CLEVELAND – Tonight’s Republican convention theme will be Make America Work Again, echoing Donald Trump’s apocalyptic rhetoric about the U.S. economy under Barack Obama. “The president has been regulating to death a free-market economy he doesn’t like and doesn’t understand,” the GOP platform declares. The delegates here have varying degrees of enthusiasm for Trump, but they all seem to agree the Obama economy is a ghastly mess.
Except for the economy wherever they happen to live.
“Actually, we’re doing great,” says Donna Gottschall, a human resources consultant in Greenville, S.C. “Employment’s up. Housing’s up. Everything’s green in Greenville!”
“Oh, yeah, unemployment is way down,” says Al Baldasano, a state legislator and retired Marine from Londonderry, N.H. “Obviously it’s gotten better.”
“Things are wonderful in our town,” says Ranae Lentz, a Republican county chair from Bellefontaine, Ohio. “We can’t fill all the job openings.”
Just as most Americans say they hate Congress but routinely vote for their local congressmen, most Republicans seem to detect a national economic malaise while — with some exceptions in places like coal country and the oil patch — touting the economic progress in their local communities. They square that circle in a variety of ways — crediting their Republican mayors and governors, accusing Obama of manipulating data, or citing legitimate weaknesses in the recovery from the Great Recession. But with unemployment down from 10 percent to below 5 percent since late 2009, one of Trump’s many challenges will be persuading non-Republicans that America isn’t working even though nearly 15 million more Americans are.
Trump illustrated this problem last week when he introduced his running mate, Indiana governor Mike Pence. He said the “primary reason” for his choice was that Indiana’s unemployment rate had dropped by 3.4 percent in four years under Pence, and that its labor force had grown, which he said was “very unusual” for a U.S. state.
“It’s always bad, down, down, down,” Trump said. “Down 40 percent, 50 percent, 60 percent in some cases.” In fact, the drop in Indiana’s unemployment rate almost perfectly mirrors the national trend. And the labor force has grown in all but nine states, with the worst drop only 3 percent in oil-dependent North Dakota. In February 2009, Obama highlighted the free-falling economy he inherited by visiting Elkhart, Indiana, where unemployment was nearly 20 percent; he recently returned to Elkhart to highlight America’s recovery, and unemployment was 4 percent.
Still, in interviews in Cleveland, Republican delegates repeatedly described economic gains that seem ordinary in national context as hometown anomalies. Jeanita McNulty, a liaison for foreign exchange students in Blue Grass, Iowa, attributed the strong local labor market to a Republican governor and small-town values. “Iowans work hard,” she said. “There’s a lot of real pride in the Midwest.”
Tina Harris, a longtime realtor in Palm Harbor, Fla., told me the housing market is “booming.” But she argued that this was a troubling data point, because buyers were liquidating their 401(k) accounts and taking money out of the “real economy” to purchase homes. “Have you checked your 401(k) lately?” asked her friend Nancy Riley, another veteran realtor in the St. Petersburg area. I said I hadn’t, but I did know the stock market had just hit an all-time high, and I didn’t see why jobs in construction and real estate like theirs shouldn’t count as the real economy.
“I’m not saying everything is horrible,” Harris said. “But it was George W. Bush who put in the policies that got the economy going. Obama did nothing.”
Again and again, delegates said they didn’t trust the official unemployment numbers, or that the “labor participation rate” (which has declined under Obama, largely because of baby boomers retiring) is more important, or that the new jobs are only part-time, when in fact part-time employment has been flat. But there was also reality-based concern about stagnant wages and tepid growth, problems that Hillary Clinton and especially Bernie Sanders have discussed as well, as well as some principled ideological disagreement with Obama’s tax increases on upper-income earners and stepped-up environmental and financial regulations.
Dub Harris, the owner of a 1000-acre cotton farm in Stamford, Texas, says the state is doing well overall, despite the ongoing slump in oil prices. But he says the strict Wall Street regulations that Obama passed in the wake of the financial crisis have had a brutal effect on young farmers, forcing banks to foreclose at the first sign of trouble rather than letting borrowers work their way out of trouble.
