Tom Godat, a union electrician who has always voted for Democrats, cast his ballot for Donald Trump last year as “the lesser of two evils” compared to Hillary Clinton.
He’s already a little embarrassed about it.
There’s a lot that Godat likes about President Trump, especially his pledge to make the country great again by ignoring lobbyists, challenging both political parties and increasing the number of good-paying jobs.
But Godat was surprised by the utter chaos that came with the president’s first month. He said it often felt like Trump and his staff were impulsively firing off executive orders instead of really thinking things through.
“I didn’t think he would come in blazing like he has,” said Godat, 39, who has three kids and works at the same aluminum rolling plant where his father worked. “It seems almost like a dictatorship at times. He’s got a lot of controversial stuff going on and rather than thinking it through, I’m afraid that he’s jumping into the frying pan with both feet.”
HOW COULD YOU POSSIBLY THINK ANYTHING ELSE WOULD HAPPEN? But wait, it gets better:
Godat commutes more than 30 miles south to Bettendorf, where he gets paid a base wage of $34 per hour to help prepare aluminum used for airplanes and cars. There’s a shortage of trained electricians, and last year Godat said he worked 600 overtime hours, bringing his total pay to about $110,000. His wife provides in-home care for the elderly.
$110,000 in Davenport, Iowa is the equivalent of $205k in NYC, $115K in Texas, $160K in Los Angeles, and $93K in WV. You can calculate your own location by clicking that link. $110k in Iowa, like $93K in WV, is fucking RICH.
Tom Godat, you’re not economically anxious, you’re an asshole.
efgoldman
I am so fucking sick of these “human interest in politics” stories about white Shitgibbon vaters who are apparently too fucking stupid to get out of the way when someone’s throwing a rock right at their heads.
Fuckem.
Fuckem all.
BCHS Class of 1980
Just $93K in WV? Or is that just for your Pittsburgh-adjacent portion of the state? But your basic point stands: the fcker ain’t poor.
Hunter Gathers
I’m willing to bet that he spends at least half of the time that he’s earning that $34 an hour complaining about welfare, muslims, and, of course, ‘The Blacks’.
Gelfling 545
This is similar to the few people I know who were/are Trump supporters. They weren’t economically anxious. They are pretty comfortable compared to many. They just felt that somehow, they should have MORE and they were pretty sure that it was the fault of all those folks living luxuriously on social services or maybe Mexicans that they didn’t.
?BillinGlendaleCA
But he’s economically anxious, please feel his pain. (spits)
Arclite
LOL, bigfooted by Anne Laurie.
Yeah, it would be funny with all of these people with Trump Remorse if it weren’t so tragic.
Big R
Link to purchasing power calculator is broken.
Patricia Kayden
And we’re supposed to reach out to Godat and his ilk how exactly? He watched Trump act like a dang fool during the election cycle and still voted for him. He heard Trump make racist, sexist, Islamophobic comments during the election cycle and still voted for him. He heard Trump encourage rally attendees to attack protesters and still voted for him.
I hope he suffers along with the rest of us.
Cacti
After voting for Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party, Tom Godat shocked when leopard begins devouring his face.
RaflW
One suspects that the “evil” he saw in HRC was more to do with sexism than anything else. I’d wager Hunter Gathers that this dude spends plenty of work time complaining about his wife. And HRC probably seemed like his wife, but much more fully empowered.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@efgoldman: it gets worse
A “progressive Republican”, pro-union Republican, who likes Trump because he’s doing what he said was gonna do, but he’d better not do the biggest thing he said he was gonna do. And a twenty-three year old falling to sleep to Fox News every night? That’s kinda sad.
Jerzy Russian
Christ, what an asshole.
Cacti
It’s not like Trump hid the fact that he planned to preside like a banana republic dictator.
The Tom Godats just didn’t care because “Trump that bitch”.
Kay
My son’s a union apprentice electrician and some of them just didn’t like Clinton. I personally feel there was a healthy dose of sexism involved but I feel like people went out of their way to pretend it wasn’t happening. I say it anyway even though I know it upsets people because I know what I heard.
