Now book tv, joan walsh presenter falls on the state of the american middle class and what should be done to ensure future opportunities for all americans. This is just over an hour. Thats my favorite part. [laughter] good evening and welcome to todays meeting of the commonwealth of california. The place where you are in the know. I am dug sovereign political reporter at kcbs radio in San Francisco and i will be a moderator for this evenings program. Please insure your cell phone, pda and other noisemaking devices are turned off for at least on silence. And we will get underway in just a moment. First id like to tell you about some upcoming programs. This thursday, september 27, melanie, financial commentator for abcs good morning america, and Paul Schott Stevens who is the ceo of the Investment Company institute will team up to discuss the future of retirement in this daunting economic environment they will stick to the current crop of retiring baby boomers and give saving strategies for the Younger Generation for those golden years far ahead. This will be a new program this is thursday year the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. Tuesday october 2nd former connecticut senator chris dodd will be here in his new role as the chairman and ceo of the Motion Picture association of america. He will address how last technology has moved entertainment content to the cloud its created economic challenges to both the industry and government protecting the rights of the 2. 2 million cremators and makers in every state especially in california. And then three days later, friday october 5th, massachusetts congressman barney frank will be here for a Luncheon Program. I should tell you chris dodd is a 6 p. M. Program also at the club in San Francisco. Friday october 5th, barney frank will be here for a Luncheon Program on the of the Commonwealth Club can you see both dolph and frank in one week. [laughter] congressman frank will be here discussing the domestic and Foreign Policy issues pertinent to the upcoming election. It is my pleasure to extend a special welcome to any new commonwealth members of this evening. Youll need the most wellinformed interesting people in the bay area when you attend the Commonwealth Club agents all of whom are as interested as you are in savitt discussion and social interaction. Now want to this evenings program, there are question cards you should have been handed on your seats for joan walsh. Fill them out, right on the question and there will be collected and we will ask them in the program. Theres also a microphone in the audience, were there will be in a while and we will take some oral questions toward the end of the program so i will remind you when the time comes you can line up with a microphone and ask your questions. We appreciate you keeping questions short and please make sure they are questions and not statements. Copies of the new book, whats the latter with white people, on sale in the lobby. She will be pleased to sign them outside the room immediately following the program. Im going to pause for a moment and then begin the program for the radio, television and internet audience and i apologize some of this will be a little repetitive. Good evening and welcome to todays meeting of the Commonwealth Club of california, the place where you are in the know. You can find the Commonwealth Club on the internet at commonwealthclub. Org. I in your moderator for this program. Im pleased to introduce our distinguished speaker, joan walsh, editor in largest salon. Com, appears frequently as a political analyst on msnbc and other networks and she is the author of the new book whats the matter with white people why we long for a golden age that never was. Ms. Walsh has had a distinguished career as a journalist and worked at the State Capitol in sacramento. She was editorinchief at salaam for six years. Shes quite proudly from new york city, where im happy to say that her father and nine grew up on the very same street near Yankee Stadium and not a major street at that. Shes a graduate of the university of wisconsin. Ms. Walsh is here to discuss your ideas on the demographics and alliances that play in this Election Year and give her to, the possible outcome might be. Please, give a Commonwealth Club welcome to joan walsh. [applause] thank you, doug, thinks everybody. I told my best friend thats here tonight that i was nervous about this. Ive been doing all sorts of things and not getting nervous, and i told trevor i tweet a lot and someone reminded me that yesterday was the 80th anniversary of fdr most important speech at that point in his life in 1932. He was running for the presidency and he came out and sent a big defining difference between him and Herbert Hoover was that he was really going to use dhaka government to help people and get us out of the Great Depression. So, no pressure there. [laughter] i was nervous before, but then hearing that, whatever. Thats a piece of cake. I get a lot of laughter. Every time the title was mentioned, people chuckled, and Chris Matthews said today and he chuckled and said that is just a funny title even though he said it like nine times its funny every time. Thats okay. And i realized that there are three actual meanings to the title, and i am only getting to talk about one for the most part. The first is sort of the title itself. Whats the matter with white people . As whats wrong with them, why are nine out of ten sell five in the five Republican Voters today white in the country that is 62 white . Thats a question that i have been thinking about a lot. Ive been writing for so long and back in the day this he is for a long time ive been struggling with exactly why that fdr