Live From Kansas City

Kansas City’s skyline was all over CNN last week.

Lou Dobbs, the network’s stern, fatherly celebrity, had decided that our town was the perfect place to promote his book. No, wait, he came to conduct an earnest, thorough, hard-hitting and heart-rending exploration of the War on the Middle Class — coincidentally, the title of his new book.

On October 17, he anchored his nightly newscast from the Liberty Memorial, with a gorgeous view of Union Station, the iconic Western Auto sign and the rest of our impressive downtown behind him. His face seemed to flush with affection — and inflection — every time he said the words Kansas City, almost as if he were singing them like Wilbert Harrison.

“Kansas City is a city filled with working Americans and a city that is filled with the issues that confront and challenge these working Americans here in Kansas City and all over the country every day,” Dobbs intoned, stating the obvious as if it were some big revelation.

Among other choice bits of Missouriana, Dobbs promised coverage of the Talent-McCaskill race — “possibly the tightest Senate race in the entire country.” Soon, Ken-doll White House correspondent John King was reporting from the campaign trail in southwest Missouri, following Jim Talent as he preached against gay marriage and abortion. Then King joined Claire McCaskill, who acknowledged that she hadn’t listened hard enough to rural Missourians in her last campaign, when she lost the governor’s race to Matt Blunt.

Mayor Kay Barnes made an appearance, looking serious as she answered Dobb’s queries about “just how is her city facing the issues brought on by this war on the middle class.” (Rest assured, middle-class KC soldiers: Barnes is creating jobs, Kansas City is making progress on improving schools, and we have model programs for dealing with illegal immigrants.)

The next night, “CNN Election Express” buses clogged the corner of Valentine and Broadway as Dobbs hosted a “town hall” meeting at the Uptown Theater. In the Valentine Shopping Center parking lot, stylish young CNN employees set up the CNN Express Yourself area — a glorified Internet café with flat-screen TVs tuned to CNN and two life-sized cardboard cut-outs of Dobbs. CNN spokeswoman Mara Gassmann told Pitch reporter Carolyn Szczepanski that during the network’s nationwide tour, as many as 25,000 people had stopped by to make bumper stickers or “engage with other independent thinkers.” But few passers-by seemed interested on this Wednesday night, maybe because the air was so cold — it seemed as if snow might start flying.

Inside the Uptown was a bizarre confab. Surrounding Dobbs, who stood on a round stage beneath the theater’s sparkly faux-Mediterranean details, invited local middle-class warriors were dressed for national TV and sitting quietly on bleachers. To come up with this racially diverse yet solidly middle-American audience, Gassmann told me later, “We reached out to teachers’ groups, unions, small-business owners, among others, so they could invite individuals they know.”

But it wasn’t really a town hall meeting. Mostly, the locals provided an audience for Dobbs’ segments profiling sad-sack middle-class families from places other than Kansas City. The Hicks family of Indiana, where husband David has to choose between paying the mortgage or paying his student loans, provided an example of how the cost of higher education hurts the middle class. The Clem family of Kentucky, two generations of auto workers, had been hit by the exporting of American manufacturing jobs to cheap overseas labor markets. The Curtis family from Parkland, Washington, had to declare bankruptcy when their health insurance wouldn’t cover the medical bills after their son was born with holes in his heart, a disconnected lung and undeveloped arteries.

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It was all very sad and disturbing. Dobbs had also hauled in experts — Republican and Democratic party strategists, education and health-care experts — supposedly to provide insights. Mostly, they just restated the problems.

Six actual Kansas Citians got to ask questions, and though Dobbs and his panel were long on sympathetic responses, no one had any real solutions.

When Chester Thompson, president of the Black Economic Union, bemoaned the failure of public education, Dobbs’ answer was a spoonful of nothing: “We do poorly. We’ve got to do better because we can’t afford to give up another generation of Americans, and we’ve got a lot of atoning to do for what we have not provided our young people, far too many of them dropping out of high school.”