I heard the complaints and the language they used and it was pretty damn obvious to me. I don’t know if his local is representative of electricians in general but they are overwhelmingly male. His “class” started with 25 and there was one woman. She’s gone. They now have zero. 100% men.
kmeyer the lurker
I think there are essentially two kinds of Trump voter. Since he’s such an obvious grifter, there are those such as this rich sap who is really just a mark. He listened selectively to his campaign and voted on the stuff he thought sounded good. That’s the first type: the mark. The second are those who (quite mistakenly) think they are in on the con. These are where the white supremacists et al come in. Sure, they’ll get enough shit that ruins Mexican-American’s lives to make them think that they are in on it, but will get no actual improvement in their own lives.
schrodingers_cat
Actual working class folks I know, voted for Hillary. The only T voter I know is not poor. He is Jewish and suffers from a chronic disease. And like all T voters, he is an idiot and an asshole.
jk
Tom Godat is clearly an idiot and reminds me of a person described in a Bob Dylan song: “it’s a wonder that he still knows how to breathe.”
Irony Abounds
This begs the bigger question: how can someone be so fucking stupid to think that Trump wouldn’t immediately set everything on fire the minute he was inaugurated and yet they can earn $100,000 a year in Iowa (or anywhere). Also, too, my guess is Mr. Durant has somewhat pale skin.
KG
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
On the bright side, it means he’s not getting laid, which should reduce the chances of this particular vein of stupidity from being passed down biologically.
Baud
@Kay: I believed we were stronger and more numerous than they were. I was wrong, at least in the states that mattered.
lollipopguild
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I cannot wait until the day that this idiot and his dad wake up to find that their crops are going to rot in the fields while the son takes a 50% pay cut to work even more hours than before. And both will blame Obama.
Cacti
@kmeyer the lurker:
Having someone lower in the pecking order than themselves is the only reward they seek.
W.E.B. DuBois identified this as the “public and psychological wage” of whiteness, regardless of an individual white person’s level of affluence. More than 80 years later, it remains, unabated.
Baud
Second order of business for Perez — eliminate Iowa’s first in the nation status.
Kay
Again, I know this upsets people but the facts are I canvassed these people for Obama and also for Clinton I think Obama’s maleness was a point of commonality for them. They connected with him on his role as a father and husband and man. I know this. It happened. They liked him and one of the things they liked about him was what they had in common with him. Now maybe she could have been better at campaigning, I don’t know, but there wasn’t enough commonality there and since Obama and Clinton have exactly the same policies you tell me.
sigaba
@Gelfling 545: What good is it making $100k a year if it isn’t guaranteed you’re a order of magnitude better off than minorities? The whole understanding of civil rights for the WWC was Those People got the vote but We kept untrammelled economic and cultural supremacy.
Also the “economic anxiety” isn’t about the voter themselves, it’s what happens when they notice that other white people are doing badly and they’re terrified there doesn’t seem to be a net. Thither but for the grace of God.
White people living in rural areas, on food stamps and dealing with drug problems, is literally the reverse of every lie white people ever told themselves about why urban blacks deserved their poverty and squalor. Blacks in the ghetto are all drug dealers and thugs, they get what they deserve, so the myth goes; the prospect of having to apply these same myths to poor whites is unbearable.
tobie
Economic nationalism was likely the big selling point with all these folks. Democrats got tarred as corporatists who don’t give a damn about working stiffs. I think a lot of that had to do with running a female candidate who by virtue of her gender and time in DC couldn’t pass herself off as a working stiff. Culturally Trump is blue collar, even if he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and likely never pounded nails. Blue collar men saw themselves in him and saw HRC as the person in management with spreadsheets cutting their jobs. This sucks.
Cacti
@Kay:
I look at it this way. Hillary Clinton got fewer electoral votes than fellow Dem Presidential losers Al Gore and John Kerry. In what way was she qualitatively different than either of those two, apart from having ovaries?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Kay: I’m haven’t been able to find it, but I swear there was a poll that showed Sanders supporters had a (slightly) more favorable opinion of Bubba than Hillary. Since the stated objections to Hillary were mostly her having “supported” the things her husband did as president, it gets harder to deny the role that gender played in the election.
Davebo
@Kay:
So they decided they had more commonality with a billionaire from New York who inherited his way into the game?
Sorry, I’m not buying it. Either that is wrong, or they are as dumb as a box of rocks.
FlyingToaster
@Baud: Out of his hands, I believe. The caucus states want a first. Iowa won.
Cacti
@tobie:
Thanks, Bernie!
schrodingers_cat
@tobie: A line BS peddled throughout the primaries until just before the convention. We see his supporters regurgitate the same nonsense after the election.
RaflW
When I think of the median Trump voter, I think of the Kirk-era Star Trek episode Mudd’s Women. They are that irreducibly sexist idiots.
