Minnesota grassroots leaders respond to presidential debate

During the presidential debates, Americans have had plenty of opportunities to hear Barack Obama and John McCain talk. Then we listen to political pundits talk about the talk. But often political pundits are far removed from the grassroots, and glean their perspective from policy wonks who get their news from other wonks. The Twin Cities Daily Planet asked four local community leaders to respond to the presidential debate and tell us how the policies discussed may or may not affect their work on employment and labor, housing, at-risk families, and energy and green jobs.

Add your own comments and responses by clicking on “comment” at the end of this article.

Trixie Golberg, Lifetrack Resources, on employment and at-risk families.

Steve Cramer, Project for Pride in Living, on “the spending freeze.”

Carl Nelson, The Green Institute, on energy and green jobs.

Grant Stevensen, ISAIAH, on the middle class and racial equity.

Trixie Golberg

The individuals that we work with are the most at-risk families. In Senator Obama’s opening comments, he ticked off the top issues that we deal with daily. Our clients are trying to find jobs that pay enough to support their families, worrying about food for their families, worrying about education, worrying about home affordability and availability, worrying about the long-term issues with energy and health care. I rarely heard Senator McCain comment on those issues. His policies affect aspects of this, but not very directly for the families we work with.

The candidates have been speaking about the middle class. Do any of the proposals you heard affect the work you do with impoverished communities?

The families we work with have such low incomes that Senator McCain’s tax proposals wouldn’t have a direct impact on them. A health care tax refund wouldn’t reach them. On the other hand, Senator Obama’s comments about investing in early childhood work and jobs that pay, about investing in jobs that create benefits for our clients…it’s the small businesses that are most often able and willing to give our clients the most opportunities.

Are there any policies cited in the debate that would positively affect the work you do? If not, what are the candidates missing?

There are so many layers involved, and what we got in the debates was really at the 30,000-foot level. In terms of issues such as health care reform, the specifics Senator Obama laid out were good: in terms of helping to provide an incentive for health care policies to be available, to buy into health care pools, to keep your own coverage. Ending discrimination based on preexisting conditions is especially important: that is the issue with many of our clients, that a health crisis has forced their families into poverty. We also work with young children at risk. I appreciated Senator Obama’s comments on investing in early childhood programs that work, investing in every child. That is where we’ll see the greatest return on our investment. A couple of areas that are not being included in the national campaigns but where there are huge issues include, for one, the incredibly high rate of incarceration in this community. There is a large community of ex-offenders, and it is such a lost community in the workplace. Our policies have left us with a growing population of people who have been incarcerated. Mental health issues are also a concern for the adults and children we work with. Both of these barriers have real effects on our clients’ abilities to reclaim their independence.

Who do you wish the candidates could meet that you have come in contact with through your work?

A couple of the families that we’re currently working with are examples of people who are doing everything right. They’re working hard. They’re using the system. They’re striving for independence. One is a single working mother, 20 years old with one son who’s three. She’s been on TANF and the Minnesota Family Investment Program—the welfare-to-work program—and she has been successful in getting a few jobs along the way, but they’ve been low-paying jobs and they haven’t been able to offer her enough hours to be independent. That requires a significant commute, and she can’t afford the gas for her car. Now she has car repairs that she needs to do but can’t afford, so she has to take a shuttle that requires her to spend hours each day away from her son. She’s a very patient, caring mother, the kind of role model you want children to see, and the system is not really supporting her though she’s willing to work. It’s the same with another family we work with, a husband and wife with twin daughters. The husband was laid off from his job working in maintenance. Both parents are very interested in working full-time and they’re both doing a tremendous amount of volunteer work to meet their requirements for public assistance, but now the wife has health issues that she is postponing dealing with because the family can’t afford to have her not working. These are families that want to work, and the barriers are so great. I loved Senator Obama’s closing remarks, when he called on all of us for sacrifice, responsibility, and service. Both of these families are doing exactly that. I would really like to hear the conversations they’d have with both candidates, discussing how the candidates’ policy proposals would affect them.

Jay Gabler contributed reporting

Steve Cramer

There was a lot of focus on—particularly from McCain—on the anger of people. We don’t see anger as much as fear with how things are heading—the rules of the game are changing so fast they can’t understand.

For someone who is deeply fearful in today’s economy, people at the bottom of the economic pyramid, I don’t think either candidate really addressed the conditions they experience.

So if we were to ask them after listening to the candidates debate ‘do you feel comforted?’ my overwhelming sense is, not so much. The macroeconomic analysis of the candidates didn’t really get into the day-in, day-out concerns and the volatility and the rapidity of change happening out there. There’s real concern, real desperation.

There were a few areas in specific areas we deal with in our work.

When the topic of health care came up as an example, the Obama plan perspective of broadening coverage to more people, to help overcome some of the problems of the health care system as it operates today, seemed helpful.

On education policy—they had very different solutions, but both candidates recognized that the system leaves many young people behind.

