After last week’s huge dose of downer, the Ol’ Bloviator promised a more upbeat yuletide post; so he’s decided to share some very sensitive personal information about what happens to him at this time of year. His only caution is that if you sell this insider info to the National Enquirer, he will expect you to make a generous donation to Bloviators Anonymous, of which, by the way, he just happens to be CFO. Also, be advised, this is some pretty heavy stuff, so please try not to let your holiday sentimentality get the better of you.
The OB was raised by parents who loved him very much, but although they did their best within their limited means to get him the Lionel train or the chemistry set or whatever he asked for, what he always wanted most of all was a Christmas like he imagined everybody else had, a big ol' happy gathering with lots of folks having lots of fun.
OB was an only child, you see, with older parents and an extended kinship group whose members were either physically or emotionally distant. OB’s grandparents were quite advanced in age, and in order to accommodate their early bedtimes and even earlier wake-up schedule, he was required to open his presents on the late afternoon of Christmas Eve. Since he was the only youngster in attendance, the festivities were not only premature but definitely of the slam-bam-thank-you-Santa-by-damn variety. Christmas was over for him before it began for most of the kids he knew, and for reasons he never quite fathomed, his parents always seemed to be happy to see it go.
As fate would have it, when the OB lost his heart to the lovely little filly who’s been his first wife for dang near four decades, he discovered that he had actually married into a family whose Christmas gatherings were even more depressing than his. After they got hitched up, he and Ms. OB (also an only offspring) found their Christmases largely consumed with bundling up their own solo bundle of joy and making extremely arduous road trips to visit his elderly grandparents who, as you recall, had never really been much into yuletide merriment.
Alas, the Ol’ Bloviator’s yearning for the perfect happy Christmas seemed destined to remain forever unrequited until a few years ago when, so eyewitnesses swear, a typically downcast OB walked into a novelty store in Fernandina Beach only to emerge as the disquietingly upbeat Elf Boy.

Don't let E.B.'s appearance here fool you, he's just a bit the worse for wear after riding shotgun on the red-eye leg of Santa's annual sojourn to Tahiti, where instead of milk and cookies they leave lots of umbrella drinks for the old fella and his staff. Whence cometh this normally jovial figment of the OB's notoriously inactive imagination? Who knows? As it turns out, E.B.’s past is a bit shadowy, and he clearly doesn’t like to talk about it much, perhaps because of all the gossip about his mysterious trips to Sweden several decades back.
Whatever his story, along about this time or a little earlier each year, Elf Boy is sure to show up to gently nudge the crusty and cynical OB out of the way for a while. He’ll start in singing Ms. OB’s least favorite Christmas songs nonstop and decidedly off key, and soon he’s nagging her about getting a bigger tree this year. When OB and the Missus started spending time in Athens, she thought they might have given E.B. the slip, but she quickly learned better last year when she looked out the window and saw the OB’s rusty but trusty 1994 GMC pickup ablaze in Christmas lights. This year, nothing would do the Elfster but that the number of lights be doubled, and as you can see, still not satisfied, he found a way to make them flash, fade, and “chase” each other.

It’s doubtful this site attracts many repeat visitors who consider themselves arbiters of good taste, but as you can also see, the Elfster is too busy helping Santa with last minute deliveries to take time to defend his flamboyant display of yuletide spirit.

As he watches from the shadows, however, the OB can’t help but wonder why gargantuan inflated Santas and snowmen might be considered aesthetically up to snuff, when a pickup tastefully tricked out with its own light show ain’t.
It’s hard to know what to make of Elf Boy’s annual friendly takeover of the OB’s psyche. While it doesn’t seem serious enough to warrant a trip to the shrink, OB does worry that his offspring may have inherited his dad’s bizarre susceptibility to recurrent visitations of a mysterious spirit of puckishness. Take a look and tell me you wouldn’t be at least a tiny bit concerned if you looked out on the slopes and saw that the fruit of your loins had ripened into this.

Still, there are surely a lot worse things than surrendering a few weeks every year to such a well-meaning (if, let’s face it, fairly weird) agent of good cheer. The OB actually wishes the Elfster could be a little more of an annual presence in his life, and he joins E.B. in hoping that all his friends hunkered down in the numberless nooks and crannies of the vast cyber kingdom will be able to defy the gloom and apprehension of the moment by getting in touch with their own inner elves and having a truly joyous and festive Christmas. In other words, as Jose Feliciano might say if he were a Georgia Tech grad, “Felice Bobby Dodd!”