Hunter Gathers
@Kay: It was sexism. Your average guy, especially the married ones, absolutely despises women.
He hates the ones who won’t fuck him.
He hates the ones he works with (ball busting bitches).
He hates his wife, who forces him to work instead of spending everyday getting drunk with his boyz on cheap beer.
But most of all, he hates women because he has to behave around them. He can no longer channel his inner 14 year old at all times, and that is hands down the most offensive thing of all time.
His life would be better if bitches knew their place, like they did when his Pappy was his age.
Grumpy Code Monkey
Too many people equate “successful” (and yes, by some metrics, Trump is “successful”) with “smart”.
RoonieRoo and I netflixed “Margin Call” last night, a very good movie about the 2008 meltdown. Jeremy Irons plays the CEO of a nameless investment bank. At one point he tells the analyst who’s discovered that the bank is sitting on a ticking time bomb of worthless mortgage-backed securities to explain the problem to him “like I’m a two-year-old child, or a Golden Retriever. I didn’t get here because of my brains, I can assure you.” His job, as he puts it, is to listen to when the music is about to stop and make bets accordingly.
That’s how Trump operates. He doesn’t know how any of this shit actually works (which any one of us could have told Godat two years ago and saved us all the trouble); he sniffs the wind, listens for the music, and places his bets accordingly. Trump’s a gambler who’s one step ahead of the sharks he owes money to.
This is obviously not how you’re supposed to run a country.
And, believe it or don’t, that’s why I didn’t freak out about Trump winning, and why I’m not that freaked out now. Between his staff’s incompetence and the inherent inefficiency of the federal government (a feature not a bug), he’s going to be hard-pressed to actually put his agenda into action.
I’m not saying he can’t or won’t do a lot of damage – he can, and he will. Just that he can’t just snap his fingers and things magically happen. Congress still has to pass legislation before it gets to his desk, courts can neuter badly-worded EOs, and policy has to be implemented through one of the largest bureaucracies on the planet.
Kay
@Baud:
I’m agnostic. I no longer care what states we carry as long as it’s “enough” so I’m not pleading for “outreach” or whatever.
But if we are going to keep talking about white working class men we are going to have to address the “men” part of that. It’s real. Who are skilled trades? They are men. These people are my clients. Gender is absolutely part of what they are and it is absolutely part of connecting with them. They themselves don’t even dodge this! We talk about it! I don’t know why Democrats refuse to even admit this exists.
When I talked to them about Clinton and they imitated her and made her out to be nagging or bossy what was that? What was going on there?
FlyingToaster
@Davebo: The billionaire sports a peni$. A wee little thing, mind you, but not a va-jay-jay.
TriassicSands
Tom’s definitely an asshole — he voted for Trump. But he probably is economically anxious. It doesn’t sound like he’s got much going for him, but he has a job that pays almost five times the federal minimum wage. If that went away — as so many high-paying working-class jobs have — what would he do? He’s 39. He’s probably one of those people who secretly knows how lucky he is but could never admit it publicly. By keeping that inside he increases his anxiety and is willing to trade anything (as long as it costs someone else and not him) for a chance to keep his job.
Surprised? Yeah, because there was no sign of chaos in Trump’s campaign.
Chris
In other words, much like the Joe the Plumber scenario where they tried to convince people that unfortunate working class souls just barely making it on $250,000.00 a year were going to be destroyed by the Obammunist taxes.
I really viscerally loathe the “White Working Class” narrative. Mostly because I, in addition to being white, Christian, straight, cisgendered and native-born, am living right on the edge right now in terms of how little money I bring in and have been for far too long. I vote Democrat, and I’m far from unique in that – if I recall the polls correctly, once you drop to the earning-less-than-50,000-a-year demographic, even white people broke for Hillary. I am sick to fucking death of watching assholes with very comfortable lifestyles who grouse about taxes and spending being paraded around as the voice of the White Working Class just because they don’t have a college degree, or live in the South or West, or own a pickup truck. (Usually a yuuge and costly one that’s well beyond the means of actual working-class people).
Between that and the crowning of silver-spoon princeling Donald Trump as a “working class billionaire,” this election cycle was pretty much the death of the term “working class” as anything that actually means something.
Baud
@Kay:
We are not allowed to call that demographic racist or sexist.
raven
@Cacti: I didn’t like any of them and I gave money and voted for all three.
Mike in NC
Read that WaPo article on Sunday. Fuck all those clueless idiots. Maybe instead of White Working Class, we can call them the White Jerking Class.
