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Hunter:
As I look at a picture of your Dad on my office wall with Chris Moakley and John Boc, I wish all Democrats would have heeded your Dad’s advice that when a factory closes, it creates a vortex that has far reaching consequences. When a manufacturing plant closes, a supply chain of producers disappear with it. Democrats saved the auto industry in the Midwest or it would have been catastrophic! The Milken Institute estimates that every computer-manufacturing job in California creates 15 jobs outside the factory. We need to keep a majority of those jobs [computer aided design, software, robotics, automation, packaging, office equipment supplies, building and equipment maintenance and janitorial services] here in America. These employment benefits spread to local restaurants, shopping outlets and then to the tax base that supports police, firemen, schoolteachers, libraries and water utilities.

In order that we not become a regional minority party forever, we have to go back to Tom O’Neill’s dad’s focus “all politics is local” platform, starting in the state houses and get back our soul and Congressional districts. While he’s writing his book please encourage your Dad to weigh in, speak out, thank and remind Democrats we can do better and don’t throw in the towel.

Finally I wanted to make sure you read Larry’s email below which reflects what many of us are thinking.

Happy Thanksgiving to the Biden family and hope to see you over the holidays. Thanks, Jack


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Jack Casey
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From: DiCara, Lawrence [mailto:LDICARA@nixonpeabody.com]
Sent: Friday, November 18, 2016 10:01 AM
To: Jack Casey
Subject: Election 2016


Election 2016

I spent a quiet weekend reading and brooding and checking in with old friends and also praying about what happened on Election Day – perhaps the greatest upset since 1948. I also read a great article by Professor Joan Williams in the Harvard Business Review, “What So Many People Don’t Get About the US Working Class”.

On Wednesday evening I spoke at a seminar before all the numbers were finalized. I excerpted some of what I had said at the Marion Public Library in October:

“Aging blue collar workers, residents of rural areas, remnants of what Leon Hadar refers to as “the shrinking white English tribe-patriotic, god-fearing and hardworking” have lost their jobs in the declining manufacturing industries that never recovered from the Great Recession. These are the people who in the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union. These are the people who will be the deciding voters in non-metropolitan Michigan and central Pennsylvania, which had been reliably blue states for a generation, as well as in Ohio and Wisconsin. . . we do not know how many angry people will vote for Donald Trump to send a message, just as they did in the UK. . . to me needles abandoned on playgrounds is an issue of greater importance than creating bike lanes. A living wage is more important than banning Styrofoam cups. The price of hamburg is more important than most anything else ... The founding fathers were clear that there would be no royalty, no class system, no inherited titles, yet Hillary Rodham Clinton lives in a world of private jets and black cars, a far cry from not only the founding fathers but Truman and Eisenhower who retreated quietly to Independence and Gettysburg . . . .

Yes this was an upset, just like in 1948. My reading of that era is that many of the educated people of the country supported Governor Thomas E. Dewey. Truman was unpopular for a host of reasons, one of them being he was not Franklin Roosevelt. Henry Wallace was taking votes on the left. Strom Thurmond, everyone assumed, would carry states in the south on the States’ Rights ticket. Few thought Truman could survive. Early polling (at a time when polling was much more primitive, or at least we thought, than in the current era) suggested Dewey would win handily. Many have seen the photograph of Truman proudly holding up The Chicago Daily Tribune “Dewey Defeats Truman”. Truman sent out Leslie Biffle who was Secretary to the Senate Democrats (and I expect one of his drinking buddies) and told him to go around the country posing as a chicken salesman to see what people were thinking. Biffle did so and came back and told the president that, wherever he went, the common man was for Truman. Truman of course hopped on the train and prevailed. There are parallels to what happened this year.

There is also a parallel to a similar upset in Massachusetts in 1978. Ed King, who had been the Director of Massport and also played professional football, surprised the same people who were surprised by this year’s presidential election, and I expect in 1948, by defeating Michael Dukakis in the Democratic primary for governor. The late Angelo Berlandi, a colorful figure of the old era, suggested “we put all the hate groups in a pot, and we stirred it”.

Professor Williams reminds us that “Class Trumps Gender”. She refers to the “class culture gap”. What happened on Election Day is far more about class and the way the respective parties deal with it than about gender or race. White working class women voted for Trump overwhelmingly, almost as much as white working class men. These voters became convinced that an Ivy League-educated rich person from Manhattan could save them from a world where the gap between the haves and the have-nots continues to grow, a world created in part by Ivy-league educated rich people from Manhattan.

I would suggest that the election was also indicative of a division between the secular and the church-going. I think the latest statistics suggest white Catholics voted Republican 2:1 [enough reason to go to confession when I was growing up in St. Gregory’s Parish, Dorchester Lower Mills, post World War II]. No Democrat can get elected if he loses white Catholics by that margin. It has never happened and it never will. Bill Bishop actually wrote a book about such divisions among us entitled The Big Sort. We self-select who we see on the street, at Church, and in most every aspect of life.