coalition fell apart and looking at it through the lens of my workingclass Irish Catholic families some of whom started the 60s as staunched jfk democrats and ended it as nixons supporters became a famous reagan democrats and now they are old republicans. This is a title but its a lot of attention and thanks to mitt romney and paul ryan and got a lot of attention they literally rush to google after watching the convention and whats the matter with white people. So i want to think sam. [applause] but, you know, a lot of the commentary focused on the nostalgia republicans seem to feel for the golden age. As i describe in my title, and we can say that that is racism or sexism and some of it no doubt is. But i think its important for us as progressives, those of us here that are progressive i hope we have some republicans, too. I think its important to think about the golden age was and that there was a golden age for some americans and it coincided with my growing up. I felt like i was the last generation of people to whom the country really kept its promises. Although with mitt romney and paul ryan got elected they would break the promise is since just under 55. We will have a chance to break promises to feel like it will be great. But, the golden age when we think about it it really was the result of the Great Depression and world war ii. It was the result of people feeling as though the tragedy created an incentive to create a big middle class that we didnt want communism and fascism and the way to prevent that was to get more and more American People a stake in society. And let them be less susceptible to those sort of isms and extremisms. So we used the government to build that great middle class. We started with of the new deal and making it easier to unionize. The g. I. Bill actually let people buy houses and go to college. It wasnt just veterans who could go to college. We were Building Public universities. The federal government was ensuring the hall of mortgages for people who maybe could have previously afforded them. And we built the roads out to the great so nervous that some of us had our golden age. The problem with that time period is that it left out a lot of people. It particularly left of africanamericans and latinos who were actually excluded from those programs or the programs despite lobbying by the liberals in the day and the naacp, the programs didnt prohibit discrimination. We know some of the suburbs we went to to have our golden age had covenants, so a lot of white people dont remember the extent to which the government helped them rise. My Irish Catholic family rose from desperate poverty to the middle class and literally one generation, but youve got this divide where a lot of people dont realize that they got help then you have africanamericans and latinos pointing to the help they got and this terrible communication gap. How can you say you didnt get something that i didnt even know you got. Thats a big problem i want the book to start to talk about. The other thing we dont think about enough and the first meaning of the title is the extent to which we all many of us congratulate ourselves on the movement of the 60s and we should. The Civil Rights Movement was the greatest movement of my lifetime. Feminism is why i am standing here. We were right to stop the vietnam war and we did the right thing. But the 60s were not an unbroken narrative of victory and happiness. They were kind of scary for a lot of people and not just white people. The crime did rise. There were urban riots, the fringe of the entire White Movement got violent. Divorce rates climbed. There was this sense the country was unraveling. And one of the things i think happened is the democrats were in charge. The democrats were engaged in the Great Society and the new round of government activism and so because they were in charge when these things seemed to fall apart they got blamed a lot of people i think blame the wrong things for the way the society seemed to fall apart. We were beginning to see offshore the industrialization. People didnt realize it but the blue collar jobs were going away so you have a constituency of people that then became republicans. The government help was rationalized, white people hadnt gotten help and these newcomers africanamericans and latinos got help, and we really wound up with a situation where my relatives and many people actually voted for policies that dismantled the opportunity structure and weve seen that over last 30 years it came crashing down and around us with the 2008 banking crash. That is the first meaning of the title and a lot of those liberals are used to that. The second meaning actually comes from a conservative critique. We now have a conservative critique with white people, seriously, and its basically whats the matter with white people, when they become so shiftless and lazy . We saw last year charles murray, a writer that was responsible for a lot of the foundations of Ronald Reagan and the notion that we thought a war on poverty and poverty one. Charles murray really stigmatized them in particular and tried to show that poverty programs made it worse by discouraging marriage and encouraging indolence and people to stop working and go on the dole. So i thought i was racist and a lot of us tried hard and succeeded in reaching his data was garbage but his message really carried. Low and behold last year i made in the newest book coming apart the state of White America and you know if ms. Veazey and relying on the dole and not getting married and having kids out of wedlock . The White Working Class are the ones falling out of stability and prosperity not because the economy changed for the jobs went away but because