TriassicSands
@schrodingers_cat:
It sounds like the “chronic disease” is stupidity.
aimai
@Kay: Why do you keep saying it upsets people? I assumed the white working class was sexist and misogynistic and wouldn’t like to vote for a woman.
Baud
@FlyingToaster: Huh? When was that decided?
Kay
@Hunter Gathers:
Oh, I don’t think that. I don’t think they hate women. They hire me. I’m a woman. I have an electricians local all of my own, practically. I get all of them.
But. They liked Obama and connected with him in some way they did not with Clinton and part of that was because IMO Obama passed some “test” of maleness. I never ever heard one word about how Obama was effeminate and I did hear that about John Kerry. They did not connect with John Kerry.
raven
@Kay: Kerry couldn’t shoot the rock.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I was gonna say, so they all read MoDo, but
I guess they don’t
When HRC choked up a bit in Nhew Hampshire in ’08, Dowd wrote that while she was watching that, (from memory) a woman in out NYT office said, “If she’s gonna cry over a campaign, how’s she gonna take on bin Laden?” I’d bet the mortgage that Dowd was quoting herself there.
TriassicSands
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Without disputing your contention I would point out that Hillary supported W’s going to war in Iraq. That’s a huge potential negative that Bill, out of office, doesn’t have. (Though it would be fair to ask, why, if Hillary had to shoulder responsibility for his policies/screwups, shouldn’t he have to do the same for hers?)
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Kay: HRC sounded like their mother-in-law.
Kay
@aimai:
Not you. I read your comments during the campaign.
I don’t think it was discussed enough, examined enough. I felt like there was immediate pushback every time it came up. “NO- THAT wasn’t what it was!” Partly it was because of the whole Bernie Bros thing. It got all mixed up with that.
I mean, I’m a woman and I work with these people. I feel like I’m a bit of an expert and I know what I saw :)
You know exactly what I mean- making fun of how she talks, making her out to be bitchy or bossy or a crazed control freak or saying things like “I CANNOT listen to that WOMAN for 4 years!” like it was just unimaginable torture. It was everywhere.
FlyingToaster
@Baud: Back during the Clinton admin, IIRC. It’s Iowa Caucuses, NH Primary, SC Primary, NV caucus, and then everybody else.
Sane proposals — like rotating the Jan/Feb among the smallest states (WY, AK, VT, SD, ND, MT), or doing a region at a time, and rotating them by region (New England, Northeast/Midatlantic, Midwest, Missouri Valley, Gulf (TX LA FL), South, Mountain West, Pacifica) all failed. The state governors or lege’s hated the idea of letting the national party decide.
Baud
@Kay: IIRC, the GOP pitched Kerry as effeminate. Their attack on Obama was that he was a rock star and a terrorist sympathizer. Obviously, those didn’t stick.
Baud
@FlyingToaster: Ok. I think they are revisiting everything this time. So hopefully Iowa loses the top spot.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: Yup, remember the purple bandaids at the GOP 2004 convention?
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: Still smarting over your loss there in 2016, eh?
Baud
@?BillinGlendaleCA: A classic IOKIYAR.
Baud
@?BillinGlendaleCA: I should have called them stupid like Trump did.
waysel
@Kay: I’m almost convinced we should run a man next time, if we have a next time. I don’t like it , but I think the USA ain’t ready for a female president.
hedgehog mobile
@efgoldman: Cosign.
Kay
@aimai:
The Bernie Bros ( if indeed they exist!) are different. This is white working class men. This isn’t like college Lefties.
But every time I would say “I think they don’t connect with her because she’s a woman” that would start the whole Bernie Bros thing and that’s not what I’m talking about. I don’t know how to explain this because I didn’t connect with Obama on that basis but there was something going on there and IMO it had to do with maleness and that’s what transcended race. They are uncomfortable with the “Mommy Party” aspect of the Democratic Party. That’s the part they have trouble with and for some reason Obama didn’t bring that to mind for them. He was like the father figure of the mommy party :)
aimai
@Kay: People said the same things about Elizabeth warren, but she won anyway. Its a mistake to think that people vote exactly the way they tell you they feel about a candidate. They don’t. And there is an anti-elite/anti professional thing going on with working class guys that make them protest a lot about voting for anyone, any time. And a lot of them don’t vote. On the republican side its cloth coat vs fur coat. Republicans loathed Bush senior because he was so effete–but they voted for him anyway.
