Lily Geismer - Left Behind

Copyright 2022 by Lily Geismer

Cover design by Pete Garceau

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First Edition: March 2022

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Geismer, Lily, author.

Title: Left behind : the Democrats failed attempt to solve inequality / Lily Geismer.

Description: First edition. | New York : PublicAffairs, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021031191 | ISBN 9781541757004 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781541756984 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Democratic Party (U.S.) | PovertyGovernment policyUnited States. | United StatesSocial policy19801993. | United StatesSocial policy1993 | United StatesSocial conditions1980 | United StatesPolitics and government1989

Classification: LCC JK2316 .G343 2022 | DDC 324.273609/049dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021031191

ISBNs: 9781541757004 (hardcover), 9781541756984 (ebook)

E3-20220103-JV-NF-ORI

For Michael, Gabriel, and June

O n a steamy day in July 1999, President Bill Clinton rested in a plastic lawn chair in front of a ramshackle prefabricated home in the Whispering Pines trailer park in Tyner, Kentucky. The economically depressed coal town lay deep in the Appalachian Mountains. While drinking from a can of Mountain Dew, Clinton talked with sixty-nine-year-old Ray Pennington, a self-described old-timer with severe emphysema who required a portable oxygen tank to breathe. Pennington had recently lost his wife of fifty-one years and had moved in with his daughter Jean. Four generations of the family lived in the rented double-wide now. Jean quit her job flipping burgers and swirling soft serve at a local Dairy Queen to care for her father. The family was now entirely reliant on the $6.30 per hour her son-in-law earned making plastic safety glasses at the Mid-South Electric Company, one of the only employers in the area.

The Pennington home was Clintons first stop on a four-day tour. He went on to Clarksdale, Mississippi, and ended in Watts, California, with stops in East Louis, Illinois, the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, and a Phoenix, Arizona, barrio. Like Tyner, these places had some of the highest rates of poverty in the nation. Like the Pennington family, residents suffered from health This descriptor reinforced the administrations contention that these places were anomalies in the boom times of the late 1990s and evaded the fact that the poverty of their residents was in large part the result of the forces of the New Economy, which Clinton helped to unleash.

Bill Clinton visiting Tyner, KY, resident Ray Pennington outside his home, 1999, and President Lyndon B. Johnson meeting with Tom Fletcher and his family on their porch in Inez, KY, 1964

Credit: Getty Images and Clinton Library/Sharon Farmer

Clinton and his staff compared the New Markets tour, as the four-day journey was called, to the trips they orchestrated for corporate executives throughout the 1990s to explore investment opportunities in emerging markets in Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America. For this so-called domestic trade mission, Clinton invited CEOs and representatives of several major corporations and financial institutions including Bank of America, Citigroup, Aetna Insurance, Walgreens, and Fannie Mae. As Clinton explained to an audience in Appalachia, not far from the Pennington home, he was showing corporate leaders that they should take a look at investing in rural and inner-city America. Its good for business, good for Americas growth, and its the right thing to do.