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Tag: myth
Elise Stefanik

Expose Of Stefanik's Privileged Life Blows Up Her 'Humble Origins' Myth

Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) has often painted herself as someone who came from a humble working-class background but pulled herself up by the bootstraps.

Stefanik, who Donald Trump is reportedly considering as a possible running mate in the 2024 presidential race, acknowledges that she attended Harvard University. But she paints her Ivy League education as an example of beating and overcoming the odds — not an example of privilege.

In an article published on April 14, however, Daily Beast reporters William Bredderman and Jake Lahut stress that Stefanik has had a much more comfortable life than she claims.

"If Stefanik was supposed to remember where she came from," Bredderman and Lahut explain, "she seems to have forgotten — to the point of making blatantly misleading statements, beginning in her first congressional campaign — how her family's wealth has given her a leg up, from providing her with an expensive private-school education to her parents buying her a $1.2 million D.C. townhouse when she was just 26. Instead of acknowledging those advantages, Stefanik has repeatedly downplayed her wealth, including in a statement to The Daily Beast."

Bredderman and Lahut add that Stefanik's "humble origin story falls away under a little pressure."

"From the start, she has maintained that she saw her parents 'risk everything' to establish Premium Plywood Products when she was a child," the reporters note. "But even the story she has told of the company's founding is incomplete. While every business venture involves risk, the Stefaniks didn't shoulder it alone: less than two months after incorporating Premium Plywood Products in late 1991, public records show they secured a Small Business Administration-guaranteed loan worth $335,000 — roughly $755,000 in today's money."

According to Bredderman and Lahut, Stefanik's "private education at Albany Academy for Girls offered a crash course in the ways of the New York capital’s moneyed elite."

"The children of political tycoons, from former President Theodore Roosevelt to former Gov. Mario Cuomo, have sent their children to its all-male counterpart across the street, The Albany Academy, where students pay the same tuition — $25,600 for the most recent academic year," Bredderman and Lahut report. "After graduating from Harvard in 2006, Stefanik decamped to D.C. to serve in then-President George W. Bush's administration — a role one of her Ivy League mentors helped her land. She would work her way up into the White House Chief of Staff's Office."

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

The Tea Party’s Origin Story Is A Myth

Members of the Tea Party position themselves as a populist movement opposed to big government and excessive government spending. They claim that they are average citizens uninterested in politics who are simply fed up with the federal government. Not true, according to political scientists David Campbell and Robert Putnam. Campbell and Putnam have been tracking voters’ political attitudes since 2006 — three years before Tea Party protests began in 2009 — and found that most of those now involved in the Tea Party movement were previously very active in the Republican Party.

“Our analysis casts doubt on the Tea Party’s “origin story.” Early on, Tea Partiers were often described as nonpartisan political neophytes. Actually, the Tea Party’s supporters today were highly partisan Republicans long before the Tea Party was born, and were more likely than others to have contacted government officials. In fact, past Republican affiliation is the single strongest predictor of Tea Party support today.”

Though the Tea Party likes to pretend they’re a diverse libertarian movement, their demographics overwhelmingly match those of the evangelical wing of the Republican Party: white, socially conservative, and opposed to the separation of church and state.

“So what do Tea Partiers have in common? They are overwhelmingly white, but even compared to other white Republicans, they had a low regard for immigrants and blacks long before Barack Obama was president, and they still do.

More important, they were disproportionately social conservatives in 2006 — opposing abortion, for example — and still are today. Next to being a Republican, the strongest predictor of being a Tea Party supporter today was a desire, back in 2006, to see religion play a prominent role in politics.”

Michele Bachmann, whose campaign for the Republican presidential nomination has been fueled by the Tea Party, also has a false origin story. A recent profile of her in the New Yorker explains that Bachmann was involved in politics even before she ran for the Minnesota State Senate.

“For many years, Bachmann has said that she showed up at the convention on a whim and nominated herself at the urging of some friends. She was, she suggests, an accidental candidate. This version of history has become central to her political biography and is repeated in most profiles of her. A 2009 column by George F. Will, for example, says that “on the spur of the moment” some Bachmann allies suggested nominating her.

But she already had a long history of political activism—the Carter and Reagan campaigns, her anti-abortion and education activism, her school-board race—and she had been targeting Laidig for a year. According to an article in the Stillwater Gazette, on October 6, 1999, Bachmann was talking about running against Laidig months before she went to the convention. “I tried to present information to Senator Laidig on Profile of Learning, he was not interested,” she said. “And I told him that if he’s not willing to be more responsive to the citizens, that I may have to run for his seat.” She told the St. Paul Pioneer Press that she had decided to run against Laidig a year earlier.”

How Impressive Is Rick Perry’s ‘Texas Miracle?’

Rick Perry has made much of the “Texas Miracle” of job growth, but it may not be as miraculous as it first appears. According to the New York Times, many of the jobs added during Perry’s time as governor pay only minimum wage.

“Much of Texas’s recent growth is the result of adding low-wage jobs. Of the 211,000 jobs added last year, 37 percent (or more than 76,000) paid at or below minimum wage, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Texas now leads the nation in minimum-wage workers (550,000 in all). That hasn’t improved our income inequality. Despite the good economy, Texas remains a state of extreme wealth and desperate poverty.”

And Rick Perry’s latest budget squeezes the fastest-growing sectors of the Texas economy, which will surely lead to more job losses. The Austin American-Statesmanreports:

“Almost half of the state’s job growth the past two years was led by education, health care and government, the sectors of the economy that will now take a hit as federal stimulus money runs out and the Legislature’s 8 percent cut in state spending translates into thousands of layoffs among state workers and teachers in the coming weeks.”

Texas may have added more jobs than any other state in the last year, but most of those jobs won’t help American workers escape poverty — and Rick Perry’s single-minded focus on cutting government spending means that many of the jobs added won’t be around next year.