Why does Paul Waldman think only URBAN young people are interested in the issue of tuition-free college?
I read Paul Waldman’s posts on the Washington Post Plum Line blog regularly and agree with most of what he says, but his claim today that rural young people who can’t afford college aren’t interested in attending college anyway, and those who do attend are fine with borrowing large amounts of money to do so if that is what’s necessary, strikes me as really strange. It’s surely not accurate.
Bernie Sanders surely is correct that they do care. A lot. Which is the direct subject of Waldman’s post. Waldman says Sanders is wrong.
Why would Waldman think that? I have no idea.
Maybe columnists at the Wash. Post know that the Post owns Kaplan University, a private for profit that depends on government guaranteed loans for its students to pay for their nearly useless Kaplan U. degrees. Would a journalist fudge the issue for the sake of his own good graces with his employer?
Ewww. No, Jack, normally I would think you might be on to something, but not this time.
Waldman’s not a columnist. He just posts to a blog there two or three times a day. I’m really pretty sure that he’s not a WP employee and has only loose connections with the Post. He’s, if I remember right, a poli sci prof at one of the DC universities, and contributes regularly to The Week magazine online and The American Prospect. The Post blog is really Greg Sargent’s, and I think Waldman just sort of subcontracts with him to write two or three posts a day for the blog. Something like that, I believe.
In any event, Waldman’s really, really unlikely to compromise his reputation on something like this, and I’m sure that’s not what’s going on.
i couldn’t read the article, Beverly, i think because i’ve exceeded some limit of free WaPo articles (i keep getting bounced to a subscribe page)
it might be useful if you blockquote a few relevant paragraphs next time you criticize or cite them…
Ah. Rjs, you should do what I used to do until I gave in got an online subscription: use your phone to google the article and then either read it on your phone or email the link to yourself and open it on your computer.
Works like a charm.
maybe that used to work, but it doesnt anymore, Beverly…what happens is a page with just the headline loads, and before the article appears, it jumps to the subscribe page…i tried the email trick too, from gmail to yahoo, and no luck with that either…
i’d been reading everything i wanted to at WaPo until a month or two ago, so i figure this is new..
ok. just figured a work around that works….an anonymous browser…got the article up right now…
Nice! Although I guess Jeff Bezos will get right on it now.
Well, they do have pay salaries, so ….
Though I don’t bother much going to metered sites, if I really cared then some combination of having three browsers on tap plus the ability to delete or edit cookie files can get you around most of that blocking. Plus a couple of old smartphones and an ice age era iPad means that some sort of device has access if it were life and death.
After re-reading Waldman’s column I’m left with a different interpretation of what is being said by both that writer and Bernie Sanders. Where they both get it wrong is in focusing on the elected representative, Jim, from a conservative Republican district. That’s useless because political operatives like Jim are immune from the facts and, worse yet, are purveyors of the fictions of life in the political realm.
In Waldman’s example he compares a constituent group of voters as being more concerned with immigration issues than they may be in regards to college tuition costs and the huge debt frequently associated with those costs. That is the problem of the ignorance of the constituency. The Democrats continuously and persistently miss that point. Right wing constituents are too often fed a propagandist stream of bull shit about social issues. Most recently, over the past several years, it has been repeatedly reported that immigration and loss of employment are unrelated phenomenon. That point is not repeated often enough by the general media and seems to be nearly ignored by the Democratic Party candidates.
The Democrats can not take back the House without a major educational effort which emphasizes the loss of personal economic opportunity that voters experience when they allow themselves to be overwhelmed by “social issues”. Illegal immigration was never genuinely about jobs being taken from resident Americans. Only now that the economy has become so bi-modal have the jobs taken by immigrants even begun to look satisfactory to those already living here. Educational opportunity has always been a crucial economic determinant. Voter have to come to understand that voting their fears and prejudices has always resulted in losing for themselves a satisfactory economic life.
Sanders and Waldman are both right, but they are also both wrong. Changing the make up of the House is crucial to changing the direction of our government away from the upper reaches of the financial elite and toward the working/middle class. That is the vast majority of the people. But to do that the voters must understand what is at stake when they vote and for whom they vote. When the candidate starts to address so-called social issues with scare tactics rather than the economy, including education, nation wide infrastructure, and health care, the voters should know they are being scammed and mislead. Voting one’s fears and prejudices results in voting against one’s own economic self interest.