Time for Rubio to “get right” on immigration, Creationism — or his Cuban surname won’t help
The national Republican Party, casting about for ways to mend its abysmal track record with Americans of Hispanic descent, ought not pin its hopes quite so naively on Florida’s U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio.
There’s no such thing as a Latino voting block in the United States, and if there were, it’s likely these days to be dominated by the surging immigration of Mexicans into the country’s West, Southwest and Midwest. Wooing and winning the future Mexican American voter demand the Republicans change up their immigration, economic and jobs policies. Success will be about policy — not last name.
Rubio ought to be allowed to rise or fall on his merits, not his parentage. Barack Obama ought to have been allowed the same, not because of, but despite of his skin color. And, as Hillary Clinton plays her cards for the 2016 presidential election, watch for web worlds filled with “first woman who …” headlines — and data-dumps of information about an imagined “block of women voters.”
Americans appear to understand that one white Alpha male doesn’t represent all men. We’re not so savvy about ethnicity, race and gender. We’re just aware enough not to say it aloud in polite company, but most of us haven’t moved too far past “some of my best friends are (feel free to fill in the blank.)
The Republican and mainstream media conversation about Rubio during and following the presidential campaign feels just too much like the “best friends,” pat ourselves on the back approach. The allure of Rubio’s Hispanic surname, his conservative credentials and his “rising star” moniker among the national media make him virtually irresistible to Republicans. One can hear them chortling in the backrooms: “We’ve got the trifecta here.”
There’s a problem with that. Three of them actually, and unless Republicans up-end their unsophisticated approach to America’s multinational Hispanic population, they’ll have little ballot box success.
Ruben Navarrette Jr., a long-time advocate and columnist for American Latinos, puts it this way in a column entitled “Why Marco Rubio can’t save the GOP”:
When you’re a Cuban-American politician who is being put forth by your party to help get votes from Latino voters — the majority of whom are Mexican or Mexican-American — things can get complicated.
First, let’s stop with the idea that any-Hispanic-surname will connect with potential voters.
Rubio is of Cuban descent, which may continue to play well in Cuban-dominated Florida, but that ethnic heritage is unlikely to appeal to the 63 percent of American Hispanics whose family trees are rooted in Mexico. Even in Key West with its 21 percent Cuban American population, Rubio fans are hard to come by. Why? Because as one multi-generational Cuban American told me: “Miami Cubans and Key West Cubans had different paths to the United States,” she said. “We’ve always lived here; we weren’t political refugees.”
If Rubio be disconnected from at least some Cuban-descent Key Westers, how much more so will he be disconnected from Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans and Hispanics from South and Central America and the Dominican Republic?
Second, Republicans must get their immigration policies straightened out. Cubans and Mexicans simply don’t share the same immigration challenges, and the GOP’s current hardline policies — staunchly supported by Rubio — aren’t going to work.
Third, Rubio’s Creationist, hate-the-science, Tea Party approach to governing are simply out of touch with pretty much every voting block except the neo-cons. It’s time for a platform update.
Rubio can’t connect the GOP with the ill-defined, virtually unshaped Hispanic voting block. Not solely because he’s Cuban, but because his immigration and public policies are out of sync.
If your annual household income is $150,000 and you’re living in most of Florida, you’re in the top 4 percent of those who live here, and in the top 9 percent nationally.
You’d need an annual household income of $289,657 to wear the Florida 1-percenter badge and $383,001 to match the national 1 percent ranks. Still, look how close to that top spot a household income of $150,000 can get you.
Who earns that much money here in the Rock River Valley? A two-some household of veteran teachers, cops or firefighters easily make it. Many of the executive director types will do it, especially if they’ve got a paycheck spouse. Ditto the CEO-sorts of the various public bodies and private companies.
Worker bees? Not so much, of course. Two veteran journalists under one roof might make it into the top 13 percent, if they stretch really tall.
The New York Times today posted this fascinating interactive tool for figuring out where your household income falls against the local metropolitan areas, the state and the nation. Try it. Good learning experience.
It doesn’t take much more than a couple making middle-income paychecks to push them into the top percentage income brackets. They might not make it to the 1 percent, but they’re sure going to be low single digits.
I think sometimes we get so caught up in the 1 percent versus the 99 percent rhetoric that we stop realizing the real conversation ought to be less about hard lines and who wins and far more about doing what’s best for the most of us and for the least among us.
Two veteran teachers in a household push their income beyond middle class. A veteran firefighter has a darned good chance of having an upper class income.
Ditto for a slew of folks who think they’re making middle class incomes, when, in fact, they are playing on that much-maligned “rich” spreadsheet. That ubiquitous “Joe the Plumber” made a heck of a lot more than a middle class income.
