That clip has become a thing again, as a seeker of the Democrat nomination who has yet to win a delegate has added "denigrating farmers" to "banning your Big Gulp." The push-back has a torque ratio the Dodge boys would love to claim.
The mayor might have been quoted out of context, according to a Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel fact-check.
In the video circulated on Twitter, Bloomberg says: “I could teach anybody, even people in this room so no offense intended, to be a farmer. It's a process. You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn. You could learn that.”That "turn the crank in the direction of the arrow" sounds even more patronizing, doesn't it? Patronizing, though, is the Sophisticated Democrat Way. "Mike, Farmers knew how to code long before you were born." On top of that, it's more the tone of the Sophisticated Democrats than the tone of Our President that motivates Trump voters. Consider Salena Zito's visit to some of the same places in Wisconsin that political scientist Catherine J. Cramer studied.
But the video deleted the first part of that statement, in which Bloomberg says, “if you think about the agrarian society (that) lasted 3,000 years, we could teach processes.”
In the full video, the Democrat presidential candidate wasn't referring to modern agriculture at all, and "Team Trump is deliberately misleading Americans,” said Bloomberg spokesman Brandon Weathersby.
In the video, Bloomberg went on to address U.S. manufacturing and more about agriculture, saying: “Then you have 300 years of the industrial society. You put the piece of metal on the lathe, you turn the crank in the direction of the arrow and you can have a job. And we created a lot of jobs. At one point, 98% of the world worked in agriculture; today it’s 2% in the United States. Now comes the information economy, and the information economy is fundamentally different because it’s built around replacing people with technology … You have to have a lot more gray matter.”
They all said their vote for Trump wasn't for him but rather for their communities.That's a lesson Professor Cramer could have drawn, but didn't.
It was an abstract and complicated decision that rarely makes sense to people who don't walk in their shoes, live in their ZIP code or understand how long establishments within both parties have let them down, their parents down, their grandparents down and their children down.
"People who don't know farmers or live near or in a farm community have little idea of why we feel so connected to our place," said [dairy farmer Donna] Leum. "But they do seem to have strong opinions about who we are, and when they find out we supported Trump, they look at us as that dumb farmer who doesn't know any better."
"Well those dumb farmers, they're an electrician. They're a plumber. They are mechanics, scientists, conservationists. They take care of the crops that fill their cupboards, (who) love and care for the animals who provide dairy and meat for their feasts. They are also vets and engineers," she says with pride and a broad smile. "I mean, we have all these skills because you cannot keep calling repair people, so you do it yourself. So actually, I think we are pretty darn smart."
In practice, what she sees might more readily be understood as the failure of one-size-fits-all public policies, which is to say, what I understand as the error of thinking of the states as operating units of the federal government, or the corollary error of thinking of the counties as operating units of the state government. What looks good on paper in Madison might not work at all well when it comes to counting deer or conserving minnows Up North. Particularly when the state employees are long-time beneficiaries of the blue social model and the residents of the Seventh District are saying "what recession" because it's been twenty years of rough sledding long before foreclosures on McMansions became a thing. Put another way, it's not so much rural voters voting contrary to their interests as it is voting to protect themselves against policymakers who hold them in contempt.Apparently, though, being contemptuous still plays well enough with the legacy press and on the coasts.
1 comment:
"“Then you have 300 years of the industrial society. You put the piece of metal on the lathe, you turn the crank in the direction of the arrow and you can have a job. "
Completely ignores the many highly skilled jobs that exist in manufacturing, from toolmakers to industrial engineers to operations research people working in inventory planning.
"Now comes the information economy, and the information economy is fundamentally different because it’s built around replacing people with technology … You have to have a lot more gray matter.” The industrial economy has been replacing people with technology since Oliver Evans' automated flour mill....and one could actually go back a lot further on this. Does Bloomberg think some garden-variety programmer, or some sell-side analyst on Wall Street, is really an exemplar of brilliance and creativity?
Is a machinist who writes CNC code part of the industrial economy, or part of the information economy?
In a party marked by extreme arrogance, Bloomberg may be setting a new level.
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