“Coming Up Short” by Robert Reich is not the economic current event book I was expecting. Reich has already wrote those kinds of books. It’s a wonderful trip through his life and how politics affected it and the course of our country.
As a young man, Reich was involved with the presidential campaigns of Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy. He talked about the old democrats and how they catered to the needs of labor. Somehow the blue collar workers were left behind by McCarthy, but Kennedy was able to bring them in but was assassinated before winning the presidential nomination.
Democrats later made the same mistake. For example, Jimmy Carter was more involved with giving away the Panama Canal than strengthening labor unions. In the late 80s and early 90s, democrats were catering to high-tech workers, college graduates, and those who would benefit from the new information age economy.
When the blue color workers were left behind, they needed somewhere to go. They needed a type of populism that would inspire them. Bernie Sanders could have done it economically but didn’t have a chance to because Hillary Clinton beat him out for the nomination in 2016. Trump then found a way to channel their despair into cultural populism, which allowed him to win the White House. “Trump stepped into the breach created by the absence of a democratic narrative that spoke to the anguish of many Americans left behind. Trump focused instead on their victimhood, on what had been ‘stolen’ from them: their jobs, their communities, their land, and their pride.”
Reich provided a lot of great nostalgia when he discussed the Clinton era and his interactions with the family. He met Bill Clinton while they were both Rhodes’s scholars. He mentioned how Clinton was ambitious and was thinking about becoming the governor of Arkansas during those times. He also mentioned how empathetic he was. When Reich was seasick, Clinton was the only person who checked in on him and even brought him some chicken soup. That line about feeling your pain was real!
He had a deep discussion about Clinton’s philosophy with the Vietnam war. Since Robert Reich was short, he did not expect to get drafted. They wouldn’t take men under 5 feet. So Robert reported to the recruiting office hoping to avoid military service.
The recruiting sergeant got all excited and started jumping up and down yelling, “You’re just what we needed for the war! We need small people like you to be tunnel rats! You can crawl through the tunnels and toss a grenade in them and get all those commie bastards to run out.”
Then the sergeant had Reich stripped down to his underwear to take his height. Reich was too short. The sergeant was very upset, but then he said, “Don’t give up hope because maybe you’ll grow!” They both started laughing their asses off!
Reich’s discussion of Pat Buchanan was very interesting. I remember a joke from the 90s that claimed Buchanan was just former KKK grand wizard David Duke without the white robes. Reich mentioned how Buchanan was channeling the racist side of the GOP and was getting a third of the GOP votes in the presidential primary, especially among the blue collar members. If only the democrats were able to see all that despair and what it would become, they could have channeled it into a powerful catalyst for economic change.
I highly recommend this book to those who are interested in history within the last 60 years. This is also recommended for folks who want to understand how we got to where we are now politically with the rise of Christian nationalism and the dismantling of our social safety nets. I enjoyed this and other books by Robert Reich.