they are their own feelings and if you think that this kind of a fringe thing or hes a scholar, so that book was a best seller just like all of his books because the right by his books and we dont, so im not talking a lot in the one in particular but liberals need to buy more books. Its not a fringe sentiment because i started hearing echoes on the primary trail. You had Rick Santorum come out and say the problem was dependency, when the family falls apart the economy falls apart and rather than the other way around, that its harder to have stable families when the economy is falling apart. You had new gingrich call barack obama the food Stamp President and those of us that heard a dog whistle or racial coding weaver absolutely right but new gingrich was also right when he said im not talking about black people, will get all the white people, the percentage of white people is also skyrocketing again. We have independent country. Paul ryan was talking about the makers versus the takers, and that was again, saying some people have Productive Lives and some people live off the rest of us and in a very ayn randian way, very juvenile and untrue. Then you have the culmination i think just a week ago in mitt romney talking about the 47 . I dont read anything. I carried the speech its like a security blanket but i have to read this so im sure i get it right. The worst sentence and mitt romneys oration in boca raton with his rich friends was i will never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives. Thats what he said about 47 americans. He holds half the country in contempt. And so the chickens have kind of come home to work for the working class. They now hold them in the same contempt that they hold minorities so that brings me to the third meaning of the title and that is youve got to say it with a little bit of a brooklyn accent or jersey and its kind of whats the matter with white people . Arent we good enough to join your multiracial progress of collation . That is the controversial part of my book and the one that is getting the least attention what is interesting. But i felt during the 2008 primary that when Hillary Clinton was succeeding in getting a large portion of the workingclass vote and bringing them back to the Democratic Party the default for a lot of people on the left is to call that racism the only reason those people were voting for her is because they wouldnt vote for a black man. We all know that is absolutely true for some people but i didnt think it was true for a majority of people and it brought home to me something that i have the feeling in San Francisco for a long time and going back to the stories that i did for image and salon and realizing that our sort of blackandwhite, literally Race Relations paradigm wasnt working in a state certainly where the fastestgrowing groups are latinos and asians and certainly before this primary that our language was exclusionary and that white liberals in particular seem to be never happier than when they can scapegoat and show that they are the good people and those ignorant people are the trouble. So i began to think about why we continue to use such exclusionary terms about politics. I began to get really irritated. Im sorry with the idea that we are going to have a great people of color collection as though the ocean dentists and the Investment Bankers and Mexican American cops had more in common with each other than any White Americans although i guess people of color could include white people because i guess thats the color but anyway, it tends not to in the ways we use it. I came to really believe that we liberals gave up the language of the inclusion and the language of unity and Common Ground and common vision. We begin the people focused on the difference that is something that maybe we have not lived the necessity for being those people, and certainly i came to feel in the course of writing this book and more strongly in the last few weeks and months democrats have an opportunity to speak to this constituency that left them a long time ago. I dont like to say i told you so. But there was a poll last week that showed the president is competitive with the class if you take this out all of the equation which is the difficult thing to do that if you take out southerners, president obama is leading mitt romney in the midwest. Thank you come although restructuring probably come and he is basically tied in the northeast and the west. Thank you, paul ryan. I saw the poll that showed that hes gone from being 20 points ahead with the voters over 60 to being four points ahead in just a couple of months. So they have managed to even turn off and alienate the core of the base. So i feel like it really does create a new opportunity for liberals to be the people that were talking about an inclusive america that works for all of us including White Working Class people to put the Government Back on the side of creating a middle class to recognize what the government did and to be the ones that are the people who believe in american exceptional some frankly and that we could have a just and prosperous multiracial america that our country isnt going to fall apart and didnt fall apart when we became so diverse that ever diversity which is what they used to say which they seem to have lost heart on. So the challenge between white people too in the cultural war and the age of the culture war heard above the left as giving up but the challenge for a lot of white people is do we really like that term and will we accept being just one out of many, not the dominant form to which everyone else is supposed to conform. I think what we have seen and weve seen so much in california and we see the children i