I made sure that she was able to vote for Obama. She's white and low income. Her records had inconsistencies, and she had gotten notices that she was not registered. She didn't have a computer, so I got online, found that she was listed, and asked someone from the elections department to get back to her. She said she had not voted since voting for Clinton in 1992, but that this year was really, really important.
What was apparently not very important to her after 1992 was voting in 1994, and I'm sure you all remember what happened that year. There is a widely shared mythology that the 90s were some sort of apex in prosperity, but that is not the case. The tech bubble disguised a lot of the harm caused by outsourcing and welfare "reform," and Clinton managed to blunt some of the worst Republican excesses. The real value of the minimum wage rose, but came nowhere near its peak in the late 60s.
http://www.epi.org/issueguides/minwage/figure1.pdfSome of the ill effects of lower real income and increasing expenses were blunted by the Earned Income Tax Credit, but for the most part people who were just hanging on saw their lives get worse at a slightly slower rate than under Republicans. Apparently that wasn't enough to get her to the polls.
Some things that increased in the 90s, even though those years still look good in retrospect because of how shitty it's gotten since then.
1. Homelessness
http://www.nhlp.org/html/hlb/299/299conference.htmhttp://www.geocities.com/Wellesley/9691/homelessnesshowmany.html2. Food insecurity and use of food banks
http://www.seedsofchange.org/hunger_malnutrition.htmIs the situation in the U.S. getting better or worse? "The U.S. Government just recently began gathering data on hunger and food insecurity. But the dramatic growth of private charitable feeding efforts since the late 1970s suggests growing hunger. . . . There were few in 1980, but an estimated 150 thousand private feeding agencies are . . . passing out food to hungry Americans ." (Beckman & Simon., p. 27) ". . . Catholic Charities, Lutheran Services of America, the Salvation Army and other assistance networks all reported sharp increases in requests for emergency food in the late 1990s . Catholic Charities reported a 26 percent increase between June 1997 and April 1998. The U.S. Conference of Mayors reported a 14 percent increase in requests for emergency assistance in 1998, and said that 21 percent of all requests went unmet." (Id., p. 29)
3. Prison population (continuing trend started by Reagan)
http://www.a1b2c3.com/drugs/law15.htm As of June 1999, prisons and jails held 1,860,520 people, according to a Bureau of Justice Statistics report. That's an increase of more than a million people since 1985, when the figure was less 800,000.
4. Income inequality
http://pnews.org/ArT/YuR/DiS.shtml During the years of the Clinton administration, the rich became richer at much faster rate than during Reagan's regime. In Clinton's first term, from 1993 to 1996, the average income of the richest five percent of households rose from $173,784 to $201,220. 46 Even during the Reagan years, the plunderers had not seen their income rise as fast. And in 1997 - the first year of Clinton's second term - it leapt to $215,436. All the statistics reveal that since Clinton has resided in the White House, the rich have experienced a financial bonanza unprecedented in modern times.
As economist Paul Krugman noted, "These widening disparities are often attributed to the increasing importance of education. But while it's true that, on average, workers with college education have done better than those without, the bulk of the divergence has been among those with similar levels of education. High-school teachers have not done as badly as janitors but they have fallen dramatically behind corporate CEOs, even though they have about the same amount of education." Insofar as corporate chief executives pay themselves and thus are able to collectively drive up the level of their own wages, thereby establishing the appearance of a "market-driven" norm, that should hardly be surprising.
We cannot afford any more of that. Here is Joe Bageant talking with a typical non-voter in a tavern--
http://www.counterpunch.org/bageant09092004.htmlThe truth is that Dottie would vote for any candidate, black, white, crippled blind or crazy, that she thought would actually help her. I know because I have asked her if she would vote for a president who wanted a nationalized health care program?" "Vote for him? I'd go down on him!" Voter approval doesn't get much stronger than that.
Quite a few of the Dotties of all colors came out for Obama this year. If we don't make some serious improvements in their lives, they'll stay home in 2010.