There’s no point wondering how sexism and misogyny played out in the election this point. She won the popular damned vote. That only isn’t good enough because a combination of factors other than her sex also drove 70,000 voters out of their hovels to vote for Trump. Those people were never going to vote for Clinton in the first place, whatever her sex, because she was a democrat. But they might not have voted for trump (or turn dout to vote at all) except for a confluence of factors including rage at a black president, rage at black lives matter, a constant drumbeat of fake stories about immigrants killing and eating our helpless citizens–a shitload of stuff.
I feel like focusing on the sexism of some democratic voters is like telling people that we can never risk putting up a woman for a top job.
waysel
@Davebo: They are dumber than said box of rocks.
FlyingToaster
@Baud: I don’t see any way of getting the states involved to agree.
Of the 4, only Nevada has a reasonably strong state D party. NH is currently a mess (trust me, I’m 50 miles away and they’ve got a vocal wingnut contingent running most municipalities; only Maine is more embarassing). SC is white Xtianist dominated (2 cousins there), and Iowa (which I grew up south of, back pre—Butcher of Guatemala) has become corn tassels, crystal meth, and hillbilly heroin.
Since states foot the bill for primaries, they want them all on the same day. State parties foot the bill for caucuses, so there is some leeway there, if inertia and tradition can be overcome.
Adria McDowell (formerly LurkerExtraordinaire)
This guy is making well over median annual income (and we don’t even know how much his wife makes- we could probably add another $25,000 to that $110,000 AT LEAST). I don’t want to hear about damn “economic anxiety” ever again. I’d like to see how people making $50,000 or less a year voted.
Shit, I wished we made $110,000. My husband’s a contracted aircraft mechanic (and federally licensed) and he makes $8.20 an hour. (He does get per diem, but even that isn’t much).
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@TriassicSands: the Iraq War decided my primary vote in ’08, and while I was with Clinton the whole way this time, I did worry about her eventual foreign policy. But I heard a lot more about NAFTA, the crime bill and 90s financial regulation in the last year than I did about Iraq.
Mike in NC
@Hunter Gathers: In this country in the year 2016 AD, the Blessed Virgin Mary couldn’t have been elected POTUS. Maybe things will change in 100 years, maybe not.
Baud
@FlyingToaster: Iowa is a caucus, so the state doesn’t have to agree. But I also hate caucuses. Someone suggested that Dems go to an all vote-by-mail system and control the process without the states’ involvement. That might be something worth considering.
Kay
@waysel:
Well, but let’s narrow that down to Democrats. So Democrats have trouble with white working class men. In general.
But we know white working class men will support an AA male President, because they did. IMO Democrats have trouble with white working class men because white working class men perceive the Democratic Party as the mommy party- health care, schools, caring for people, that sort of thing. Female things. So maybe a female candidate for Democrats just highlights an impression they already have. Maybe Democrats can’t nominate a woman because they already come in with resistance from WWC men.
Chris
@Mike in NC:
Good heavens, I should hope not. Pregnant by someone other than her husband? What a sinful example. Think of the children.
Aleta
@kmeyer the lurker:
They think they will rise to a better economic level, they’ve been promised that, though these policies won’t help members of their class. But talking about class in the US, understanding it, would be socialism. We’re encouraged to fantasize about striking it rich instead.
efgoldman
@Kay:
What turned the unions toward Ronaldus Magnus, and made the now-extinct “Reagan Democrats”, was the government’s insistence that they integrate, racially and sexually. Well, that worked well, didn’t it.
Kay
@aimai:
Oh, I don’t. I feel like admitting this exists and happened allows women and everyone else to talk about it in a real way.
There’s so much defensiveness around it, even among women. I don’t care if Democrats make an effort to attract WWC men. I think they have to replace some states if they don’t- they have to add something – GA, NC, whatever, but if Democrats are going to talk about why WWC men voted for Obama and didn’t vote for Clinton and not talk about sexism then they’re just denying something that was so obvious to me that I can’t handle pretending it didn’t happen.
efgoldman
@Baud:
We are more numerous. Doesn’t mean shit if we don’t get people off their asses to vote.
aimai
@Kay: No–this was a revenge election for white people. They didn’t care who the democrats put up–they felt that 8 years of democratic/black/women’s issues was enough. Anyone who embraced the Obama legacy and coalition was going to go down in flames because people (stupid people) thought it was time for a change. That is the reason bernie did so well with some kinds of voters. He explicitly rejected and even demonized Obama, identity politics, and to a certain extent the democratic party itself. So he was a democrat for people who were sick of democrats.
