while rogue bureaucrats retire on full pensions.
In America, you vote Democrat if you are a member of some big identity group and you want the big man to make all the decisions for you. You vote Republican if you want to live as a responsible individual and you don't want to live as an underling to some jumped-up jerk.
You believe in Big Government, Big Business, Big Labor, Big Ed, Big Green? Go vote Democrat. But if you believe there is something fuller, something higher than life in the rank-and-file, if you are one of the little people following the crazy dream of the responsible individual, then you'll want to vote Republican.
We Republican voters are the People of the Responsible Self. George Eliot wrote about us on the last page of Middlemarchwhere she spoke of the contribution to the greater good of the world by people "who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs." They weren't victims; they weren't superstars. They merely made a difference.
The first thing that any GOP presidential candidate should do, every day, is to show that he cares about us and ordinary people like us.
Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrillruns the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also see his American Manifesto and get his Road to the Middle Class.
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