Enough Talk About Entrepreneurs

In the documentary “Mitt,” Romney talks about a business
owner who was complaining about his tax burden. The business owner
didn’t just pay income taxes. There were also the payroll taxes and gas
taxes. Fair enough, but what about Romney’s infamous 47 percent comment in which
he said those who did not have a net income tax liability lacked personal
responsibility? Romney failed to apply his cumulative tax analysis to
workers earning under the median. Many of those workers had net payroll
tax liabilities. Many of them paid gas taxes.

My point here isn’t to take one last shot at Romney. For
one thing, it isn’t the last shot I will take at Romney; more importantly,
Romney’s comments weren’t simply a Romney problem. They are a problem of
the culture that Romney inhabits. This cultural problem shows up in Karl
Rove’s horrible American Crossroads ad where he has
old, white business owners complaining about how Obama is taxing and regulating
them too much. At first, I thought Rove had just given up on talking to
the median voter and decided it was easier just to produce an ad sucking
up to his donors. I still think that is part of it, but I also think
that Rove’s crew had bought into the worldview of the Washington
donor/lobbyist/political operative classes. I don’t think Rove fully
grasped the insularity the ad projected.

The
problem didn’t go away with the 2012 election. Last year, a Marco
Rubio aide was caught saying what he really believed. The Rubio aide was arguing for
increasing the number of low-skill guest workers in the construction industry
despite high unemployment among low-skill Americans and noncitizen
residents. The Rubio aide argued that the low-skill American workers “can’t
cut it”.

There
are moments when a polity needs to be vigorously reminded of the contributions
of business owners and entrepreneurs (pre-Thatcher England comes to mind), but
the Republican party of 2012 went off the deep end. What united
Romney, Rove, and the Rubio aide, was that they are all inside the
same echo chamber. They all inhabited a mental universe where
the complaints and interests of business owners (as described by
those business owners and their lobbyists) were the interests of the community.
The concerns and interests of anyone else were either derivative of, or a
distraction from, what really mattered. And the public noticed. Fifty-three percent of voters said they
thought Romney’s policies would primarily favor the rich. Only
thirty-four percent thought Romney’s policies would primarily favor the
middle-class.

It
is worth comparing Romney’s life experiences to Ronald Reagan. One
of Reagan’s jobs was to talk limited government politics to GE’s unionized
and overwhelmingly Democratic employees. If Reagan wasn’t connecting with
those workers, he was failing. Reagan managed to get a sense of the
priorities of those workers. He got a sense of how those employees saw their
work, the past, and their own lives.

Eventually, Reagan had a better sense of blue collar workers
than liberal politicians like Walter Mondale and Mario Cuomo who were
rhetorically dependent on heavily mythologized visions from
the 1930s. Liberal journalists loved Mario Cuomo’s absurdly
overrated speech at the 1984 Democratic National
Convention, but Reagan carried Cuomo’s home state.

Reagan’s liberal opponents treated his appeal to wage earners as
some combination of larceny and sorcery, but the truth was that Reagan was just
better at listening to the wage earners of his own time while his opponents
believed those wage earners were duty-bound to buy whatever distorted version
of the past the Democratic party was selling. What Republican is
listening so well to the concerns of today’s wage earners when it comes to
national issues?

The
national Republican candidate who came closest to trying to recapture Reagan’s
appeal to working-class voters was Mike Huckabee. Huckabee’s speech to the
2008 Republican National Convention is a good example of his strengths and
weaknesses. Huckabee rooted his presentation in the lived experiences of
struggling wage earners. Huckabee talked about families that had to choose
between wage cuts and layoffs, and about the burden of high gas prices on a
single other who had to drive her used car to work.

It
all started very effectively, but Huckabee’s speech didn’t go anywhere.
It didn’t lead to an agenda to improve the lives of people at or below the
earnings median. Huckabee instead told a long story about a teacher who took away the
desks of her students in order to teach them to appreciate military
veterans.

Ramesh Ponnuru memorably described the story as half creepy
and half incomprehensible, but the story was filling a hole in Huckabee’s
populism. He had exhausted working-class solidarity gestures and moved on
to patriotic solidarity gestures. But Huckabee was on to something (about
the concerns of employees, not about taking away children’s desks).
Huckabee treated the concerns of wage earners as real and not merely as
derivative of, or obstacles to, the more important goals of business owners.

It is a lesson that Washington Republican leaders are failing to
learn at this very moment. Some House Republican members (one suspects
with the connivance of the Republican leadership) are trying to increase the
number of low-skill guest workers. This despite our current
population of low-skill workers having a 9.6 percent unemployment rate and a
44.5 percent labor force participation rate. This despite the extreme
unpopularity of increasing low-skill immigration among lower-earning American workers. This
despite the broad and
bipartisan support
(outside the lobbying classes) for shifting future immigration flows in the
direction of skills and English-proficiency. This despite the
various civic problems that come from importing a class of workers who might face deportation if they undergo a spell of
unemployment and who are barred from US citizenship. No doubt these
House Republicans have been told by friendly business owners and their
lobbyists that there is a shortage of low-skill workers and that the current
pool of low-skill workers can’t cut it. The only question is whether the
House Republican leaders have heard—whether they can hear—from anyone
else.