For the first time that I can remember, wealthy voters appear to have voted for a Democrat rather than a Republican for President. Nationally, exit polls showed that Obama got 52 percent of the votes of voters with incomes over $200,000 a year, while McCain got 46 percent. In contrast, the two candidates roughly tied among the middle class ($75,000-150,000 income).
Popularity in Silicon Valley, Manhattan’s East Side and the Chicago North Shore is also one reason Barack Obama was able to more than double John McCain’s campaign spending. Among the plushy elite, the Obama-Biden ticket was fashionable, McCain-Palin, emphatically déclassé.
This changeover of party identification began several years ago and has many ingredients: fatigue with fighting Iraq and terrorism, agitation over the presumed verities of global warming and other environmental crises, the long cultural march of race and gender and sexual identification, the left’s increasing monopoly of the high arts, media and academia, and an open disdain for the cultural voice of conservatism (GWB’s drawl, Sarah Palin’s baby, the religious right). For the first time, Democrats are the “party of the rich.”
It is not clear, however, that the rich-as-investors are as pro-Obama as the rich-as-voters. They mutter, these former Republicans and Independents, that the new President surely will not actually do what he promised to do. They hope for hypocrisy. Privately they advise: don’t bail out Detroit. Don’t “renegotiate” NAFTA (remember Smoot-Hawley?). Don’t implement card-check. Don’t raise taxes on investments in a recession or you’ll turn it into a depression. We love you, but we want McCain’s policies.
So, from Palm Springs to Palm Beach, the Transition mystery is, will the “Change” Obama promised turn out to be as cosmetic as the President-Elect’s first appointments suggest? Will “BB” acknowledge that there isn’t any money for universal health care and that card check will destroy business confidence? Happy to take credit for an exit from Iraq that is already negotiated with the Iraqis by the departing Bush Administration, will the President add troops to Afghanistan and confront Iran and its surrogates? Maybe, as someone has suggested, he will announce that he is going to introduce “John F. Kennedy’s tax reforms,” which turn out to have been supply side.
That would be well-received in Shaker Heights and Potomac. Announce pro-growth budgetary austerity and tax cuts at night and watch the DOW rocket 1,200 points the next day.
Or will he do what he promised? Cut taxes for “95 percent of Americans” and help the “rich” learn to share? Pass one new entitlement and works project after another? If so, he’ll need to tax and print literally trillions of dollars and order Dante’s sign to be posted at the entrance to Wall Street: “Abandon Hope, all ye who Enter Here.”
The protracted hard times would be full of gallant Administration gestures, sporting public-mural artist gigs on every civic wall of every hamlet. Millions of Conservation Corps waifs would be busied learning about the evils American history while they undertook assorted forms of community organizing. And there would be Fireside Chats, of course, to raise our morale. It might help the Democratic Party politically as it helped FDR in the long, cold slog of the 30s. But it would be hell for pension funds and other investments that everyone counts on. It also wouldn’t be so good for the people in non-profits, churches, tourism, home remodeling and various service industries who have counted “the rich” as patrons heretofore.
But, meanwhile, the rich wouldn't need to fret about tax increases for households making more than $250,000 a year. Fewer and fewer would find themselves in such a vulnerable category. With a sinking stock market and businesses closing, the “rich” would become a smaller and smaller constituency.