So on health care and education policy, there was some acknowledgment of the everyday realities of the people we work with.

The candidates have been speaking about the middle class. Do any of the proposals you heard affect the work you do with impoverished communities?

My overall impression was that the analysis of both candidates occurs at a pretty macro level, they didn’t really get down to ‘what does this really mean to people at the lowest end of the economic spectrum’, with the exceptions of some parts of health care and education. There were sound bites on charters and vouchers, but it maybe unrealistic in this format to expect anything else.

“There’s an equity dimension here. Obama’s ‘invest for progress’ vs. McCain’s ‘we can’t just keep throwing money at problems’….you know, ‘invest’ is a more hopeful framework from the standpoint of the people we see and work with everyday.

The truth is some of these issues that affect low income families require money. We have working families living in homeless shelters because there isn’t adequate housing assistance funding, we have moms who are perfectly capable of going to work, and want to work, but they don’t have adequate childcare support—they have to make the choice of ‘do I go to work, or do I take care of my children’ due to a lack of federal funding under welfare reform. We have folks who could work, but we have an underfunded transportation system, we have kids who could go to college but lack the assistance. The reality is, for the people we see in our office everyday, the programs that are in place and are meant to help them don’t have adequate resources to do the job. Some problems can only be unlocked with the investment of funds.

Are there any policies cited in the debate that would positively affect the work you do? If not, what are the candidates missing?

There were a few snippets here and there. Discussion of investment in early childhood education was good. McCain talked about investing in workforce development. But what sent a shiver up my spine was this McCain idea of ‘get spending under control’ with a spending freeze. I don’t know how you have a policy like that and still deal with problems like displaced workers.

We’ve evolved a very inequitable society as a result of the spending and tax policies of the past eight years, we’re sort of back to where we were before the Great Depression, so to say now that those same policies have created a historic deficit, and we’re going to freeze spending, is just fundamentally unfair.

There are certain outcomes we want to achieve as a society…and the federal government has not been pulling its weight. Freezing domestic spending would only exacerbate existing problems, and make worse the desperate circumstances that people find themselves in.

Obama’s framework of spending and tax policies are more tilted toward addressing the problems that have developed over time that we are seeing.

Who do you wish the candidates could meet that you have come in contact with through your work?

Well, there’s Cheryl. She’s a mortgage foreclosure counselor in a nonprofit. Her job is to work everyday with people who are being foreclosed on, and the ground level information she has about these people would be very helpful to these candidates.

She’s learned how people end up in a foreclosure scenario, and the desperate measures they take to stave off foreclosure.

It’s very moving to hear those real-life, on-the-ground stories, the human tragedies that a mortgage counselor hears. That information would be very helpful to bring policy down from the 30,000 foot level and inform it for the on the ground realities.

Another person I thought of is Rosa. A woman who came to the United States with a couple of kids, from Mexico. She bought a home, works at a charter school, has advanced in her job. She’s become a role model for people in her community…the thing we see in our work is the richness someone like Rosa brings to our community. You just wish a presidential candidate could spend some significant time with someone like Rosa. You wish they could see the incredible potential of some of these people in our communities.”

Anything else?

I thought the conversation about the Supreme Court was important. While it focused on Roe v Wade, the larger issue is that judicial philosophy affects our country in so many ways, it can lift people up, or it can close things off. Government can uplift people, and so that could be pretty important for the kind of people we work with.

Paul Purman contributed reporting

Carl Nelson

The Green Institute’s work focuses on energy and what we’ve experienced in the last couple years is that people care more about energy now than in any time since I’ve been working on it, and I’ve been working on it since the elder Bush years. What people care about are the prices, dependence on foreign oil, and climate change.

We heard the candidates talking about these, and in some ways they both wanted the same thing in terms of oil independence. Their understanding of the issue, though, is a little bit lacking because the real issue is how do we get there?

Also, there were some myths that were perpetrated. For example, there was a statement made by McCain that if we build nuclear power plants we’d be able to replace our dependence on oil. That’s not true. We can’t do that because we use nuclear energy for electricity. We don’t currently use electricity for our transportation system. So this definitely wouldn’t help us get away from our dependence on foreign oil.

But it was clear that there were some additional links that needed to be mentioned. Now, nuclear may not be the best way to go, but we need to get electric cars that run on wind. In the debate they talked about the time line for oil independence. They both said we can get free of Middle East oil in ten years. The only way to do that is to shift to electric vehicles, or hybrids that are also plug-in vehicles. And we need to speed that process up. If ever there was a national cause this is it.

The candidates talked about energy, but they didn’t have anything new to say [since the first debates]. At one point the moderator said every presidential candidate since Nixon has talked about energy independence. It’s true. But we need to ask a realistic question. How? They didn’t entirely address that.

The candidates have been speaking about the middle class. Do any of the proposals you heard affect the work you do with impoverished communities or the working class?

