John F. Kennedy once said, “Victory has a hundred fathers, but defeat is an orphan.” In light of the Democrats’ wholly unexpected loss in November, we can reverse that statement. Failure had many sources. The party is shuffling the cards, each one marked with an excuse — identity politics; a weak slogan, “Stronger Together” in contrast to the victor’s mantra; the candidate not visiting the right states; the email brouhaha; the nominee’s stolid demeanor while her opponent spoke extemporaneously; and on and on.
Perhaps the Trump card is the loss of workers’ votes. Some polls even suggested that the Republican carried union families, something unprecedented in the last 80 years, since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In effect, Trump stole Democrats’ clothes while they were skinny-dipping in the river.
Every politician has only a limited number of topics they can emphasize in a campaign. If they spend too much time on Topic A, they might have to neglect Topics B and C.
To determine how this worked out in the recent election, I looked at the speeches President Obama made in 2016 and the 20 days before Trump was inaugurated. I used the website Americanrhetoric.com, which reproduces all of his talks.
It is true that Obama was not running, but Secretary Hillary Clinton was widely — and correctly — regarded as his logical successor. I attended two of her speeches in Nevada, and she deviated only slightly from Obama’s ideas. The main difference I detected, at least in energy policy, was her pledge to set up regulations so that fracking — hydraulic fracturing — would be banished from the nation.
So analysis of Obama’s thoughts gives a reasonable picture of what the Democrats were thinking as the election loomed. I looked for words like workers, working men and women, union(s), social workers, working families, etc. I avoided the word “work,” used hundreds of times in phrases like, “We’ve got work to do.” I also skipped terms such as “a more perfect union.”
Climate change was mentioned forcefully in Secretary Clinton’s and other Democratic candidates’ speeches that I heard. Those who had questions about it were derided from the platform as being against science, including, I suppose, astronomy.
We can compare Obama’s mention of climate and climate change (the term global warming has completely disappeared from his vocabulary) to his discussions on workers and related phrases. I skipped over non-meteorological uses of “climate.” For example, “There is a climate of fear in the world.”
What can we learn? I counted 30 talks mentioning climate and climate change in the course of little over a year, or about once a fortnight. It was discussed about 75 times in all. The president even managed to work the phrase in during a visit by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to Pearl Harbor.
What about workers? I counted only 27 talks when workers were mentioned, fewer than the number of speeches including climate change. Admittedly, the total number of references to workers was greater than the 75 for climate change. However, many of the times that Obama discussed workers were in speeches in foreign countries — Greece, Peru, Vietnam, Cuba and the like. There seemed to be less emphasis on workers when he returned home.
What can we learn from this? A candidate can only cover a limited number of topics in a talk. Workers displaced by globalization in Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania — the so-called “blue wall” on top of the map that Democrats were counting on to carry them to victory — apparently supplied the margin of victory to Trump. If they had thought that climate change was a major concern, the Democratic emphasis on it, as exemplified by its use in Obama’s speeches, would have been justified.
I saw no outcry from unemployed workers about climate change. Polling on environmental topics shows that worries about air and water pollution head the list. Climate change finishes dead last. Obama’s speeches show that he regarded workers and climate change as approximately equal in importance. While the Democrats were trumpeting climate change, Trump took off with the workers’ votes.
A footnote to Obama’s talks: The sheer volume of words is staggering. I did not count them all, but over the eight years of his presidency, there must have been hundreds of thousands. Right now, we have the exact opposite — a president who speaks in 140 characters or less. If Trump ever gets a speechwriter, I would remind him of an old proverb. Speeches are like biscuits — they could use some shortening.