The typical middle class household annual income today is about $97,000, reflecting the combined income of the “typical middle class man” in the high $50,000 and the woman in the very low $40,000.
That’s what makes this “hate the rich” and “love the middle class” arguments so silly. Whether it’s the Tea Party’s anger at taxes and big government or the Occupiers demonizing of Wall Street’s excesses — both potentially worthy causes, by the way – none of this should be framed as a love affair with middle class coupled with a burning at the stake of the upper class.
There’s just not much middle class left. I’m not the only one thinking that way. The Atlantic posted an impressive, fact-driven narrative on the same subject. It’s long, and as the friend who shared it with me said, well worth the time.
These days most Americans like thinking of themselves as middle class. There’s something safe, comforting and downright American about being solidly in the middle. Neither too rich or too poor; too educated or too not. Just not “too” anything.
There have been times in our cultural history when moving on up was top of our collective goals. Getting to the hallowed ground, first of middle class, then of “upper middle class,” or, gasp, even “upper class,” was the way things were supposed to be.
To get there, we had to be educated, responsible, skilled at our jobs, reasonably fluent in the civics of our government, clean, reverent and brave, to borrow from the Scout manual. If we did those things, we made more money. Being middle class and then moving up the ladder was then, and always has been, far more than household income. It was about being and valuing the whole package.
I think today’s class definitions are all bollixed up. First, there’s this fact-less idea that middle class is “salt of the earth” types with good family values and a Christian work ethic, and enough education and civics lessons to know a little about a lot — all regardless of income.
Then, there is the equally fact devoid concept of an “upper class” that scarfs up all the money, looks down its nose at the middle class, ignores the needs of those less fortunate and, in general, fiddles while Rome burns, to use a cliche.
And, the “lower class”? What about its cultural types? Oh, the lower class is uneducated, has no values or work ethic, sucks off the public dole for generations and, generally, isn’t American.
The trouble with these cultural stereotypes is they make being middle class the only true and good “class” to be. And, that frames all of today’s disgruntled, polarized, frustratingly unsolvable challenges.
Let’s try to let go of these emotional, fact-less class stereotypes. We are all in this together.
Assuming the headline got your attention, stick with me for a minute. I haven’t totally lost my mind.
Public employees are the last fragments of the United States’ once robust middle class. If their jobs disappear, we can kiss our community farewell. That “tipping point” all the local movers-and-shakers talk about when they get together stops being talk pretty fast when there’s no middle class.
Long gone are the days when every house in Loves Park, IL, had an RV, a fishing boat and a map to Wisconsin’s north woods. Back then, manufacturing jobs paid upwards of $50,000, no high school, much less college, degree required. That was good money, job security and a solid, secure life for thousands of families.
So slowly that the transition was imperceptible to all but those looking for it, four decades of waning factory jobs took their toll on a long list of others dependent on that manufacturing middle class: accountants, lawyers, journalists, homeowners, auto dealers, preachers. You. Me.
At the same time, public employees — teachers, law enforcement, fire fighters, road crews, secretaries, marketing and development executives — bargained first for better benefits and then for better wages. Public employees went from barely paying the bills to middle class over those four decades.
Today, they’re all we’ve got left of a middle class, here and around the country. If the middle fails, expect the resulting black hole to suck the rest of us in.
So, it’s time to raise taxes to save those jobs. Every penny of such a tax increase goes directly to job creation (hire more probation officers, please) and job retention (you get to keep your job if you’re actually doing it well.)
Not a penny can go to salary increases: no steps, lanes, bargaining increases, cost of living. They’ve got to give those up, just like the private sector workers have done. For the next five years, public employees get to keep their jobs at the current salary — assuming, as I said before, they’re actually doing the job.
No layoffs for five years. No threats of job reductions. Just the security of knowing that a paycheck will keep coming — and that check can be used to remodel a kitchen, buy a car, take out a mortgage on a new house, pay down the credit cards, send the kid(s) off to higher education.
In turn, public employees have got to step it up. Make quality work and customer service the way it’s always done. Pick up more (a lot) for health care benefits and pensions. Work longer hours for the same pay. Learn new skills. Sit down and bargain in good faith to reduce costs (Four on a truck? Spare me) with those who pay your now secure paychecks.
The Tea Party tax-haters can scream from here to heaven and cast about for pointing fingers, but there’s this one gut-wrenching truth: The middle class is the glue that holds America together. These days, the only middle class left is public employees. If we trash and ditch them, we’re all going under.
the country’s West, Southwest and Midwest. Wooing and winning the future Mexican American voter demand the Republicans change up their immigration, economic and jobs policies. Success will be about policy — not last name.