Posted by JC at 09:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

“Experience is a dear school,” wrote Benjamin Franklin, “but fools learn at no other.” Right again, Uncle Ben. Since we are definitely going through some of the “dearest” schooling that has been inflicted on any American generation since the Great Depression, I can only hope that we will at least come out of it understanding how important it is to have at least an acquaintance with fundamental economics. In these dismal times, it would be fitting, I suppose, to see increased interest in what is often called “the dismal science,” although I have to confess that I have always found economics fascinating, and at the risk of seeming terminally geeky, even fun. In addition to the fact that economics is still missing from the curricula in way too many high schools, there is the simple reality that when it is taught, it sometimes isn’t taught very well. People with economic degrees can generally find more lucrative ways to put their training to use than trying to pound it into the heads of high schoolers, and at the college level, introductory economics courses are all too frequently mass production affairs which are often taught by folks who don’t want to be there any more than the people they are supposed to turn on to some really important but not necessarily exciting concepts like elasticity of demand.
Luckily for me, I took an honors class in economics taught by a curmudgeonly old dude who didn’t suffer fools gladly but who clearly knew his stuff and how to impart it. I hardly became an expert as a result of this one class, but it did stoke my interest in learning more, and what little extra I have managed to pick up has been enormously useful to me as a historian, even if a few economists might feel it has made me a bit dangerous as well. I have even been described as an “economic determinist,” (which, by the way, I ain’t) but mostly by people I would call cultural determinists who find it easier to label every form of behavior they can’t explain after fifteen minutes of effort as the manifestation of some ancient, inbred cultural trait passed on from generation to generation.
I’m particularly sensitive to this, I guess, because so much of the writing about southerners has slipped into this track. For example, antebellum planters were said to have persisted in owning slaves and growing cotton (instead of diversifying their investments and supporting industrialization) because they were caught up in an old European pre-capitalist mentality that had long since disappeared among those who settled in the more progressive North. This is total horse-pucky, of course. As a group, southern slaveholders were the richest people in the United States and some of the richest people in the world in 1860, and it’s been my observation that people who are doing well at what they are doing generally keep doing it, for just that reason rather than because of any flimsy-as-a-fart-on-a toothpick nonsense about being raised in a genteel tradition that frowned upon acquisitiveness.
Enough of this history talk. Let’s consider the big enchilada of the here and now, the much-debated bailout of Detroit’s Big Three. Harry Truman’s oft-quoted (by me, at least) comment about really wanting to meet a “one-handed economist” bears repeating because it is so relevant here. Truman was actually complaining that, when asked about the impact of any proposed initiative, his economic advisers would invariably respond, “Well, on the one hand . . . but, on the other hand,” Truman should actually have been heartened by this response because it meant his advisors were genuine economists who understood their obligation to evaluate the various outcomes that might result from decisions about how scarce resources were to be allocated to meet a multitude of competing needs and goals. Since there could be no valid scenario where every need was equally well met, economists were always looking at the upside and downside of every proposition.
One of the biggest problems with our collective ignorance of economics is that it allows our politicians to get away with being one-handed economists. Witness all the posturing about the auto bailout. First, there’s the self-appointed, conservative watchdogs of the “peoples’ money,” who are, by the way, generally the same folks who invariably oppose things like hiking the minimum wage or restructuring the tax system in order to increase the amount of “the people’s money” that goes and stays in the people’s pockets. Although the watchdogs have also voted uncritically for the massive expenditures of “the peoples’ money” in Iraq, they’re suddenly worried about forking over it over to Detroit, and they’re definitely not saying much about the “people” who won’t be making any money at all after their employers go belly-up. The liberals, meanwhile, are worried about protecting the wages, benefits, and pensions of past and present autoworkers, even though the cost of maintaining them at anything remotely close to the current level is surely an insurmountable obstacle to any agreement that would keep the companies afloat and their workers at work.
I understand the UAW is refusing to accept any of the proposed wage-and-benefit cuts until 2011. I’m a huge believer in paying working people a decent wage, but the UAW crowd might want to rethink their position on this. Saving the wages and benefits package until 2011 won’t be much to brag about to the people who are standing with you in the unemployment line six months from now.
Frankly, I don’t think whatever arrangement they wind up with is going to work unless Congress simply buys into the idea of long-term nationalization of the auto industry. Even then, the real kicker will be whether, after five years or so to re-tool, Detroit can start to build cars that anybody really wants to buy. Much has been made, understandably, of GM’s obligations to its more than 432,000 retirees, who outnumber its current employees by nearly 7 to 1 and account for roughly $15 of the $70 plus that GM calculates it pays per current employee-hour worked. David Leonhard makes a telling point when he estimates that even if Congress agree to take on $10 per hour in retiree benefits, and the UAW is ultimately gracious
