Eric Alterman: The Democrats need a candidate who speaks to Springsteen voters

[babylonsister]

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-alterman-democrat-presidential-candidates-bruce-sprinsgteen-20190403-story.html?fbclid=IwAR0fPTYdTJq8oicO3V_peK-m8LASzNRJjAq5-AR5X7xxgW_LaUnmwkyiGVI

The Democrats need a candidate who speaks to Springsteen voters
By Eric Alterman
Apr 03, 2019 | 3:15 AM

snip//

The candidates should start by thinking about Bruce. He is literally everything Donald Trump is not. He is self-made. He is honest. He is famously hard-working. He does not rip people off. And though he is rich, he understands and empathizes with those left behind by the global economy. This has been the primary theme of his art since 1978’s “Darkness on the Edge of Town.”

Springsteen has written more songs about the dignity of work than can be listed on this page, and the candidates might want to spend an afternoon listening to them. He’s written about the terror displaced workers feel when they see their children living in cars (“Seeds”). He’s written about the economic collapse of the New Jersey town where he grew up (“My Hometown”). And his fans trust and forgive him, even when they disagree with him. I was at Madison Square Garden once when the cops in front of me booed the opening of a song about a young man killed by police. (“41 Shots.”) But they cheered the next one.

More than 20 million working-class voters identify as neither Democrats nor Republicans. Democrats need to reach a majority of them if they are to win crucial states Clinton lost. The trick is, they need to do this at the same time they excite the base of women, minorities and young people to turn out in numbers sufficient to put them over the top in urban areas. Here, too, Springsteen has much to teach.

Springsteen shows are multigenerational. I took my Kanye- and Jay-Z-loving daughter to see Bruce at the Meadowlands the week she left for college for the first time in 2016, just as I had seen him the week I left for college for the first time 38 years earlier. There were 60,000 of us — a bigger number than Trump’s margins in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan — and the crowd was younger than she was, older than I was, and everything in between. OK, it was not “the promised land.” But we were an America that celebrated our differences, our immigrant past, and our belief that we could one day be better than we were. We sang and danced, but we also believed.

Bruce will turn 70 this year and yes, he is a white heterosexual male of the kind decidedly out of fashion with Democratic activists. But I’ll bet the female and non-Caucasian candidates in the race would love to have his support. The Democrat who earns Springsteen voters will have to speak honestly and sympathetically about the problems that ail the white working-class voters who pulled the lever for Trump at the same time they are able to excite the members of the base who identify with Black Lives Matter, Democratic Socialists of America, Planned Parenthood, the Human Rights Campaign, Greenpeace, etc.

Springsteen does that. And so, perhaps, can an honest politician who tosses the playbook of the past, ignores the polls and the consultants, and speaks honestly and authentically about the challenges we face as a nation without whitewashing our past. He or she won’t be able to solve all the political pathologies that led to the Trump presidency, much less the ones he has caused or exacerbated while in office. But they can certainly blow away the lies that have left so many millions of Americans lost and brokenhearted. And then we can all get back to work; those of us who were lucky enough to be born in the USA and those who were born to run here.



Springsteen biographer Eric Alterman is also the Nation's media columnist and a professor of English at Brooklyn College.

[Cha]

1. Alterman also wrote this.. "The Liberal case against Bernie"

Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential candidacy poses a conundrum for progressives. Not since 1936, when Franklin Roosevelt said that he “welcomed” the hatred of corporate interests, has a serious presidential candidate offered so aggressive a challenge to the conservative powers that be. At the same time, however, a dangerous lunatic is president of the United States, and Sanders, of all the major Democratic contenders, is the one who will make Donald Trump’s reelection most likely. Eight years of a Trump presidency could mean the end of meaningful democracy in the United States, along with many of the rights that women, minorities, immigrants, LGBTQ people, and others now take for granted.

Let me clarify: I’ve been a fan and supporter of Sanders ever since he was elected mayor of Burlington, Vermont, in 1981. I was honored to be asked to testify before him in Congress years ago, and I voted for him in the New York presidential primary in 2016. I did so, however, not because I imagined he might win the nomination, but because I hoped that a strong showing by Sanders would help wake up Hillary Clinton to the importance of addressing economic inequality, and also to honor his brave criticism of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.

I was wrong. Sanders turned so negative toward Clinton that it hurt her in the general election. Even though he campaigned for her after he lost the nomination, roughly 12 percent of Sanders’s supporters switched to Trump, and enough of the rest supported Jill Stein’s kamikaze candidacy that it helped tip key states to Trump.

I see he's into reality.

https://www.thenation.com/article/bernie-sanders-electability-eric-alterman/

https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1287&pid=42334

[BlueFlorida]

3. He is a very good writer. nt

[jcgoldie]

2. Love the Boss

Sort of got depressed when I read he's turning 70.

[mcar]

4. Bruce is a solid Democrat!

[Cha]

5. Dare I say an

Last edited Wed Apr 3, 2019, 10:49 AM - Edit history (1)

Obama Dem?

[mcar]

6. I think you'd be correct

[karynnj]

8. Actually, the first Democrat that Springsteen actively campaigned for was John Kerry

It was also the first time he agreed to let a campaign use one of his songs. Springsteen, in several appearances in 2004 spoke to the crowd that came to hear him on the election and made the case for Kerry, who he knew from the early 1980s, before Kerry won any elected office. They met working on helping Vietnam vets. When Springsteen appeared with Kerry in Madison Wisconsin, Kerry was visibly moved by Springsteen's words endorsing him.

I suspect that one of the many motivations of the SBVT was to take away Kerry's possibility of connecting to these people via his service and the validation of his crew, many of whom were older versions of the Springsteen fans. That part of his life of unusual privilege and opportunity was the ONLY natural connection to them as it originally was to Springsteen himself. Those years, under extremely close contact, if exploited, completely destroy the characterization of him as an aloof, entitled elitist.

I would suggest, that Alterman is NOT speaking of the type of Democrat that Springsteen would endorse enthusiastically, but a candidate who can him or herself, speak to the white working class who form part of Springsteen's base. If you remember the 2008 primaries, states with a concentration of those people voted against Obama, for Clinton - POSSIBLY because he is black. Joe Biden was picked as VP because he was seen as acceptable to those people and because he had foreign policy credentials.

I would imagine that there are several 2020 people in addition to Biden, who might be seen as able to speak to the Springsteen supporters.

[bigtree]

7. I like Bruce, but this nonsense

"Bruce will turn 70 this year and yes, he is a white heterosexual male of the kind decidedly out of fashion with Democratic activists. But I’ll bet the female and non-Caucasian candidates in the race would love to have his support."

...ugh.

[Bayard]

9. I agree!

Icing on the cake would be if Bruce would actually do some campaigning for said candidate.

Raise your hand if you remember Reagan holding forth about Bruce being proud to be born in the USA.