It's the Middle Class, Stupid! - Hardcover

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1.

WE ARE WRITING THIS BOOK BECAUSE WE FAILED AND THAT’S NOT GOOD ENOUGH

There’s no other way to put it. We failed. It is as simple as that. Both of us have spent our lives focused on what’s happening with working people and seeing them get a fair shake for a hard day’s work—seeing them get the chance to move up the ladder and be honored. We put the middle class at the center of the world, because you can’t have an America without a middle class.

Well, we failed, and we have got to do better, and that’s why we are writing this book.

You need to understand the Democratic Party and why people have been drawn to it over many decades and through so much of our history. Some joined because it was the party of working people that would stand up for the little guy against the big shots. Some joined because it was the party that stood up for the poor. Some because it was the party of rights for women, Latinos, immigrants, gays and lesbians, each in their time—the party tolerant of the country’s growing diversity. Some joined because it was more supportive of abortion. Some because of the environment and climate change. Some because of spending on the arts or whatever.

Those are all good and important reasons to embrace the Democratic Party, but they are not what has animated us through all the years of struggle. Our passion for Democratic politics began with race and racial equality. That shaped us like no other issue and upended the political world like no other. But, like Robert Kennedy, we quickly came to believe that our party would only succeed and have purpose if we put work, work values, and hardworking people of whatever color at the center of our efforts. Given our country’s history, that might take a lifetime.

The two of us could not be more different. James is tall and bald. Stan is a short guy who had a ’fro. And you could not have constructed more divergent personal journeys to our common passion. Stan grew up in working-class big-city neighborhoods and galloped through Harvard and Yale before putting his spotlight on the Reagan Democrats, the disaffected working class that felt betrayed by the Democratic Party. James grew up in small-town Cajun Louisiana, joined the Marines, and barely got passing grades in law school before he started running and winning campaigns. Both of us became convinced that Bill Clinton was the extraordinary politician who was trusted by African American voters and instinctively understood he had to honor and win over the “forgotten middle class” to lead the country.

James I grew up in Carville, Louisiana, in Iberville Parish, sixty-five miles north of New Orleans. Carville was barely a blip on the map back then, and the only thing that stopped folks passing straight through was the stop sign in the middle of town.

Carville was named after my paternal grandfather, who was accorded that honor because he was the postmaster, one of the three generations of our family to hold that position. He also owned a country store, which was a big deal in a place like Carville. The store and the post office were adjacent. I remember in my daddy’s time when he ran the store, if you wanted to buy a three-cent stamp, which was what a first-class stamp cost for most of the fifties (it went up to four cents in 1959), my dad would say, “Fine, here’s your stamp.” Then if you wanted a loaf of bread and a quart of milk, he’d walk you next door and sell you that. My momma, Miss Nippy, worked selling encyclopedias door-to-door. They were hardworking people.

My dad reckoned up two tills each night, one in the store and one in the post office. I think Washington got what was coming to it and the Carville kids got the rest. Mom and Dad could never make a lot of money when they had eight kids going in and out of the store: we pretty much ate up everything they had. I helped myself to a lot more soft drinks, candy, cookies, and sandwiches than I did stamps. I didn’t have much use for those.

It’s my guess that Carville was about 85 percent black, and for the first ten years of my life it was segregated. Whites and blacks went about their business separately. It might have been hard for an outsider to figure that Carville was divided along racial lines, because there weren’t actually any amenities to segregate. My father, Chester, employed a black man in his store—something you never saw in the South—and we never used racial slurs in my family on instruction from my parents.

Because the biggest employer around was the federal government— the National Leprosarium in town was the nation’s premier center for the treatment of Hansen’s disease—Carville was a different kind of place, and it’s safe to say I grew up in one of the more egalitarian places in the rural South, which might not be saying much.

But after the Supreme Court ruled in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954, everything changed. Once segregation was declared unconstitutional, people paid more attention to what had been the norm around town for many years. After taking segregation for granted for generations, whites became fearful of what a newly empowered black minority might mean, because we knew that black people were going to assert their constitutional rights. Perhaps the prevailing sentiment was that if blacks weren’t so pushy, life would continue as it had before.

Few times in life can you pick out an experience that forced you to alter an opinion you held. I can identify one right here. When I was sixteen I borrowed a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird from the mobile library. I’d asked for a book about football but I guess the lady could tell I needed some educating. I got so engrossed in Harper Lee’s classic that I stuck it inside a different cover and read it under my desk during lessons at school. When I finished, I realized that whatever preconceptions I had about race, I was wrong—dead wrong.

My great-grandfather was born in Ireland; he came over to Wisconsin when he was twelve years old and he was in a regiment at the end of the Civil War. As a Republican in the era of Reconstruction in the South, he was with the good guys; Lincoln, the Great Emancipator himself, was of course a Republican. My great-grandfather actually served in the Louisiana legislature and in the very short administration of P. B. S. Pinchback (1872–73), the first African American governor of any state.

The Republican inclinations of the family at that time have left a legacy that lives on in me. Don’t be alarmed, my Democrat friends: that legacy is just my name. My daddy’s name was Chester and my actual name is Chester James Carville. We were both named in honor of Chester A. Arthur, the twenty-first president of the United States—and a Republican—who assumed office in 1881 after the assassination of President Garfield. Presidential names are a Carville tradition. In my great-grandfather’s day, people who were pro-Union tended to be very patriotic, and they would show this by naming their kids after presidents. My great-grandfather was John Madison Carville (after the fourth president) and his brother was Garfield (after number twenty, the assassinated one, and another Republican).

By the time I was growing up, Democrats and Republicans were standing for very different principles, and I could see which side was going to represent me. I understood from reading To Kill a Mockingbird that things had to change and I knew that the federal government had to make things change. It wasn’t as if Congress could pass a law in Washington and segregation would simply wither away. There were riots when James Meredith tried to enroll at the University of...