I just am so sick of hearing this crap–it was a revenge election, with all that that implies. We will benefit from the flip side of that in 2018 when/if our voters come out to get their revenge.
Cacti
@TriassicSands:
Economic anxiety doesn’t really apply here. He’s not the unskilled assembly line worker or coal digger. He’s an electrician, a skilled tradesman. There’s a labor shortage in the skilled trades nationally. Tom Godat should never want for work.
different-church-lady
Oh. A little. That’s a good start. Maybe if you put some more effort in to it, you could be a hundred times more embarrased about it. Which would leave you approximately thirty-seven thousand times short of JUST HOW FUCKING EMARRASED YOU OUGHT TO BE, YOU COLLOSSAL DUMBSHIT.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@efgoldman: In some cases they even turned towards Tricky Dick, remember the Teamsters endorsed Nixon in 1972. That’s why, when I hear that the Democrats abandoned labor, I know someone is unfamiliar with their history.
TriassicSands
@waysel:
Does that make sense? States from across the political spectrum have elected women to state-wide office.
It may be that the country isn’t ready for a Democratic female president.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Kay: I’m not convinced that there was a massive number of Obama-Trump voters. I hear individual stories, but no numbers as to the scale of the phenomenon. I do think that Trump motivated infrequent voters to get out and vote, but I’ve got no data to back up that either.
gene108
@Patricia Kayden:
Run a candidate with a peni$, two testicles, and no mammary glands.
I think it is that simple.
TriassicSands
@Cacti:
Anxiety is not always rational.
When I wrote that comment and was thinking about Tom I didn’t have an image in my mind of a clear-thinking person with a lot on the ball.
Kay
@efgoldman:
I don’t think the lack of women in skiilled trades is all the fault of men in skilled trades. Women do different work and it’s skilled. Health care, for example. I don’t think nurses are keeping men out of nursing. These are categories that exist. There’s other factors in play.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Kay: There were quite a few men in the kid’s graduating class(the kid’s a nurse).
efgoldman
@Baud:
Maybe you’re not because you’re the 21st century Harold Stassen.
Fuckem. They’re racist, sexist assholes. Every fucking one of them.
Kay
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
That’s nice. I’m on a school committee and we’ve noticed more men teaching younger grades- little kids. I think it’s interesting. Something happened. It became acceptable for them to teach kindergarten.
TriassicSands
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
At the Washinton State caucus in 2016, every Bernie supporter in my precinct who spoke out against HRC mentioned her vote for the war and their fear that she would be too militaristic as president. That’s a small sample but her Iraq vote was certainly on the minds of some voters. It was less about an old Senate vote and more about who HRC is and what she would do in the future.
JMS
Only half joking that I think more competent female presidents in the movies and on TV would help. Also, HRC was not a great campaigner (to be honest, I really couldn’t stand to listen to her giving speeches) and had baggage–some of self-inflicted. A woman candidate who is an Obama-caliber campaigner would pull through just fine, I believe. I hope we have a chance to find out.
Ruckus
@Kay:
You of course already know the answer. It’s not that they hate women, they hate strong women, and even more they hate, hate, hate, that’s with the heat of a nova hot hate, hate women that might have any power over them. And I’d bet that it’s not just men that feel that way, some women do as well.
Ruckus
@tobie:
Wrong, culturally dumpf is white trash.
I’m blue collar and while a lot of my fellow, white skinned, blue collar folks are racist fucks, a lot of them are not. That’s not what we are seeing here, drumpf is white trash. He’s far worse than all the bullshit stories put together about Bill Clinton when he ran but there is no mistaking it, he is the white trash that they called Bill. Never forget it’s all projection with them.
low-tech cyclist
Maybe if they raised the base rate?
Steve in the ATL
@Chris: I’ll wager that the electrician with the $50k house spent more on his pickup truck
Ruckus
@Kay:
It was here on BJ. People that worked for her, donated to her, voted for her (according to them, and I’d bet they did) But I read people that listened to a speech that was included in the original posting and they said she was shrill or sounded off. I’d listen to it and wonder what the fuck where they on about, she sounds fine.
Maybe I’m tone deaf, a woman I was engaged to has a rather different voice and one day her best friend asked me how I could stand to listen to her. Her best friend. (In the end her voice was never the issue, what she said with that voice…..)
schrodingers_cat
@TriassicSands: Unfortunately, its not just stupidity. Its something that can endanger his life without access to medical care.
