MICHAEL BARONE: Will ‘burly men’ stop the Democrats’ blue wave?
Do they live in two different worlds? White college graduate women favor Democrats over Republicans in House elections, 62 to 35 percent. White noncollege-graduate men favor Republicans over Democrats in House elections, 58 to 38 percent.
Those results are from a Washington Post poll conducted only in 69 seriously contested congressional districts, 63 of them currently held by Republicans. The numbers in other polls are only slightly different for these two groups.
They all tell the same story. These Americans live in the same relatively small slices of America (average population about 750,000), not many miles away from each other. But they take very different — often angrily different — views of where the nation is headed and on sensitive issues. . . .
It’s not that white college women are diehard Keynesians and white noncollege men supply-siders. People tend to tailor their economic theories to partisan preference, not vice versa. But the economic policies of the last two administrations and concurrent trends have had — and were intended to have — very different effects on white college women and white noncollege men.
President Barack Obama’s 2009 stimulus package was heavily tilted toward college women. As my American Enterprise Institute colleague Christina Hoff Summers wrote in The Weekly Standard in June 2009, the Obama economic team’s original idea was to finance infrastructure, construction, and manufacturing, sectors which lost 3 million jobs in 2007-09.
But feminist groups objected. Obama economist Christina Romer, Summers wrote, recalled that her first email “was from a women’s group saying, ‘We don’t want this stimulus package to just create jobs for burly men.’” So Obama ditched his “macho” stimulus plan for one stimulating creation of jobs in government and especially in education and healthcare, which had gained 588,000 jobs during the 2007-09 recession. Forget the bridge-building and electric grid modernization; let’s subsidize more administrators, facilitators, liaisons.
The results were disappointing. Sputtering growth nudged up toward 3 percent and down toward zero, which is what it was during the last quarter of the Obama administration. Administrators outnumbered teachers in higher education but added little value; government payrolls were sheltered from cuts, temporarily. There was little recovery in blue-collar jobs, and millions of men lingered on the disability rolls. Life-expectancy fell among downscale groups amid a rise in opioid dependency and deaths.
The trajectory of the economy — and the beneficiaries — seem different in the Trump presidency so far. Growth is more robust, obviously, though some economists thought this was impossible, and the the biggest gains are, in contrast to the last 30 years, in blue-collar jobs and downscale earnings.
Yep. You know, if Obama had stuck with his instincts on infrastructure, he could have cemented Democratic rule for a generation. But when he caved to the feminists, he planted the seeds for the Trump revolution.