She has no health insurance. She lost it when she got divorced and cannot afford to buy her own. “I don’t make enough to be financially stable. I live from paycheck to paycheck,” she told me. I asked Brown what she knew about the Affordable Care Act, which would probably provide some subsidies to help pay for coverage. “Very little,” she replied, although she thought the subsidies would be helpful. “There’s just so much crap being spoken from both sides, it’s hard to know what’s the truth. You just stop listening.”
Are the candidates addressing her concerns? “I met Obama four years ago when he was in Iowa,” where she used to live, she said adding: “I think he’s trying for the middle class and the lower class.” She didn’t care much for Romney. “I used to be a Mormon, for a short time,” Brown said, “and when you are a member of the church, there is not much separation of church and state.”
Tracy
Thirty-five-year-old Tracy Knox was sitting on a bench underneath a tree in the Old Market, waiting for the Saturday farmer’s market to open. Her hair was wrapped in a bandana, and she was to begin her first day selling in the market for her employer, the Great Harvest Bread Company, which she described as a locally owned chain that makes products with all natural ingredients and honey instead of high fructose corn syrup. Working at the bakery in customer service was a new job for Knox. She started there a month ago and earns about $8 an hour. Knox said that was considerably less than she earned previously as a telemarketer in the cable business. Part of her responsibilities in that job was collecting bills, she said, and she didn’t like that at all. She’s a single mother, and the hours made it difficult for her to spend time with her three sons, ages 15, 12, and 10.
“I know people make choices, and you can’t raise children on $8 an hour,” she said. “But it gives me the quality of life, the ability to go back to school, and be a mom.” Knox continued: “I’m not middle class. I grew up middle class but I can’t raise my children as middle class because of the lack of opportunities.”
Her predicament fed her beliefs about the election and the candidates. “I don’t think the candidates ever actually speak to us,” she said. “Unfortunately, America has become—I don’t want to say it—a class system. If you’re below a certain income line, they blow you off.”
Knox said she did get some child support and had a good family network in Omaha that would make it possible for her to return to school in the fall. She was hoping that would open the door to more opportunities. “I’m neither a Democrat or a Republican,” she said. “Honestly it’s the lesser of two evils.” What don’t you like about Obama, I asked. “It’s something I can’t pinpoint,” Knox answered. She said if there were “a really strong Republican out there,” she would vote for him or her. As for Romney, she said, “he’s very arrogant and has more money than I’ll have in my life. He doesn’t know how it is to eat eggs for three weeks because that’s all you can afford.”
Lindsey
Lindsey Westervelt, 30, likes her job managing the Overland Sheepskin Co., which sells a variety of attractive clothing and accessories made from sheep hides. She had worked at the store for six and a half years, and last year she became the manager. She told me it was a great company to work for, with loyal employees. Business is good. Omaha is home to big companies like Conagra, Gallup, Kiewit, Mutual of Omaha, and they supply lots of customers. When Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway has its annual meeting, many stockholders come here to buy, she told me.
Interesting interviews. Very sad that most of the people interviewed would benefit significantly from the Affordable Care Act but are either uninformed or misinformed about it.
#1 Posted by Harris Meyer, CJR on Tue 12 Jun 2012 at 12:48 PM
Harris gives us Iteration #5893 of the standard liberal "The Average Slob Is Too Stupid To Know What's Good For Him" elitist, anti-democratic nonsense.
Some pigs are always more equal than other pigs in Liberal La La Land.
#2 Posted by padikiller, CJR on Tue 12 Jun 2012 at 11:28 PM
"Harris gives us Iteration #5893 of the standard liberal "The Average Slob Is Too Stupid To Know What's Good For Him" elitist, anti-democratic nonsense."
What Padi actually believes liberals believe:
"Can you perform the surgery required to excise a brain tumor? If not, you must be stupid."
Implication? Padi believes we don't need expertise to understand complicated systems or perform complicated tasks. The "average slob" should be able to perform your brain surgery.