enough to accept $45 per hour in wages and benefits for current employees, the typical savings per car would be only about $800. Since the Big Three price average is already some $2,500 below the Japanese competitors who have been taking them to the woodshed since Hector was a pup, how much difference will another 800 bucks make unless Detroit learns how to make a car that you don’t wind up hoping some woefully ill-informed thief will take off your hands? Beyond that, there’s the question of why, with every car lot you see overflowing with Detroit’s hardcore unsellables, we would want to invest public money in glutting the market even further until these guys, (we can only hope,) finally develop the capacity to build autos that might sell?
All of this sounds like a bailout is nothing more than flinging good money after bad—only this time’ it’s our money, but, on the other hand, before we vow and declare that it’s no skin off our behineys if the Big Three become the Big Zero, maybe we better check on the thickness of our behiney hides and the extent of their potential exposure to the toxic economic shock wave that’s certain to radiate from ground zero.
Even by the mid-1920s, the automobile industry was already critical enough to our economy that dwindling demand for cars should have been a signal that we were headed for the big trouble that ultimately became the Great Depression. Just for starters, a complete shutdown of today’s Big Three would mean the direct loss of some 200,000 jobs paying as much as 20 percent more than the average manufacturing worker gets. Even though recent cutbacks by carmakers have already been felt in many of the critical related industries like parts, rubber, metal, glass, and electronics, to name but a few, the “ripple” effect of the Big Three going completely dark would still be more like a tidal wave. Take a gander at this study, just released, strikingly enough, on Election Day. It puts overall job losses from a total Big Three shutdown in 2009 at nearly three million. That would amount to a roughly $151 billion loss in personal income, a 25 percent decrease in income tax collections and a 20 percent dip in social security collections, just for next year alone.
Think the foreclosure rate is bad now? You truly ain’t seen nothing yet. “Repo Man” is going to be a busy boy as well. Already feeble consumer buying will obviously take a huge hit, and welfare and social services will be stressed to an extent we’ve never seen and certainly well beyond their shrunken budgets. Ditto public education at every level. There’s always the option, I suppose, of collecting more tax revenue from the folks who are still working, including those who could see no merit whatsoever in keeping those car companies afloat in order to give them the chance to right their course.
In addition to the direct and indirect economic implications of withholding life support from the American auto industry, the political implications might be profound as well. I’ve been thinking in particular about the reaction when it finally sinks in that the Gen Y’ers may be the first group of kids in our recent history, certainly, who, as a group, wind up with a lower relative standard of living than their parents enjoyed. We’re quick to brag about our brilliant and enduring system of government, but while I’m as big an admirer of the Founding Dads as anybody, I’m inclined to think that we may have been ignoring the importance of our historic economic success to our political stability. Taking due note of the peculiarly disadvantaged and those held back by discrimination, Americans have traditionally had good reason to believe that, with the requisite effort, they will be able to live better than their parents and that their own children can anticipate the same.
By and large, for the last hundred years or so, we have been reasonably content to choose our presidents and members of congress from two major political parties because we felt that, at any one time, at least one of these outfits could get the job done in helping us not just maintain our current individual and household status but to improve on it. Now, however, we as a nation may be in the middle of an unfolding perception that neither the Demos or the GOP will be able to offer credible assurances that they can just keep things from getting worse, much less make us believe they can make tomorrow look better than today.
If we don’t see significant improvement over the next four years, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised to see a significant “third” party and maybe even a fourth or fifth one as well. This may sound like a healthy thing on the face of it, and it might well be if one of these aggregations rejects partisanship and ideological rigidity in favor of simply trying to help as many people of all stripes as possible. However, depending on how dire our economic and related social conditions and prospects might be, we could also be assailed by people coming from considerably farther right and/or left than most of us would be comfortable with, purporting to protect the particular perceived interests of some groups while demonizing or scapegoating anybody else who might somehow be characterized as a competing claimant for a bigger piece of that shrunken ol’ pie.
I don’t know much, but I do know this: Whatever can be done by political means to get us out of this hellacious mess won’t come as a result of pitting us against each other. Relax, this is not going to dissolve into a weepy liberal plea that we all join hands and sing “KUMBAYAH,” but before we leap to condemn proposals that don’t seem at first glance to benefit us directly and immediately, maybe we should at least take time to consider that contemporary spheres of economic interest overlap a lot more than most people realize. We’re all living in an exceedingly complicated, tightly intertwined, and global rather than national economic and sociopolitical matrix. Lest we get sucked into falling for some for some one-handed economics, which can be mighty appealing in times as frightening and confusing as these, let’s first recall ol’ H. L. Mencken’s reminder to the effect that “for every complex problem, there’s always a simple solution. And it’s always wrong.”

