Linky Friday: Everything Is Political

J_A in reply to Stillwater says:

@stillwater

I think we are trying to say the same thing, but, just for emphasis, this is what Dems are saying to white blue collar voters

Hillary Clinton met a tough crowd in West Virginia coal country recently.

The state, which will hold its primary May 10, backed Clinton over President Barack Obama in 2008. But some voters now see her as a threat to the area’s coal industry.

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“How you could say you are going to put a lot of coal miners out of jobs, and then come in here and tell us how you’re going to be our friend?” unemployed coal worker Bo Copely asked Clinton at a campaign event on May 2.

Clinton acknowledged that she said something to that effect, but she also apologized.

“I don’t know how to explain it other than what I said was totally out of context for what I meant because I have been talking about helping coal country for a very long time,” Clinton said. “It was a misstatement because what I was saying is the way things are going now, they will continue to lose jobs. It didn’t mean that we were going to do it. What I said is that is going to happen unless we take action to help and prevent it.”

So what did Clinton say about putting coal miners out of work? We decided to look at the full context.

She made the comment during a March 13 CNN Town Hall. Journalist Roland Martin asked, in effect, why should poor white people vote for her.

In her response, Clinton did say that she would be putting coal companies out of business, as a result of moving toward renewable energy sources. But she followed that by saying she wanted to create new economic opportunities for current coal workers, possibly spurred by clean energy development.

Here are her full remarks, with the most relevant parts in bold:

Look, we have serious economic problems in many parts of our country. And Roland is absolutely right. Instead of dividing people the way Donald Trump does, let’s reunite around policies that will bring jobs and opportunities to all these underserved poor communities.

So for example, I’m the only candidate which has a policy about how to bring economic opportunity using clean renewable energy as the key into coal country. Because we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business, right?

And we’re going to make it clear that we don’t want to forget those people. Those people labored in those mines for generations, losing their health, often losing their lives to turn on our lights and power our factories.

Now we’ve got to move away from coal and all the other fossil fuels, but I don’t want to move away from the people who did the best they could to produce the energy that we relied on.

So whether it’s coal country or Indian country or poor urban areas, there is a lot of poverty in America. We have gone backwards. We were moving in the right direction. In the ’90s, more people were lifted out of poverty than any time in recent history.

Because of the terrible economic policies of the Bush administration, President Obama was left with the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, and people fell back into poverty because they lost jobs, they lost homes, they lost opportunities, and hope.

So I am passionate about this, which is why I have put forward specific plans about how we incentivize more jobs, more investment in poor communities, and put people to work.

And this I’d what the GOP is saying

We’re going to get those miners back to work … the miners of West Virginia and Pennsylvania, which was so great to me last week, Ohio and all over are going to start to work again, believe me. They are going to be proud again to be miners

Yes, the first plan is long winded, and looks like a badly done PowerPoint presentation. The second one is crispy, clear, and exactly what the audience is looking for. It’s great marketing.

The problem is, the second one is impossible to achieve. And those that are offering the second plan know it’s impossible to achieve. There’s a word to describe knowingly offering impossible things in order to dupe your audience. It starts with L.

Yes, perhaps the bullet point list can’t or won’t be implemented because reasons. But one is feasible and the other one is not.

So it’s not that the Dems are not offering concrete things to the white blue collar voters. It is that they are restricting their offers to what is possible, even if difficult. And the voters prefer the guys that are offering them the impossible thing.

Could the first, long winded program be better packaged? Sure it can. Even I, long winded pedantic non-native speaker that I am, could do better.

But of course, the Dems could also lie. That will also get them votes. It will get them even more votes. Trump got a lot of votes by promissing that Repeal and Replace would make health coverage better and cheaper. Nowhere he offered to also cut 20 million people out of health coverage to fund a tax rebate to high earners. But that’s what he’s giving his blue collar voters.Report

J_A in reply to Jaybird says:

That I can agree with.

The criticism is that she gave a long-winded, or seriously thought, policy speech that was not tailored to her audience.

And that it gave their opponents selectively quoted from that speech to imply she was happy about miners losing their jobs, and she would expedite the process.

All that is bad campaigning.

However, their opponents lied about what they would do for the miners. They lied to their faces.

There’s a party with policies to address the problems of white working class people. And gay party is not the GOP. We can discuss the marketing issues the Dems have, which are plenty. But when people say the Dems should devise policies to help the white working class I’m at a loss. What policies do people want to help the WWC that are not already part of the Democratic platform.

Unless what “policies to help the WWC” is code for “stop helping people that are not like us”

BIG NOTE: I know very well that you, Jaybird, do not want to stop policies that help women and minorities. But it seems that some voters would rather lose their Medicaid that have Medicaid cover people they dislike.

So how do we campaign among this people? Bait and switch? Promise to do what we won’t do? It’s an honest question, because I don’t know how to square that circle.Report

J_A in reply to Dan d says:

No it’s not the government could easily put coal miners back to work by buying coal and putting it into storage. It’s just that nobody wants to do that.

Put it in storage and do what with it? It seems we truly are all Keynesians now.

How much should our taxes increase to do that? What should we cut to pay for that coal? Medicaid? The military? Waste and fraud?

You know who else is losing their jobs? Sears workers. Perhaps the government should buy every American and green card holder a pair of jeans from Sears every quarter. Why do you hate blue collar workers?Report

J_A in reply to Stillwater says:

Blue collar workers would agree with you and deny that retail workers are blue collar on precisely those grounds. Maybe this is a useful metric: as manual effort to perform a task increases so does the identification of that task as blue collar.

So McDonald short-order cooks are not blue collar? Nurses and hospital orderlies are not blue collar? Office cleaning ladies (those elves that clean your office trash bin and bathroom late at night) are not blue collar? Yard maintenance teams are not blue collar?

So why don’t oil riggers and coal miners identify with them? Are they not getting dirty enough at the end of the day?

It is as if all of the above are failing in something that would make them WWCReport

J_A in reply to George Turner says:

We’ve had gas turbines power plants since 1939. We’ve been using them ever since as peakers,

And we’ve had cars since 1886. I’m sure they were just as powerful and efficient as today’s

If we want to be pedantic, the first gas turbine patent that resembles the current apparatus we call a gas turbine was granted in 1791. The 1939 gas turbine you mention, installed in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, was all of 4 MW. The first utility application of a gas turbine, 1946, was all of 27 MW.

In 2011 Mitsubishi tested a 570 MW combined cycle unit with efficiency above 60%. The GE 9HA is rated 62% efficiency at 605 MW

I guess we are not in Neuchâtel anymoreReport

J_A in reply to George Turner says:

Coal st current prices does not compete with gas at current prices because:

– CC plants are more efficient than steam turbines plants, so the same $/MMBTU of fuel produces more MWh

– CC plants have a fraction of the O&M costs of coal plants

– The capital cost of a new coal plant is roughly twice that of a gas fired CC

(From an internal study we commissioned one year ago)

Coal competes very well with LNG in markets without/ with limited access to piped gas (like China. Chile, Central America and the Caribbean Brazil, Africa, India) but has very little future in markets with domestic gas like the USA.

And your (we could have done gas in the 1960s fails to account that:

Natural gas prices were regulated at the wellhead until the Carter administration, which made exploration for NG unprofitable.

Interstate transportation of NG was heavily regulated up to and through the 1960s, which resulted in very limited transportation of natural gas across state lines.

The state of the art of metallurgics in the 1060s-1980s did not allow for the high efficiencies and massive sizes of CC plants today. In the 1990s a 100 MW turbine was BIG. Today, it’s so small it’s hard to buy one.Report