The Gulf Between the Donor Class and the Working Class

This story was originally published on nationaljournal.com on March 28, 2016 Nich­olas Con­fess­ore’s ter­rif­ic, front-page piece in Monday’s New York Times dove­tailed nicely with a March 11 rant by vet­er­an Re­pub­lic­an strategist Steve Schmidt on MS­N­BC’s Morn­ing Joe. Both were es­sen­tially mes­sages to Re­pub­lic­an politi­cians and strategists, but their Demo­crat­ic coun­ter­parts would be well-ad­vised to think about them as well. Re­fer­ring to a wealthy 18-year old, Fort Worth-area boy con­victed on four counts of in­vol­un­tary man­slaughter in a drunk-driv­ing case after his law­yer claimed an “af­flu­enza” de­fense, Schmidt claimed that the “Re­pub­lic­an es­tab­lish­ment in Wash­ing­ton has a case of af­flu­enza. You have six of the 10 wealth­i­est counties in the coun­try sur­round D.C. You have a real-es­tate mar­ket that took a nar­row down­turn but re­boun­ded very quickly. You have a city that’s in­su­lated from eco­nom­ic dis­tress; it’s re­ces­sion-proof to some de­gree. So this Re­pub­lic­an es­tab­lish­ment, the con­sult­ing class in Wash­ing­ton, these are not liv­ing-wage jobs. And at the end of the day, I think they totally miss the psych­ic im­pact, the eco­nom­ic im­pact of the Great Re­ces­sion, of the eco­nom­ic