PS. OK, I admit I’m one of those people likely to see the glass half empty. That’s because I’ve had a lot of experience with glasses—and bottles, too, for that matter—and while I’ve seen a helluva lot of mine get emptier, not a single one of them has ever gotten fuller. In any event, I apologize for posting such a “downer” this close to Christmas. By way of recompense, the Ol’ Bloviator promises a much “lighter” offering before St. Nick arrives.

Posted by JC at 04:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

In a weak nod toward full disclosure, I should reveal that an earlier, less provocatively titled version of this bloviation appeared over yonder on the History News Network.

The polls had hardly closed, it seemed, before the punditry of print and blogosphere were positively a-twitter at the possibility that Barack Obama’s near-landslide victory is both substance and symbol of the happy reality that “The South has moved from being the center of the political universe to being an outside player in presidential politics.” I can see why Obama’s big win might seem like a metaphoric triumph over the South that, at the time of his birth, would have afforded him little prospect of having the opportunity to vote for a presidential candidate, much less of becoming one. By the same time-warped logic, of course, Jimmy Carter’s victory in 1976 could have been construed as the final proof that hookworm had been eradicated. Prior to 2000, by the way, the 1976 election was the last in which either party owed its success to a single southern vote, so anyone who situates the South at “the center of the political universe” in presidential races is putting a hell of a lot of weight on just two trips to the polls.
Although I have trouble resisting the notion that such facile generalizations reflect a desire to pin the entire nation’s shift to the right over the last two generations on the South, there’s no denying that a majority of white southerners have not voted for a Democrat since 1960. Even with an expected increase in black turnout, it was hard to imagine that Obama could overcome the heightened white resistance that a black Democratic candidate was sure to arouse down South. This scenario clearly played out in states like Alabama, where Obama managed only 10 percent of the white vote as opposed to the 19 percent given to John Kerry in 2004. In Mississippi, Obama claimed only 11 percent of white voters, compared to 14 percent for Kerry, and in Louisiana, Kerry’s 24 percent showing among whites fell to 14 percent with Obama. If you ever had any doubts that ol' Billy Faulkner knew his stuff, take a gander at this graphic evidence that the past is never dead or even past. It overlays the old "Cotton Belt," a.k.a., the "Black Belt," because of its concentration both of rich,darker soils and of the slaves who worked them, with Oby's southern vote.