Jim McCulloh of the United Auto Workers Local 249 — his union builds Ford Escapes and F-150 pickups — tried not to sound partisan when he stood and took a microphone. “My U.S. senator, who is up for re-election, told a group of us back in Washington in February of this year that, given the choice between a bad trade agreement and no trade agreement, he would vote for the bad trade agreement unless we had a better trade agreement to offer.”

“Well,” Dobbs asked, “what’s the name of that senator?”

It was Talent. But McCulloh’s question was a general one, one that could have been asked just as easily of Democrats. “Why do our representatives only negotiate admittedly bad trade agreements that cause the loss of American jobs instead of working to get a fair trade agreement that would not threaten American jobs?”

Why? Dobbs couldn’t tell us why. He could only tell us that we’d lost 4 million manufacturing jobs and run up a $5 trillion trade deficit over the past six years.

There was an agonizing question from a father of five who was very concerned about policies that affect his family economically. “But also as a Catholic, I’m concerned about certain moral issues, moral principles. For instance, no matter how much a candidate’s good for my pocketbook, if that candidate supports abortion or gay marriage or embryonic stem-cell research, I don’t feel I can support that person any more than if they were trying to bring back slavery.”

Dobbs tossed that one to CNN political analyst William Schneider, who said (duh), “That’s the division in American politics … I don’t think you’re ever going to reach compromise on those issues because they’re deeply religious and deeply moral. You have to find ways of agreeing on what can be done rather than disagreeing on those principles.”

Then Dobbs offered a response to the tear-jerking story of the Curtis family, with the 18-month-old kid and a million-dollar medical bill. Dobbs gave the address for a fund his crew had set up at a credit union in Bellevue, Washington. “And just to be clear, we’ll be donating as well. We don’t ever ask anybody to do anything we don’t do here,” he said.

Right. Viewers who send a check to help pay for one child’s medical bills might feel better, but it’s that sort of knee-jerk, feel-good, charity-oriented response that lets us avoid talking about, say, a national health-care plan that might help more than one kid.

God forbid we could have talked about anything so radical in a discussion about a war on the middle class.

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It was, in the end, never quite clear who was perpetrating this war. Was it the politicians? Some vague “corporate America”? Dobbs didn’t name one giant company that had laid off thousands of workers. (Psst, Lou: You’re in Kansas City. What about Sprint?)

Perhaps the most insightful comment came toward the end of the night from Democratic strategist Robert Zimmerman. “You know something?” he said. “The most frightening aspect of this forum is how frustrated everyone is and the despair in their questions, and, for that matter, the polling data we have seen shows a complete sense of despair and lack of confidence in the system.”

Maybe the answers are in Dobbs’ book. Folks from Rainy Day Books were there selling copies, and Dobbs signed autographs afterward. But if Dobbs’ sympathetic platitudes that night were any indication of the answers in War on the Middle Class, hardworking folks might as well save their money for this winter’s heating bill.

Backstage after the show, Dobbs told Szczepanski that his message resonated with people because “we’re reporting on illegal immigration, on failing public schools, on the high cost of free trade, on the role of corporate America and the outrageous cost of health care — all the American challenges…. We focus on the issues I think are critical, not on the so-called wedge issues. And I have no patience for pop-culture news. We present a nonpartisan, independent reality.”

Maybe, but that version of reality assumes that if we just elect good politicians, they’ll do our fighting for us. Dobbs’ own show made clear that strategy’s failure.

Here’s one small solution that, for all his talk about the great people of Kansas City, Dobbs completely missed. This year, a few real middle-class Missourians — community groups, religious leaders, labor unions and average citizens — got together and collected signatures from other real Missourians. They put a question on the November 7 ballot that asks whether the state should raise its minimum wage to a measly $6.50 an hour. Let’s pass the fucker.

And even if a new party’s in power, let’s not assume that anything will change after November 7.