Toilet bowl effect

In 1914, two years before he was appointed to the Supreme Court, a collection of articles by the esteemed Louis D. Brandeis was published under the title, Other People’s Money — And How the Bankers Use It. It was a sensation.

In 1991, after a successful run on Broadway, “Other People’s Money,” a play by Jerry Sterner, became a movie featuring Danny DeVito as a ruthless liquidator of moribund businesses.

In a monologue that has since acquired almost a cult following, DeVito’s character
explains to the stockholders why it would be foolhardy to try to keep their company in business when new technology was going to make it obsolete.

This company is dead. I didn't kill it. Don't blame me. It was dead when I got here.

It's too late for prayers. For even if the prayers were answered and a miracle occurred, and the yen did this and the dollar did that, and the infrastructure did the other thing, we would still be dead. You know why? Fiber optics. New technologies. Obsolescence. We're dead, all right. We're just not broke. And do you know the surest way to go broke?

Keep getting an increasing share of a shrinking market.

Down the tubes. Slow but sure.

You know, at one time there must have been dozens of companies making buggy whips. And I'll bet the last company around was the one that made the best goddamn buggy whip you ever saw.

Now, how would you have liked to have been a stockholder in that company?

You invested in a business, and this business is dead. Let's have the intelligence, let's have the decency to sign the death certificate, collect the insurance, and invest in something with a future.

Last week I was complaining to a friend about a comment I’d heard on NPR to the effect that, in the recent Pennsylvania primary, Hillary Clinton had won “the core constituency of the Democratic Party” by taking more of the white, non-college-educated, working class vote than had Obama. I just didn’t see it.

Because I don’t think you can define the “core constituency” of the Democratic Party that way any longer, any more than you can claim the Republican Party base is still mostly made up of rich people.

Whoever Hillary Clinton won in Pennsylvania, the total vote for her was less than half what the most conservative estimates had projected, suggesting that the “white, working class, non-college-educated” voter either is not a certain voter for Hillary or that the proportion of such voters has shrunk — or perhaps both.

“It’s called the toilet bowl effect,” said my friend, going on to illustrate: When a toilet is flushed, a huge volume of water descends into the bowl and then whirls in an ever-shrinking vortex until it’s gone.

Hillary Clinton appears to be capturing an increasing share of a declining constituency, and Democrats would be foolish to take seriously her effort to persuade us that because she can win the “Archie Bunker” vote she must be given the nomination.

Pish and tosh, I say.

A similarly deluded member of the punditocracy reminded us over the weekend that ever since the 1960s (and its civil rights legislation) the only Democrats to win the presidency were from Southern states and he suggested that may still be true.

I’ve got news for him: The South has gone north, so to speak.

I was born and raised to the age of 12 in the South; I have lived in New York, Ohio, and California since then, and now that I am back, I am here to tell you: This is not your father’s Old South.

My experience qualifies me to speak with some authority about Yankee directness and California subtlety; about brazenly liberal folks in San Francisco but not so in some of its suburbs; about racism in New York, in Ohio and in California while better relations now exist between black and white folks in Texas.

And I can state unequivocally that one of the best things about the South, what I think of as the “dear hearts and gentle people factor” hasn’t gone north; it’s still very much here, thank you.

So, just as the Democratic Party can take heart that the “white, less-college-educated, working class” voter has, in the last 50 years, become less white and more educated; that the “working class” of decades ago have risen in skills and expectations; they will be well advised not to focus a disproportionate share of their money and energies trying to capture an increasing share of what has become a shrinking market.