Across the region, however, Obama not only equaled or surpassed Kerry’s share of the white vote in nine of thirteen states, but utilizing hordes of volunteers and drawing on a huge campaign war chest, he was able to break the GOP’s grip on Dixie by actually winning Florida, Virginia, and North Carolina. Obama won in these states primarily by getting a substantially greater percentage of white votes in North Carolina and Virginia and matching Kerry’s share of the white vote in Florida, while running five to ten points ahead of Kerry with black voters as well. Excluding Oklahoma, where no poll data was available, Obama averaged over 95 percent of the black vote across the old Confederacy, and within states, he typically ran strongest in places with large black populations and in fast-growing areas like North Carolina’s Research Triangle that had attracted large numbers of more affluent, better-educated residents, most of them white.
Obama’s returns also reflected the growing suburbanization of the South’s black middle class. He carried three metropolitan Atlanta counties—Douglas, Newton, and Rockdale—that, despite giving 60 percent or more of their votes to George W. Bush in 2004, had seen their black populations more than double since 2000. Blacks represented over one-third of the population in each of these counties by 2008, and although McCain carried four other metropolitan counties with smaller but fast-growing black populations (including notoriously conservative Cobb), his share of the vote nonetheless fell short of Bush’s by from seven to twelve points. The limits of the Democrats’ metro surge in Georgia were sharply defined by race and geography, however. In adjoining counties like Walton, Forsyth, and Cherokee, which were both whiter and farther out from Atlanta, McCain claimed better than three of every four votes cast.
By bringing out record numbers of black voters, the Obama campaign boosted the fortunes of a number of white Democratic candidates elsewhere on the ticket. In Georgia, despite capturing less than 30 percent of the white vote, Democratic senatorial challenger Jim Martin was able to force a runoff with GOP incumbent Saxby Chambliss because blacks gave him 93 percent of their support. In North Carolina, meanwhile, neither Democratic senatorial candidate Kay Hagan nor her gubernatorial counterpart Beverly Perdue won as much as 40 percent of the white vote, but with 96 and 95 percent of the black vote, respectively, both claimed victory on election night.
Hagan’s race was particularly satisfying to Democrats because she ousted GOP incumbent Elizabeth Dole, who, sensing that she was in trouble, had resorted to a last-minute television spot suggesting her staunch Presbyterian opponent was actually in cahoots with an atheist organization and therefore keeping company with the “Godless.” The now widely circulated ad even closed with a voice resembling Hagan’s announcing, “God is dead.” This scurrilous bit of deception seemed to backfire on Dole among metropolitan voters in North Carolina, especially, and liberal commentators gleefully pointed out that after GOP vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, who accused Obama of “palling around with terrorists,” came to Guilford County, in the Greensboro-High Point metro area, and praised it as the “real [read conservative Republican] America,” the county went for Obama by 18 points. (Washington Post, October 17, 2008)
Among rural and small town whites, however, a torrent of rumors, emails, ads, and flyers suggesting that Obama was a Muslim or even the Antichrist seemed to intensify fears and hostilities rooted in his race. Arkansas, Louisiana, and Tennessee accounted for three of the four states where the Republicans actually fared better in 2008 than 2004. Overall, only 22 percent of the counties nationwide voted more strongly Republican in 2008 than in 2004, and according to the New YorkTimesmap, as seen through my tired old eyes, at least, some three-fourths or more of them were in the South. In general, the populations of these predominantly rural counties tended to be whiter, poorer, less educated, and more evangelical than their peers elsewhere in the region. The South could claim practically all the counties where the Republicans gained an additional 10 percent or more of the vote in 2008, and one-third of the residents of these counties were Southern Baptists.
Believe it or not, I’m actually a-thinkin’ that a more conservative GOP choice might have meant even more dark of these red splotches on the South’s electoral cheeks. Skeptical at best of his ideological bona fides, the folks on Johnny Mac’s right flank (to whom he was forced to keep pandering during the campaign when he should have been wooing Independents and undecideds) weren’t exactly his most gung-ho troops. Compared to 2004, GOP turnout was down 1.3 percent across the country this year, and given the anticipated white backlash against the Obama camp’s massive voter registration effort, it surely means something that Republican turnout was essentially flat with 2004 in fast-growing Virginia. Nor should we overlook the 25,000 ballots for Libertarian Bob Barr in North Carolina, where the Obama victory margin was fewer than 14,000 votes.
Although the counties that were redder this year than in 2004 are home to a decided minority of the region’s people, some analysts seem to have fixated on places like Cleburne County, Alabama (total vote, 6468) and Itawamba County, Mississippi (total vote, 9265) in pouncing on the 2008 election results as evidence of the South’s ongoing marginalization in national politics and arguing that the Democrats should stop wasting their time on the region in presidential elections. In doing so they seem unable or unwilling to see that the South is no longer, and, for that matter never has been, simply Cleburne or Itawamba writ large. Although they were not necessary for an Obama victory this time, the fifty-five electoral votes the Democrats accumulated in winning Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia might well come in handy in future contests. Moreover, in Georgia where McCain’s final five point margin was much slimmer than once anticipated, the Obama campaign’s belated decision to run ads targeting metro Atlanta, with its large population of white newcomers and African Americans, might have indicated recognition of a lost opportunity and foretold a more formidable effort in that state in 2012.
On the other hand, in the short term, at least, it’s obviously difficult to see the Democrats investing major time or resources campaigning in states like Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Oklahoma, or South Carolina where the electoral payoff is relatively puny and too many white voters’ hard-line attitudes not only on race, but religion and other social issues seem unlikely to soften anytime soon. Likewise, much like the Democrats in the era when they could count on essentially this same category of whites to maintain a “Solid South,” so long as their opponents leave these states uncontested in presidential elections, the Republicans have no particular incentive to pay much attention to them either.
Although the hasty proclamation of southern political irrelevance clearly doesn’t apply to all southern states, both the 2006 and 2008 elections have given reason to suspect that the Republican Party’s strong and sustained tack to the right may have unwittingly marginalized the GOP and left it with a shrunken core of support heavily concentrated in the South. With southerners occupying nearly half of the party’s congressional seats after the 2008 races, political scientist Merle Black suggests the Republicans might have “maxed out on the South” and in the process, ”limited their appeal in the rest of the country.” I’m not fit to carry Merle’s briefcase, but I’m guessing he’d be the first to tell us that the truly substantial evidence needed to evaluate the second half of this proposition won’t be available until about this time in 2012. The real meaning of any election, it seems, is something we can’t even begin to understand until we’ve had the next one.

Posted by JC at 12:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)