Trump supporters

Zohar Lazar

James Wolcott in Vanity Fair:

...Since the election we’ve heard a steady tom-tom beat even from those on the left, such as Bernie Sanders, that it was economic anxiety that drove many traditional white working-class voters away from the Democrats into the pelican flappers of Donald Trump.

But the hate, bigotry, and cackling cruelty of the circus maximus that is Trump’s first term carries too loud a primal yowl to be ascribed to stagnant wages and factory closings. Something far more septic and serrated is going on. Deep data mining, as opposed to anecdotal fishing at the diner, has unearthed a more plausible driver for the Trump victory: not “economic anxiety” but racial animosity. 

A roundup of post-election studies and surveys by German Lopez at Vox cited a paper by a trio of social scientists that found “that voters’ measures of sexism and racism correlated much more closely with support for Trump than economic dissatisfaction after controlling for factors like partisanship and political ideology.” 

The headline for a long, exhaustively detailed article in The Nation by Sean McElwee and Jason McDaniel slammed home the point with a two-by-four: “Economic Anxiety Didn’t Make People Vote Trump, Racism Did”...

https://t.co/dVoM9aLh0b pic.twitter.com/mQZZ0bIK1v

— Matt Davies (@MatttDavies) October 18, 2018

Gavin Newsom's cognitive issue

More on that Garofoli story in the Chronicle on Gavin Newsom:

Since childhood, Newsom has suffered from dyslexia, a learning disorder that makes reading difficult. Newsom rarely reads a speech on paper because he can easily lose his place. Reading off a teleprompter isn’t much better...Newsom now deals with it by taking an hour of preparation for every minute of a speech he gives. He has to memorize parts of it and riff off others. It’s “profoundly difficult,” he said.

How does Newsom inform himself on important issues if he can't, as this suggests, even read a newspaper---or briefing papers? Seems like he has to rely on staff and advisers before making a decision on public policy, which makes them almost as important as Newsom himself.

“I can intellectually deal with an issue, but I have to see it firsthand,” Newsom said. “You’re going to talk to me about homelessness, I have to get out on the streets. You’re going to talk to me about a project, I have to go out and see the site. All of the sudden then, it three-dimensionalizes[sic] and has completely different resonance and different meaning.”

That isn't reassuring. Seeing individual homeless people on the street may evoke compassion and suggest the need for government action, but it tells you nothing about the scope of the problem, its causes, or the possible cost to do something about it---or even about what kind of action might be effective.

Newsom apparently dealt with this issue effectively when he led the move to get Care Not Cash on the ballot in 2002 and then as mayor create some effective policies to mitigate homelessness in San Francisco.

Governor Newsom could visit the high-speed rail site pictured below, but what would that tell him? That, yes, the project is under construction, that maybe he should support it---and keep creating those jobs, since unions are supporting him and are an important part of the Democratic Party's base---and supporters of the project. 

High-speed rail site near Fresno

Garofoli refers to half a dozen labor unions that support his election. Newsom responds:

“You think you can buy me? I promise you, given the opportunity I will prove to you you are wrong,” he said. “I am grateful for support. But it doesn’t change my point of view. What changes my point of view is facts and conditions.”

This is a naive sense of human psychology, as if massive support by labor unions couldn't possibly influence his conscious decisions on issues. I guess we'll see how that works out in practice.