Low-paid, non-English-speaking crowds love Bush tax cuts

[Rspaight]

At $6 an hour, who needs a tax cut?

March 12, 2004

It was upbeat, precise, as organized as a meeting of the board of directors, framed at beginning and end with rousing music -- a near-perfect campaign stop:

President George W. Bush arrived on schedule. He gave his speech. He moderated a panel of five people on a makeshift stage in front of a sign that said "Strengthening America's Economy." He wove their stories seamlessly into the fabric of his re-election campaign. He engaged in self-deprecating humor that even a detractor might find charming.

And then he left -- to a standing ovation -- shaking hands all the way to the exit door of U.S.A. Industries in Bay Shore, where his campaign made this first of three stops on Long Island yesterday.

Security people kept reporters from interviewing the workers at U.S.A. until the president was on the way to his next stop.

But when workers were finally interviewed -- these people who made up the bulk of the president's cheering audience in New York -- Bush's performance turned out to be, if anything, even more impressive.

"No speak English," said the first worker, smiling apologetically.

"No speak English," said the second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth workers way-laid in the crowd.

But you think the tax cuts should be made permanent, as he says?

"Sorry, no English," said another.

It is possible that President Bush could have drawn a crowd of several hundred at lunchtime on the streets of Bay Shore to cheer his economic policies, which can be summed up in two words: tax cuts.

But if that crowd is ready-made -- the work force of a small auto parts factory whose owner has received tax breaks from the Republican-run state and town governments, and who employs large numbers of non-English speaking immigrants happy to work for $6 to $9 an hour with few benefits -- why bother?

"I understand him a little bit English," said Nubia Guzman, a packer who said she earns $7.50 an hour after four years on a job that Bush had described in his speech as evidence of the success of his tax cutting economic policies. She has no health coverage.

What did you like about him? she was asked.

"He nice," she said.

This may be all that matters in the long run. The candidate who wins is usually the one people like the look and sound of, not the one they have listened closely to. In this particular crowd, anyway, there were probably few voters. Of those who spoke English, few said they were registered.

It is the not-so-secret secret of every presidential campaign that most crowds at most campaign stops are so much stage prop. They are there to make a certain amount of noise, to look like a constituency the candidate hopes to win the votes of -- in the Bay Shore factory, Hispanic voters -- and to be as unsurprising and well-behaved as security arrangements can make them.

The campaigner is the only one with a speaking part in these entertainments. And in yesterday's performance, Bush was a star. It almost didn't matter that most of his audience didn't understand a word he said. He gave off an aura of optimism that was magnetic.

In fact, he used the word optimism at least eight times during his presentation. "I hope you get a feeling of the optimism ... " he said. "It's gotta make you optimistic ... " he said. "I am very optimistic about the future ... "

He was as upbeat as those people who do hour-long info-mercials. Optimism poured out of him.

Optimism apparently will be one of the themes of his campaign. You don't have to like Bush to see the brilliance of it. It is apparently the counter-punch to the relentless attack of his presumed democratic opponent, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), who criticizes Bush for what he terms Bush's many failures: failures of economic policy, of foreign policy, of environmental and domestic policies, of political vision.

Optimism is a deep vein in the psyche of all people, Americans especially; and if Bush succeeds at bottling it for his campaign, he will win.

What would you like to do with your life?, a shipping clerk at U.S.A. Industries named Wil Romero was asked. He is 26 years old. He thought for a moment.

"I would like to be an American citizen," he said.

[Ron]

Playing the optimism card is one of the few strategies open to Bush as actually defending his policies has met with increased skepticism. Obviously, whether it'll work or not will depend in large part how convincing he is. [And how badly the public wants to believe it.] His father was terrible at it. Reagan was good at it. Clinton never had to try it.

I haven't seen Kerry in action as often as you all have, but what concerns me about his campaign is that his stridency may begin to wear thin well before November while Bush's cool, detached optimism may in fact look better and better. But this is all academic. Kerry--if he can keep his cool and avoid [literal] finger pointing--will trounce Bush in the debates. But he's got to match Bush's cool both now on the stump and later in the debates. He's got to start looking more "presidential."

[Patrick M]

Why is the self-proclaimed party of optimism running attack ads on Kerry instead of trumping their own record?

And why the focus on negativity in Bush's SOTU and radio addresses (kill, killing, killers, terra, terra-ism, war, war, war -- see Ryan's no extraneous words(tm)).

[Ron]

Why is the self-proclaimed party of optimism running attack ads on Kerry instead of trumping their own record?

As a strategy, running on feel-good optimism may serve the Republicans well as by its vague nature it avoids addressing the specifics of Bush's policies. They tried trumpeting the specifics of those policies earlier, e.g., tax cuts created new jobs, etc., but that effort failed. If you're a Republican political strategist, what do you do? There are no new Bush policies on which to pin the campaign and the current ones are best discussed obliquely. Attacking Kerry is all they're left with.

As far as the negativity goes, as has been discussed here several months ago, creating a climate of fear and dependence best serves the interests of the Bush team--a team, by the way, that more closely resembles the Orwellian "ideal" than I ever would have thought possible in the United States.

[Rspaight]

There are no new Bush policies on which to pin the campaign and the current ones are best discussed obliquely.

That's it right there. There haven't been any new proposals of note. Mars flopped, the marriage amendment flopped, and I can't imagine steroids being a serious campaign plank. His economic platform consists of nothing but tax cuts, bureaucratic spending and unfunded mandates, and his foreign policy consists of nothing but war, threats and intransigence.

So all he's got are attacks and platitudes. And pictures of 9/11 and scary, swarthy guys trying to get on planes -- what's already being called the "Muhammad Horton" tactic. As Patrick said, an uneasy mix of stirring patriotism and queasy fearmongering.

Strap in tight, it's going to be a bumpy eight months.

Ryan