Earth to Aunt Maude: Where Are You When We Need You?
Growing up on the North Side of St. Louis, I had a friend named Phil whose Dad was a banker and a Republican. Since I lived in a working-class neighborhood, I thought everyone belonged to a union, was a mailman, cop or fireman and, above all, Irish, Catholic and a Democrat. Poor Phil, I thought, must be tough to be a minority. Phil was a Lutheran, too!
As I grew older and became a journalist, I discovered the simplistic folly of my youthful thoughts. I covered Democrats and Republicans alike and tried to do it fairly. I also became a stalwart political independent.
Yet buried deep within my psyche was the belief that Democrats were for the working stiffs like my Dad, a union representative and electrician, and Republicans were for the bankers, guys like Phil’s Dad.
My Aunt Maude, known locally as the First Lady of the First Ward, bolstered my belief, shaking her finger in my face and pronouncing: “Democrats are for working people. Republicans are not. And don’t you forget it!” A child of the loyalties that President Franklin Roosevelt seared into the American psyche, Aunt Maude and her Democrats stood for something. So did the Republicans. They were the party of business.
Years later, as an economics correspondent for the Chicago Tribune in Washington and then a top editor back in Chicago and Los Angeles, I pondered the same question that surfaced in Joseph O’Neill’s thought-provoking essay “Brand New Dems?” in the May 25, 2020 edition of The New York Review of Books:
Why do opinion polls always equate the Republicans as the party that does a better job of managing the economy? Is it simply because the party’s been traditionally associated with businessmen?
I know “facts” are out of fashion these days with opinions of all stripes coloring the news. But let’s consider a few:
Every Republican President since Ronald Reagan has presided over a recession, officially defined as two consecutive declines in broadest measure of the economy, the Gross Domestic Product.
As a reporter and editor, I covered them all, the one under President Reagan starting in January,1981 (in fairness, he inherited a bad hand from President Jimmy Carter); one by GOP President George H.W. Bush starting in July, 1990 and two under the administrations of his son, Republican President George W. Bush – one in March of 2001 and a doozy in the Great Recession that started in December, 2007.
And how did the two Democrats do during that 39-year time span? President Bill Clinton not only avoided a recession, he engineered something I thought impossible at the time — back-to-back federal budget surpluses from fiscal years 1998 to 2001. President Barack Obama pulled us out of the recession started under Bush, the worst one since the Great Depression (Anyone remember Herbert Hoover?). He also helped save the auto industry and presided over an unprecedented Bull Market on Wall Street.
Lest I be called a partisan, I can assure you that years of being a journalist reinforced my embrace of political independence. To put it mildly I hate what President Donald Trump has done to our country. And he and his GOP pals in the Senate are at it again. We’re entering another Republican Recession. Yet the Democrats have not given me much of an alternative. Joe Biden’s a far more decent man than Trump. But he simply doesn’t feel right for this point in history. As a man in a Chicago pub once told me: “He’s lost his jive.”.
O’Neill, a novelist who teaches at Bard College, persuasively argues in his essay that we’ve arrived at this point in time because the GOP has mastered the art of marketing. Republicans simply do a better job of branding the party as the steward of the economy, the facts be damned. Under his thinking, the Democratic party couldn’t sell Trump a golf course.
But I wonder if the problem also isn’t tied to Americans and the media we once relied upon for the information we need to make rational decisions in a Democracy.
We are sliding into a world where the two parties represent fringe ideologies rather than people. More and more, their ranks are filled with people obsessed with their own celebrity, jockeying for slots on entertainment shows where people who call themselves journalists help their guests cement their brand. They are all obsessed with Trump, which is exactly what he wants. We’ve become a nation inundated with gabfests designed to lure viewers rather than challenge opinions..
Voters are understandably confused, barraged by tidbits of news called Tweets that more often than not lack the crucial elements of good journalism – facts, context and intelligent reporting that challenges rather that reinforces one’s beliefs.
The parties really don’t stand for anything of substance. They represent the people with the loudest foghorns and the deepest pockets to finance a never-ending unprincipled campaign to keep their jobs.
Republicans don’t have a soul and I question whether Democrats do, either. I recommend reading O’Neill’s essay for something that might challenge the way you think. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/05/28/brand-new-democrats/
Meanwhile, it would be nice to see Aunt Maude again.
—James O’Shea