The candidates spoke very little about energy conservation. We’ve done a lot of work on energy efficiency to help the working poor. We helped to start the Philips Community Energy Coop, which helps the poor and working class in Philips by using energy efficient appliances. So within the realm of energy that’s one major impact you can have on people: lower their energy bills. Another place is transit. That has a huge impact on the working poor, so they can have access to jobs and employment opportunities. But the candidates didn’t really talk about that.

I think this is true in general. People focus on energy sources when we need to focus on energy efficiency. In Minnesota we’re a little ahead of the country in this, but we have a lot of work to do here. In the second debate Obama mentioned energy conservation, and he’s the only one I’ve heard specifically mention it. It was a little surprising to hear him talk about that. The long-term goal is to move away from fossil fuels, but that’s a twenty year thing. We have to do things, [like retrofitting old buildings and not just focusing on new green buildings], that can impact our energy efficiency. We need to start that now.

Are there any policies cited in the debate that would positively affect the work you do? If not, what are the candidates missing?

They missed a connection between energy and housing. We’re in this economic mess because of the housing crisis and now it’s spread and we’re in a credit crunch. But there’s a real connection there.

For example, I was at the Midwest Home and Garden Show at the convention center a couple of weekends ago volunteering for Minnesota Greenstar Certified Homes and Remodeling. There was nobody there! There was nobody there because all the remodeling contractors were talking about how no one has money to finance some of their improvements. New homeowners are not buying new houses, but people also aren’t continuing to invest in their current homes. You’d think that people would invest in their old homes if they aren’t able to buy new homes. There was a study done in the West Coast and they found that the one area of the market that was still strong was green homes. It turns out that homes that had been certified as “green” were still doing well. In the meantime the rest of the market had decreasing values.*

I think there is a role of the government here with the bailout. If the government is talking about 700 billion dollars, some of this could be provided for people who are investing in making their homes green, which would in turn provide jobs for those involved in remodeling and focus our attention on energy conservation.

*The study Nelson referred to was an April 2007 study by McGraw-Hill Construction entitled, In a Down Housing Market, Green Demand Exceeds Supply

Who do you wish the candidates could meet that you have come in contact with through your work?

There is this guy David Solberg, who is an engineer and what he does is focus on reducing energy in industrial processes. There’s a Minnesota company called Cypress Semiconductors, and they have a plant somewhere in the suburbs. It’s a huge building with a bunch of industrial machines. They called Solberg up and asked him, “how can we be more energy efficient?” He used the wasted energy that was produced from these machines and found a way to recapture it. He reduced their energy to so low that Centerpoint Energy came out to check the meter because something was broken. It just goes to show how much innovation needs be used and how much energy we’re wasting. He’s trying to do the same thing with Rock Tenn.

There’s so much emphasis on where the energy is coming from but we need to focus also on how to use the energy we already have and that we’re wasting. I still don’t think that it’s gotten out to the general public as to the importance of that. Solberg’s an important figure in that whole discussion.

Grant Stevensen

In all honesty, I think my actual answer is no. I didn’t hear it in this debate, except for when Senator Obama got specific with his health care plan.

The candidates have been speaking about the middle class. Do any of the proposals you heard affect the work you do with impoverished communities or the working class?

In name almost everyone considers themselves as middle class whether they make $30,000 or $200,000. All this middle class language has a way of getting in the way of the vision.Obama is talking about ‘Joe’ [the Plumber] as he is now. McCain is talking about ‘Joe’ as a future vision. But “middle class is a metaphor” so wide as to be almost meaningless, like the phrases ‘Joe Six-pack’, ‘Hockey Mom’, and ‘Joe Plumber’ are meaningless.

We know what we really want. [Healthcare, jobs, and home-ownership.] I would rather talk about those things. Those are the issues.

Are there any policies cited in the debate that would positively affect the work you do? If not, what are the candidates missing?

Clearly the health plans. I don’t see anything in McCain’s that will help us, but possibly in Obama’s. I’m not sure beyond that. The financial crisis has a huge impact on the work we do but its way upstream.

I didn’t hear anything in the debate about immigration policy. In the past both called for fixing the broken system.

Both candidates now are talking about how we need to pull together to solve this huge [financial] crisis. Why only in a crisis? Why only when we are coming apart at the seams? In the midst of a crisis it’s the obvious thing to do, but we need to be together all the time.

Are there any policies you would propose that are fundamentally different than the candidates’ proposals?

For myself, I am suspicious of any policy that dumps more money into private health care.

Who do you wish the candidates could meet that you have come in contact with through your work?

I would put in front of them the myriad people whose lives are devastated by not having health insurance or are on the brink of devastation by not having good health care. It’s so troubling how many people’s lives are destroyed.

The health of the community is more important than delivery of health care. There is a patchwork of things that makes life sustainable and livable. Racial equality should also be on the list. It’s a tricky issue, but it never gets touched on [in the debates].

Melissa Slachetka contributed reporting