Earlier today while enjoying my morning Dunkin Donuts coffee and taking a few puffs of Captain Black in my favorite Country Gentlemen corn cob pipe, I noticed an article posted at Lucianne.com that I felt needed a rant from a self-proclaimed blue collar everyman in response. Luckily, I found myself available to deliver it. The article in question is “To Attract Disillusioned Voters, the GOP Must Understand Their Concerns” written by Henry Olsen from National Review. The following statement struck a blue collar nerve within and I feel must be addressed.
"Winning the support of blue-collar voters means gaining their trust, and that means first affirming the core elements of their worldview. They have to believe that the GOP nominee understands that they have been the losers in the transition to a modern economy. They have to believe that the nominee will be on their side when the chips are down and that he is willing to take on the powerful. A nominee who appears ignorant of or callous toward these views, such as Mitt Romney, will be rejected as long as the Democratic nominee seems marginally acceptable.”
First I would like to state that I do not believe Mr. Olsen is knowingly being condescending and I feel that the article has some merit. With that being said…
They? Seriously? Mr. Olson’s statement comes off as a gold-collar writer seeing the blue collar workers as some form of simpletons who only view the world through a self-centered eye. Yes, we do have those concerns, but I would like to point out our gaze is far more reaching then our 9-5 jobs. We understand the economy far more than those that smugly believe we do not, do.
We live the economy rather than experience it from news articles or checking our latest dividend checks. When the price per barrel of oil goes up, we take a collective pay cut every time we fill up our Ford F150’s to get to work. We also know when the job market is flooded by more workers from outside the United States that not only could we lose a job ourselves, but that the going wage for that same job falls for everyone eventually. We know the economics of supply and demand. We also know that there is no such thing as “a job Americans are not willing to do”. Plenty of Americans will fill those jobs if the economics of supply and demand were actually practiced. By that theory, the jobs wage would increase to entice workers from other jobs to fill it. Yet, that is not how Big Business practices supply side economics. It only practices it when it is to its benefit. When having to fulfill its role in the equation it lobbies the Washington D.C. Establishment to allow more foreign born workers to undercut their responsibility. We do read the great Thomas Sowell far more than you think.
Us blue-collar workers also have interest in the security of the United States as well. The gold-collar writer seems to think all we see is illegals storming our borders and that’s where the concerns end. That is a very narrow minded view of us. Many of us have had the honor to serve this great nation in various branches of our military. In doing so, many of us have seen foreign policy staring down the business end of a AK-47, RPG, or have been hammered by a road side bomb.
We have come in close contact with our premier enemies in this day and age. We know just how ruthless and fanatic they are. We see our borders as unprotected barriers against terrorism within our own borders. We signed up, gave our all, some regretfully their lives, so that we would not have to fight these fanatics on our doorsteps. But now that is exactly what it looks like might end up happening sooner than the seemingly highly educated well placed individuals in Washington D.C. would think. To be blunt, we have the knowledge only coming face to face with an enemy can teach.
To the gold-collar writer the issue of trust seems to be solved by just putting a candidate up front to tell us what we want to hear. It goes far deeper than that because the blue-collar worker is far deeper than you think. We were the ones screaming Mitt Romney would not win the Presidency. We screamed until our voices were hoarse and our lungs out of breath. We knew he was going to fail because of one simple thing: that no matter how much money a campaign spends it cannot be bought; we did not trust him.
Mitt Romney may be a nice man. He may have been a good business man. But we knew he would not change the course to ruin this country is headed on. We have been lied to so many times in the past by both parties. The difference is that one we expected it from, the other we hoped would not. Our hopes were dashed yet again. This time though there will be no second or third chances. We have finally learned the hard lesson we chose to previously ignore.
Elections are never about the blue-collar worker. They are about parties and politicians looking to keep the status quo going, the money flowing, and the people duped for another election cycle. We have learned that this is the unvarnished truth of politics in Washington D.C. today. If the Republican Establishment wants our trust, they must abolish themselves and their tightening grasp on the blue-collar wallet and secure our borders without excuses. This is not going to happen.
For Mr. Olsen, I would suggest stepping out of the confines of his normal day-to-day environment and talk to real blue-collar people rather than getting his view of us from Pew research polls. That would be a start.