Of course, when you use his arguement to claim executives and lawyers don't merit their high compensation, especially when their understanding of complexity is so low in quality you could hardly imagine how the "average slob" could cause more catastrophic damage, he gets a tad upset.
The fact is that Romney care does solve relatively well some major healthcare problems:
http://m.npr.org/story/146701343?url=/blogs/health/2012/02/13/146701343/health-care-in-massachusetts-abject-failure-or-work-in-progress
And in the state that it was first implemented, people have high rates of satisfaction. The problem it avoids solving is:
"That doesn't mean everything about Massachusetts health care is wonderful. The 2006 law didn't do anything about controlling health costs, which were already among the nation's highest. Dreyfuss says that's at the top of the agenda now.
DREYFUSS: When suddenly every employer is offering insurance, everyone is paying for it and the government is subsidizing it, and it's growing at 8 or 10 percent per year - year over year - suddenly, there's a lot more interest in doing something about it."
So that is the problem which needs dealing with in future. However, we can't focus on that problem because republicans want to nulify everything.
""The president's plan assumes an endless expansion of government, with rising costs and, of course, with the spread of Obamacare," Romney says. "I will halt the expansion of government, and I will repeal Obamacare."..
"I will not go back to the days when insurance companies had unchecked power to cancel your policy, or deny you coverage, or charge women differently from men," Obama says. "We're not going back there. We're going forward."
There is no overlap at all in the two men's current approaches to health care. If Romney is elected, he'll work to get rid of the law that was based on his own plan. If the president wins a second term, he will fight to keep what he can."
We're not going to face the problems to come because republicans have defined the president and his party as their problem. And when they are in power, under Bush or Romney, they will continue to avoid looking at solutions to problems because, in their minds, they have the solutions - it's just the problems which need redefining. It will be a return to bush style government based on pr campaign, not knowledge or expertise. "invade Iran + tax cuts for the rich, that will solve everything!"
And fox news will run with that story, everybody else will be "balanced". When the "average slob" is uninformed or misinformed by his institutions, that isn't because he's stupid and "liberals are elitists", that's because institutions are failing to inform the public in a meaningful way.
#3 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Wed 13 Jun 2012 at 03:22 PM
You want elitism? Here's conservative David Brooks;
"Maybe before we can build great monuments to leaders we have to relearn the art of following. Democratic followership is also built on a series of paradoxes: that we are all created equal but that we also elevate those who are extraordinary; that we choose our leaders but also have to defer to them and trust their discretion; that we’re proud individuals but only really thrive as a group, organized and led by just authority.
I don’t know if America has a leadership problem; it certainly has a followership problem. Vast majorities of Americans don’t trust their institutions. That’s not mostly because our institutions perform much worse than they did in 1925 and 1955, when they were widely trusted. It’s mostly because more people are cynical and like to pretend that they are better than everything else around them. Vanity has more to do with rising distrust than anything else...
To have good leaders you have to have good followers — able to recognize just authority, admire it, be grateful for it and emulate it. "
Shorter David Brooks:
http://www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/archives/003626.html
"DAVID BROOKS: Okay, so our act starts with us inflating a giant internet bubble. Then that collapses, taking the country's economy with it, just as we massively cut taxes on millionaires because, we say, if we don't the government will have too much money. Right after that we blow off warnings about terrorism and let 3,000 Americans get slaughtered. We use that as a chance to lie the U.S. into invading a country that had nothing to do with the attack, killing hundreds of thousands of people and turning millions into refugees. In the middle of all that we borrow torture techniques from the Inquisition and use them on people in secret sites around the planet. Then we make billions off another financial bubble, the biggest in human history, and do nothing as it collapses, plunging the world into the greatest economic calamity since the Great Depression. To fix that we open up the national bank vault and shovel out money as fast as possible to all the criminals who made it happen in the first place. Then—as the amazing finale—we refuse to prosecute anyone for that, for the war, or for torture, and we start killing U.S. citizens with flying death robots.
[LONG PAUSE]
AGENT: ...That's a hell of an act. What do you call it?
DAVID BROOKS: The Aristocrats!"
#4 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Wed 13 Jun 2012 at 03:29 PM