Alternate title: The Democrats demonstrate their tin ear on populism. Again.
So. When Joni Ernst gave the official Republican response to the State of the Union address, she included a homely detail from her childhood: in the wintertime, she and all the other kids would have bread bags placed over their shoes in order to protect them from the weather. …And why am I bringing that pretty much commonplace, throwaway line? Well, I’ll let Peggy Noonan explain.
Leftism too has its class tropes, only they come from the opposite angle. Response on the left to Ernst and the bread bags was snobbish, superior and dumb to the point of embarrassing. First, they couldn’t believe it—no one wears bread bags on their shoes in a storm, how absurd, she must be developmentally challenged. Then they denigrated what she said, putting pictures on Twitter of themselves wearing bread bags on their feet, accompanied by comments that had all the whiff of the upper class speaking of the quaint ways of the help. Andy Borowitz, surprisingly, wrote a dumb, leaden spoof in the New Yorker that seemed a companion piece to Politico’s earlier use of a photo of Ernst that gave her crazy eyes.
And this is why left-populism never goes anywhere in this country: the Left’s agitprop is written by people who are remarkably disconnected from the actual populace. I mean, I was raised in 1970s/1980s coastal suburban New Jersey… and when I was a kid, my parents would indeed put bread bags (or other plastic bags) over my shoes when it was winter. Because we were a middle class (and Democratic too, mind) familly, which meant that we didn’t have snow boots as a matter of course. And everybody else did it, too. It was no big deal.
Now, I understand that this pitch is aimed at younger voters, preferably the ones who don’t idly ask their parents Bread bags? – and then get a story about the old days. Two problems with said pitch, though. First off: making it may more resonate unfavorably with older voters than it would resonate favorably with younger ones. Second, and somewhat related: the Democratic party shouldn’t be assuming that it knows what actually resonates among younger voters*. They will so assume – if I thought that they might not, I wouldn’t have written this – but they shouldn’t.
Moe Lane (crosspost)
*And then there are the upcoming crop of new voters for 2016. They’re the ones currently glumly staring at their school lunches and wondering how the heck the Democrats expect them to live on that [expletive deleted].
Yeah, I remember those. We had winter boots, for the most part – Chicago does get winter – but generally the waterproof ones weren’t warm, and the warm ones weren’t waterproof.
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Kids would get sent to school with bread bags over socks, keep a pair of gym shoes at school, and change at start and end of day.
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Ernst seems pretty down to earth to this cat, I think she calibrated this nicely to encourage Greenwich Village parochialism, which will come across as hectoring or nattering to anyone who remembers bread bags ..
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Mew
Even here in Ga. With our relatively mild (but wet) winters, we would sometimes do that. We never had another pair of shoes to keep at school, though….
I have never heard of this being done, and I come from a middle class family, my mom was a farmer’s daughter.
That being said, it doesn’t make me think any less of Joni Ernst.
I also kind of dislike Apple pie so…maybe its just me, my family is a sugar cream, custard, cherry, and pumpkin pie family.
Also the Maple Brown Sugar pie is pretty good.
I’ve been known to make a maple-apple pie that’s pretty decent. There’s a *lot* of varieties, perhaps you’ve just been forced to eat the common boxed ones…
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Mew
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(pretty much involves using a sweet apple, replacing the sugar with syrup, and replacing the water in the crust with vodka… otherwise the extra moisture from the maple syrup keeps the crust soggy)
My parents were middle class and a little on the cheap side, but we had winter boots. I live in the south and will have to remember this bread bag idea if we get any snow this year.
I thought it also said something important about waste. If you want to put bread bags on shoes, you have to have bread bags saved up. Which means you save them routinely (or you eat a LOT of bread). When the bread is gone, you smooth out the plastic bag and tuck it in a drawer because, hey, that might come in handy some day. Waste not, want not.
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We do the same thing today with those evil plastic shopping bags, the occasional useful plastic or glass jar, and so on. I see it as a holdover from the Great Depression, which combined fantastically little pocket change with the growing availability of mass-produced packaging (glass and tin, mostly, but they invented Bakelite about then too).
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None of which makes any sense to the culturally illiterate and quintessentially anti-thrift leftist elites, but for me Senator Ernst’s comment was incredibly evocative.
Oh but doncha know the progs recycle !! They carefully sort, in ones and two, the bread bags , the tin cans , the aluminum cans , the newsprint , the coated paper They have whole rooms in their NYC studio apartments and Caly two BR splits to sort and then recycle the post consumer waste . Or MB not .
Heh. Nothing compares to Portland’s mandatory separate recycling and composting bins in fast food joints.
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Mew
I remember doing similar things with newspaper bags when I was young. Bag over heavy socks into winter boots before heading to the hill for sledding.
Before putting your shoes into rubber overshoes, you can put a bread bag over them. This reduces the friction, making the putting on and taking off the overshoes much easier.
Been doing this since dirt was new.