It is not a question of right versus left as Trump is a person without definitive ideology. It is a question of us versus them. Us is whoever you include in your tribe, them is everybody else including financiers with houses in the Hamptons, urban elites being driven around in black cars, even Colin Kaepernick, who gets paid millions of dollars to play football, but refuses to stand for the playing of the Star-Spangled Banner.

People are angry because there are long waits to get into the VA. They are angry because upward mobility has stopped for them and their families. They have no pensions. They are worried about the price of sneakers. They are concerned about interest rates on college loans. They are fearful about fluctuations in the price of gas and home heating oil, and yes hamburg. They are tired of people in Washington starting wars and then sending their children and grandchildren to fight them and then to come back as broken men and women.

Those who are angry send a message to those in power. It happened in 1946, 1958, 1966, 1994, 2010 and it will happen again in the future. Only Bush 41 succeeded a two-term president of his party in my lifetime. By the way, Winston Churchill was also turned out of office shortly after World War II.

Those of us on the coasts, those of us with graduate degrees, those of us who read the Times and the Post and listen to NPR just assumed that the common man would come to his or her senses and not vote for Trump. I argued, Wednesday evening, that probably a million men in America voted for Trump and didn’t tell anyone, including their wives or girlfriends. More surprisingly, many women were also silent supporters. This reminds me of my old City Council colleague Louise Day Hicks who ran twice for mayor against Kevin White and twice for Congress. There was extensive polling data when she ran in these one-on-one contests over 40 years ago. There was always an undercount. People in middle class neighborhoods were reluctant to admit to anybody they were voting for her, but they did. The same was true in this year’s election.

The distance between the intelligentsia commenting on the election and those voting was quite obvious on Tuesday evening as the theories advanced by the talking heads were struck down one by one in the course of a few hours. Somehow, these experts do not talk to veterans in Chicopee or Palmer who texted me with glee at 2.45 the morning after the Election, nor do I expect they talk to poor people in Pennsylvania or Michigan either. Congresswoman Dingell has suggested that quite vocally. Do any of them have an Aunt in Peoria or a cousin in Middleborough? They live in a Beltway Bubble. Some of them may look different, but for the most part they think the same. They are absolutely out of touch with the rest of the country. I didn’t agree with much of what emerged from the pen of Antonin Scalia, but once he suggested that the country would be better off if the Justices of the Supreme Court were not all Ivy League educated and from either coast. I think he had a valid point.

It’s important to understand that politics is also about personalities. Each June, at Boys State and Girls State, we send a poll to the students which they fill out electronically before they arrive – before they have heard my lectures or those of anyone else. I have been amazed in recent years at the visceral unpopularity of Hilary Clinton among middle American boys. [By the way, she also had a sizable although less significant negative among the girls.] Somehow or other the leaders of the Democratic Party need to understand that some political figures are popular and some are unpopular, perhaps without regard to the merits of the candidacy or their careers. Many of us suffered through the 2000 elections where most pollsters concluded that although many citizens thought Al Gore was more prepared to be president (which he was) and understood the issues much better (which he did), that George W. Bush was a more likeable figure – someone with whom they would be happy having a beer, (although he had long stopped drinking by then).

There are some similarities to this year. It is almost impossible for a candidate to survive for a long time in politics with a high negative. Contrast Hillary to Joe Biden who relishes campaigning and is beloved by many. The Democratic Party needs to look toward nominating candidates who in addition to being competent are also popular. That might not sound very idealistic, but it’s very pragmatic.

For the Democratic National Committee to select Congressman Keith Ellison of Minnesota or former Governor Howard Dean of Vermont as the next chair would send the wrong message. Whoever is chairing the Democratic National Committee should be someone who has appeal to those who have strayed from the Democratic Party. We need to move to the center and away from the movement politics/political correctness which has burdened some recent Democratic campaigns with disastrous results. Statistics now tell us that 42 states (that’s over 80 percent) voted more Republican then they did in the prior election. Some have even suggested that the Republican Party, given that it controls 34 governorships, 68 of 99 state legislative bodies, The House, The Senate and now the White House last enjoyed such dominance in 1929. The number of Democrats in State legislatures has declined more than 20% since 2008! They are the people who will draw the lines of congressional districts after the 2020 census. We can be pristine or we can win. I know that Congressman Neal and Congressman Lynch among others have expressed similar statements in the past few days.

The Election is over. Donald Trump must in less than 10 weeks create a government at which he will be at the helm for the next four years. When looking at the photograph of him and President Obama, all I can recall was an old movie starring Robert Redford called The Candidate. After he had been elected to the Senate from California, Redford turns to his campaign manager/brother and says “What do we do now?” I expect whether in Trump Tower or elsewhere, those are the thoughts crossing the mind of Donald J. Trump.

Larry


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