“We’re seeing wonderful young men, the first in church on Sunday and the first in the fields on Monday, they miss their first crop and the banks have to take their land,” Harris said. “It’s overregulation, and it’s killing us. Every country that goes down the socialist track fails, and Obama has done that on steroids.”
In his thick west Texas drawl, Harris also complained about the Federal Reserve’s loose-money approach, which has weakened the dollar, but he also complained that the dollar is too strong, which has hurt agricultural exports. Really, his larger complaint seemed to be less about economics than values, the sense that Obama is a liberal cosmopolitan who doesn’t care about hardworking rural Christians, the fear that Big Government is becoming an even bigger part of American life. In the words of Lentz, the Ohio delegate: “I don’t think he’s in touch with ordinary people. He’s from a big city.”
In fact, the most common economic critiques I heard from delegates — more common than taxes, trade, unemployment, the national debt, or immigration — were variants of Mitt Romney’s “free stuff” critique of Obama, the notion that Obama is expanding the welfare state for lazy moochers. They said Obamacare is increasing premiums for the middle class, although premiums are actually growing at a slower rate than they were before Obamacare, in order to extend insurance to the poor. McNulty, the Republican activist in Iowa, compared the Obama approach to feeding homeless people under the bridge, so they remain comfortable under the bridge.
“They’re making millions more people dependent on the government, and they’re making the government into a kingdom,” says Baldasano, the New Hampshire legislator who is co-chair of Veterans for Trump. “What happened to giving people a hand up instead of a handout? What happened to our sovereignty?”
Even the delegates who remain skeptical of Trump expect him to shake up the Obama approach to the welfare state, to stop coddling the undeserving and reward hard work, to help the country rediscover the entrepreneurial values that once made America great. Harris, the Florida realtor, told me that during the Great Depression, jobless Americans were so desperate for work that they went door to door offering to sharpen knives. Lentz said young people aren’t applying for jobs at the Honda plant in Bellefontaine because they can’t pass the drug tests. Jeff Dean, a municipal judge in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, says the young people he sees in his court don’t bother trying to work because they have access to welfare.
“I think we need a new approach,” Dean says. “When I hear Trump talking about cutting the corporate tax rate, I think he’s hitting the nail on the head.”
Obviously, Republicans think it’s time for a change. Romney failed to make that case in 2012, but even after a record 76 consecutive months of job growth, only about one fourth of the electorate thinks the country is on the right track. On his triumphant return to Elkhart, Obama touted the economy’s progress since his last visit — American households have recovered more than $30 trillion in wealth, GDP is 10 percent higher than its pre-crisis peak, oil imports and health care cost growth have dropped to historic lows. Whatever the weaknesses of the U.S. recovery, it has been considerably stronger than the recoveries in the rest of the developed world. But in a polarized country, and in a political culture where the president is credited or blamed for everything, it’s only Obama supporters who tend to notice that.
Some on the left have turned “economic anxiety” into a sarcastic meme in 2016, suggesting it’s a euphemism the media use to avoid accusing racist and xenophobic Trump supporters of racism or xenophobia. There’s surely some of that. But for many Republicans — and maybe it would be true for Democrats if the economy was in similar shape under a GOP president — the notion that America isn’t working has more to do with what the president did than whether it worked. It’s a Republican article of faith that his policies couldn’t work—and therefore haven’t worked.
Randy Ellis is a commissioner in Roane County, Tenn., and many of his constituents rely on the government laboratory in Oak Ridge for their livelihoods. He says the local economy is vibrant, in large part because of a $2 billion government rebuilding project after a massive dike collapse and slurry spill at a local coal plant. He says his constituents don’t like Obama because they’re Republicans. And they like Trump because he stands up to Obama.
“You know, he says what we all talk about around the dinner table,” Ellis says. “We don’t like what’s happening. And he’s not too politically correct to say it.”