K-to-the-Jane
My incredibly wise, progressive, Catholic, 80-yr old mother–who reads BJ and the rest of the ENTIRE internet everyday (I s**t you not, the entire internet)– told me many years ago that the only thing most Americans hate/fear more than blacks is women.
Of course it was sexism.
Ruckus
@waysel:
I made that argument just over 8 yrs ago about maybe it wasn’t time yet to run a black man. I was wrong then and you are wrong now. You can’t be the party of everyone if you exclude people from running for office that are qualified based upon some bullshit rational. I don’t know who is going to run in a couple of years, I hope it is a woman, actually I hope it’s a black woman, it’s past time to break that barrier.
TriassicSands
@Kay:
People hear differently. My sister, who voted for HRC, hates her voice.
For my part, I thought Clinton sounded fine until she started to yell.
Something I’ve noticed in my lifetime:
Men, generally, have more pleasant speaking voices than women.
Women, generally, have much better singing voices than men. Beautiful women’s singing voices are very common. Men’s much less so.
Now, that may be only how I hear things and others disagree, which wouldn’t be a surprise because they have different hearing equipment than I have.
Steve in the ATL
@Adria McDowell (formerly LurkerExtraordinaire):
Really? Is this the going rate or is he underpaid? I thought airplane mechanics were well paid.
Adria McDowell (formerly Lurker Extraordinaire
@Kay: I have a friend from high school who is a male nurse. When he and his wife moved to Philly he tried to find employment as a home health nurse. All the customers wanted female nurses. I feel bad for the guy- he just wants to take care of people!
Adria McDowell (formerly Lurker Extraordinaire
@Steve in the ATL: From what I have been told, aircraft mechanics are considered unskilled labor (which is WTF HOW?) while car mechanics are considered skilled labor, so maybe that’s why? If you are aircraft maintenance working on drones, you are making six figures, but also working 6 days a week. The best pay is in working for Delta, Southwest, etc. If you work for a regional or an MRO, wages are much lower. All the major carriers’ maintenance operations are all in the South, and no offense, but I’m not a fan of the weather. We like where we are now (Columbus area).
Ruckus
@different-church-lady:
I like it when you get on your horse.
Adria McDowell (formerly Lurker Extraordinaire
@K-to-the-Jane: Your mom sounds AWESOME.
Kay
@Ruckus:
I thought she had some trouble speaking. It’s hard to do well. One thing I noticed is her face didn’t match what she was saying. I think people perceive that as untrustworthy. I was pulling for her and I had trouble with it. It’s just odd.
If you’re talking about something positive and upbeat your face should reflect that, or it seems insincere.
I turn the sound off a lot for politicians. Mike Huckabee is as bad as Clinton for “face doesn’t match words”. His disconnect is huge and for me that conveys dishonesty.
This goes beyond technical issues of an unappealing voice. This was complaints about how they felt she was bitchy and bossy, that they would somehow be taking direction from her or she would be nagging them. It was really so much about her gender.
Ruckus
@Kay:
Well if women are kept out of doing “mans work” whatever the fuck that is, then the corollary is that men will also not do “womens work” also whatever the fuck that is. But the military and the government have changed some of that and put people in jobs that their gender used to keep them out of. 50 yrs ago it was not unheard of but it was rare to see a female doctor. But now? Majority of the doctors that I’ve had over the last 25 yrs have been woman. And I think I get better care. I’ve passed on several men as docs, only one woman. Everyone of those seemed far more concerned about their career than my care.
Kay
@Ruckus:
I think it’s nice that young men are teaching younger grades because I think it’s good for boys to see that men can do those jobs. My elementary school was like 100% women. I didn’t have a male teacher until high school. I never even thought about it until I had sons and then I wondered if they were like “there are no men in this place” :)
I would have noticed the flip side as a girl- if all my teachers had been men.
Ruckus
@Kay:
Oh I’m agreeing with you 100% I hear complaints about women from other men all the time, she’s bitchy, she’s controlling, she’s cold, she’s whatever that doesn’t get him laid. It’s never his fault, ever that he doesn’t get laid. To a lot of men, women are not seen as people, they are an end to a means, getting laid. And to some women, other women are competition. All other women. The one with the (non)disturbing voice? Turned out she was jealous as hell. Much to my amazement I was getting laid every minute of the day I wasn’t in her presence. If she had been even 1/1000% correct I wouldn’t have had enough strength to feed myself.
