Democrats should focus on infrastructure
Donald Trump wants to build a wall at the border. Democrats should be the party that builds things that count.
The party should push the envelope on this one.
In addition to roads and bridges, Democrats should become the party that puts the nation’s costly clutter of overhead wires safely underground; the party of new water, sewage and natural gas pipes and tunnels; the party of new tarmacs and railroad tracks; and the party that brings broadband Internet service into the homes and offices of Americans nationwide.
In short, Democrats should embark on a great infrastructure remake: a 21st-century America for 21st-century Americans.
Too expensive? For sure, all of this will cost real dough.
But as Peter Beinart has pointed out, congressional Republicans, their ranks thinned by electoral losses this November due to Donald Trump or Ted Cruz running the top of their party’s ticket, might be in a mood to deal in reality: the country has badly neglected its infrastructure while watching the rise of gleaming new structures in Asia and in portions of the Middle East, all of which put us to shame and behind the times.
A massive makeover of our roads and bridges and such would not only help insure the country’s future; it would put millions of people to work immediately at jobs that pay good, solid middle-income wages.
For Democrats, it’s a win-win situation. By reconnecting with its New Deal roots and the brand of liberalism exemplified by Hubert Humphrey, it will render an important service to millions of Americans, some of whom are not even born yet.
At one time, the words “Democratic Party” and “full employment” were practically synonymous. Humphrey, a longtime Minnesota senator and vice president of the United States under Lyndon Johnson, wrote the term itself into law. Once upon a time it was official government policy, thanks to Humphrey and the Democrats, to put as many people to work as could possibly be accommodated.
Those days now seem long ago. Outside the enactment early in the Obama administration of a package of projects designed to stimulate a badly slumping economy, it’s been years since anyone in public life broached the idea of the government aggressively pursuing a policy of work-for-everyone.
Now and again, Democrats bring the subject up. President Obama has raised the issue, on occasion. But it has not been a consistent drumbeat. It’s been more like smoke signals that waft up and away and soon disappear.
It’s time to change all of this. Besides the economic impact, a policy geared to an infrastructure re-do can have important political consequences.
As the current campaigns for president have demonstrated, voters are a discontented lot right now, and no group has exhibited more alienation and dissatisfaction than blue collar Americans, the majority of whom are white males.
Narrowly speaking, a policy that looks to invigorate and renew the nation’s physical underpinnings has the potential to attract millions of voters to the Democratic candidate for president and thereafter to the party as a whole.
For decades now, Democrats have had a “white” problem. Exhibit A is Appalachia, of which southwestern Pennsylvania is a part. Hundreds of thousands of white men and women in our region have deserted the party — the party that for years was their natural political home. Maybe that trend can be reversed.
More broadly, after decades of neglect, blue collar white males need reassured that they, too, have a future they can believe in. The campaign has exposed a degree of anger that has shocked a great many people unmindful of the struggle for survival being waged by a substantial number of their fellow citizens.
While it may be easy for some to dismiss the outpouring of support for Donald Trump, the millions who have flocked to his standard should be a wake-up call to the party of “the forgotten man.”
It’s time to end the marginalization of such folks in the councils of liberalism and the Democratic party.
The Democratic party once nurtured and protected the working class. Just now it’s priorities are elsewhere. No finer demonstration of this was Vice President Biden’s speech at Pitt last week in support of an end to sexual violence on campuses across the country.
A vice president’s time is precious. That he chose to travel to southwestern Pennsylvania to highlight that issue is telling. He could just have easily attended, say, the massive miner workers’ rally recently in Waynesburg.
That’s where Hubert Humphrey would have gone.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books — “Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation” and “Our People.” He can be reached at grandsalutebook@gmail .com.