Posts Tagged ‘US Elections’
Ron The Plumber … October 31st, 2008
Sarasota, Florida
One of the most discussed characters in this Presidential election is a man called Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher–Joe the plumber of Toledo, Ohio which is a swing state. The gentleman who was terrified of Barack Obama’s ’spreading-the-wealth-around tax plan’. And who has became the centrepiece of the McCain campaign ever since the Republican senator repeatedly mentioned him in the debate.
Turns out Joe is actually a little too working class to be affected by the Obama plan. It taxes individuals and businesses with earnings of over $250,000. Joe makes $40,000 annually (but nevertheless aspires to buy a business worth several times his salary). The Obama plan woke him from his American dream rather rudely.
Ron the plumber, of Sarasota, Florida, which is also a swing state, has a very good handle on reality however. Sure, he dreams too: about steady work for himself and his college degree-holding wife. And for the employment to be a little less back-breaking than it is now at the hospital remodelling site he’s at.
He gets on all fours to show me what he does all day. Bunching his shoulders , twisting his neck at acute angles in imaginary closed spaces to simulate how he cuts, welds and rivets pipes that run unseen under neat buildings, keeping them functioning.
He’s on his knees ten hours a day, and they hurt. His clothes are covered with muck. He doesn’t get paid that much–most likely even less than Joe of Toledo.
But it wasn’t always like that. So what happened?
“What happened was the war. George Bush done this. Four years ago ,there was so much work here in Sarasota, work everywhere. Construction, hotels… and then the war started. And all the money had to go there…
“People that are rich, they can survive, but ordinary folks, they can’t. I used to have money in the bank and stuff. Now I’m living week to week.” The emphasis on the last phrase is as heavy as the burden of an unaffordable mortgage payment.
Fortunately, Ron doesn’t own a house he needs to pay for. He lives in a motel, where he makes the rent by doing odd plumbing and maintenance work for the property. If he earned $250,000 a year, he’d be thrilled to pay the extra three per cent.
“My wife’s trying to find a job. She got two college degrees. She can’t find no work. I’m grateful for what I got and I’m lucky… My trade, everybody needs that.” Then he chuckles and says: “When you get up in the morning what do you do? You know, so everybody needs that.”
As essential as it is, plumbing is still affected by constipation–in credit flows. Ron says so: “No new houses being built. So I’m lucky that I got a job with a company at the hospital.”
But he keeps blaming the war for the blighted times. “Osama Bin Laden is laughing at us from his cave or whatever and we’re spending billions in Iraq. It’s been seven years, he’s laughing.”
9/11 is quite close to the bone for people in Sarasota. It was in flight schools in Venice, less than an hour away from here that Mohammad Atta and other hijackers learned to fly aircraft.
Venice is a beautifully designed retirement town built in the 1920s, with wide roads and blue wave beaches, very attractive looking funeral homes, a small airport and several flying schools. But house prices in the area have been very badly hit: they are down an an average by about 40% from their 2007 levels.
Nothing new is being built, so Ron’s got fewer job options. You pass neat homes everywhere, with yard signs that say might say ‘McCain’, ‘Obama’ or ‘For Sale’.
Going by the numbers, if this guy ‘For Sale’ was in the race, he would defintely win–along with his running mate, ‘For Rent’.
Florida facts:
- Swing state, 27 electoral college votes.
- Obama leads by 7 points in latest polls; McCain, Biden campaigning hard there in the last week.
- Bush won Florida–and the Presidency–by just 543 votes over Al Gore in 2000 after a major controversy over disenfranchisement of minority voters and a confusing ballot paper.
- Ralph Nader, who pulled about 97,000 votes as the Green Party candidate hurt Gore and helped Bush in 2000. Nader is in the race again, a nominee of the Ecology Party of Florida.
Tags: Florida, George Bush, GOP Economic Policy, Joe The Plumber, John McCain, US Elections
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Can Gary once again play the agent of change? October 6th, 2008
GARY, Indiana, with its farcical Broadway and Fifth Avenue—streets that couldn’t even pass for a cheap film set—is no ordinary town. It’s got a motto that says: ‘We are doing great things’. Among the great things it wants to do, is play a crucial role in winning Indiana—which has not voted for a Democrat for president since 1964—for Barack Obama.
Among great things it has accomplished, says a City Hall poster, is the recent opening of Dustie’s Buffet, an eat-all-you-want place. I am not making this up.
No, Gary isn’t ordinary, because it was the first major town in the United States to elect a black mayor, Richard Hatcher, in 1967. That said something about the town. What happened immediately after, made a much broader point: it said something about America.
White people fled Gary after that election, hitting the gas even harder after the country’s first National Black Political Convention was held there in 1972. They took all their money and all their business and went down to Merrillville, 22 miles south, to entrench themselves in a town that once belonged to the peace-loving Potawatomi Indians. (Merrillville’s approximate demographics: 70% white; 22% black, 0.33% American Indian).
Gary, once a market where shampoos and lotions were tested by the likes of Levers before being sold in the big cities, turned into a place where detergents were hard to find. This happened quite rapidly. After years of steady growth in population, helped by the then competitive steel mills in the area that offered decent blue-collar employment at the very least, the South (and South of) Chicago steel mills that Barack Obama recalls from his childhood started shutting down in the 1960s.
Broadway, a 1923 picture hanging in city hall tells you, was a bustling street: Dr Eurit the dentist was clearly extracting some business; the theatre poster did not lie when it said Dorothy Philips stars in the Slander and the Woman tonight.
Most of all, there were people. The closure of the steel mills and the politics that led to the white flight of the 60s, changed both the demographics and the economics of Gary. By the time Michael Jackson was recording Thriller, Gary had one of the highest crime rates in the country (it still makes the top 20 most dangerous places in America, down a bit, though there were 71 homicides in 2007).
Dr Guy Spencer, businessman/ actor/model/composer/radio host (his
cards say all of this; in Gary, you can do a lot of things, or nothing) went to the National Black Political Convention with his dad in 1972. It was held across the street from where he runs his printing business today, and he has a briefcase from it as a keepsake. It was important, of course, that summit. But it did very little to cure what Spencer calls the black people’s “crabs in the bucket disease”. This is in the same vein as Obama’s ‘We are the ones we have been waiting for’. Except that it means ‘if one of us tries to escape, “we will pull us down”.’
That disease, combined with one more diagnosed (post facto) by Dr Spencer, made Gary elect a white mayor once again. The other illness was “the great white hope syndrome”. During the three terms he was mayor (till 2006), Scott King, oversaw the failed facelift of Broadway, and couldn’t satisfactorily account for $700 million the city got off casinos, contractors and the like, according to Dr Spencer.
Every Gary vote will be invaluable to America’s much loved agent of change. But those who cast them see change in a different light. It won’t be just about the empowerment of black people (i.e. getting them elected to official positions as it was when Hatcher was elected.) Gary’s been there, done that.
Tags: Barack Obama, Gary Indiana, US Elections
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