JMG
John, you’re being unfair to that poor man. He might not be an asshole. He might just be extremely stupid.
john fremont
@Adria McDowell (formerly LurkerExtraordinaire): So is your husband out on the road all of the time going to different contracts? I know plenty of A&P mechanics and avionics techs that live on the road throughout the year contracting.Believe me, they don’t make 100 grand a year. The only ones I know that do are on DOD contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Steve in the ATL
@john fremont: that is just nuts to me. The guys turning wrenches at the MB or Volvo or Lexus dealership are all making $90-100k, but airplane mechanics are barely above minimum wage? Damn.
john fremont
@Steve in the ATL: Aircraft mechanics, avionics technicians and machinists do well at the airlines. Airlines are also unionized. The aircraft manufacturers hire contractors during production runs so it’s feast or famine for contracted mechanics and technicians. You make all of the overtime while you can get it. So that means traveling to the manufacturer or to a maintenance facility down South or in Arizona.
john fremont
@Steve in the ATL: Yes. Aviation maintenance pays differently then auto. Auto mechanics usually have set billable hours for every job whereas in general/recreational aviation it’s always been billed that the mechanic starts the clock when he begins and then stops it when he finishes. Then the owner of the aircraft haggles with the shop owner to nickel and dime as much as he can get. Henceforth general aviation mechanics don’t get paid all that well. I know of plenty of aircraft mechanics who went on to become auto mechanics because of this because they got tired of waiting for a job opening at one of the airlines.Even the airline jobs have you start out on a night shift most of the time so it wreaks havoc on your home life. In the case of United Airlines, most mechanics and techs spend years renting campers and RV’s at the employee parking lot in San Francisco waiting for openings to transfer to across the country. They work at the base in San Fran but on their salaries they cannot afford any homes or apartments there.
liberal
@raven: Heh!
liberal
@Kay:
Hillary’s simply not a good “retail” politician. Doesn’t mean she’d be a bad president. Does mean it probably wasn’t wise to nominate her to begin with.
satby
@aimai: a revenge election coupled with the results of 30 years of character assassination on Clinton. Because people I like, who didn’t vote Trump, didn’t vote for Clinton either because she was “so dishonest”. I could tell them it was bs and even point to references, but 30 years of media, and other politicians (some supposedly on the same side) were calling her corrupt. And it depressed her vote, other votes were suppressed, and the people seeking revenge came out.
liberal
@Kay:
Not at all true. Hillary’s much more hawkish than Barack. Of course that has nothing to do with the rationales of 99.99% of the people who voted for Trump.
liberal
@satby:
Yep. They crawled out of the woodwork to vote against her.
NorthLeft12
Sorry John, but this guy is economically anxious. His wage and [probably] lifestyle are completely unsustainable in the scenario presented here. He could be intelligent enough to realize that, although what he thought that Deadbeat Donald would do to help him and the country is a bit beyond me.
So yeah, he is an asshole.
satby
@liberal: even though 2.8 million + MORE voted for her. She was a perfectly fine candidate. She was robbed.
Ruckus
@satby:
As were we all.
Freemark
@liberal: Agreed. Hillary was a bad campaigner. Someone running for President in this day and age has to be a great salesperson, she was terrible ‘salesperson’. Her body language and voice came across like she didn’t actually believe in anything she was selling. Her lawyer like parsing of words made it worse. She may have had the same policies as Obama but she didn’t come across as believing in those policies. She came across as if she was stating other peoples thoughts because she had to not because she believed them. Combine that with the misogyny and the GOP attacks over the years she started with a real uphill climb.
And for the record I voted for her and campaigned for her. Doesn’t stop me from recognizing the problems with her campaign.
Stan
@Gelfling 545:
I agree, same here
Stan
@Kay:
These skilled building-trades unions are not just overwhelmingly male, they are overwhelmingly WHITE male.
Where I live, pretty much every black building-trades guy I know feels like the unions are their enemy. And based on what I’ve seen I have to agree.
Stan
@Hunter Gathers:
I hope you’re joking. if not, that’s pretty offensive. I’m a pretty average married guy – OK, to be honest, I’m probably a below-average guy.
I do not despise women.
I don’t hate the ones who won’t fuck me. I’m perfectly happy not fucking women I’m not married to.
I don’t hate women I work with. I am pretty sure I only hate them at the same rate I hate the guys I work with.
I don’t hate my wife, in fact I am kind of fond of her. it’s only been 19 years, maybe that’ll change…..
Most of my friends could have said all this too.