We know this can have a transformative effect. In the 1990s, the Clinton administration experimented with a program called Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing, which gave poor families in public housing vouchers to move to safer, middle-income neighborhoods where their children were surrounded every day by evidence that life can be better. Twenty years later, the children of those families have grown up to earn higher incomes and attend college at higher rates than their peers who stayed behind. And the younger the kids were when they moved, the bigger boost they received.
Previous generations of Americans actually moved around the country much more than we do today. Millions of black families migrated from the rural South to the urban North. Large numbers of poor whites left Appalachia to take jobs in Midwestern factories. My own father hopped a freight train from Scranton, Pennsylvania, to Chicago in 1935, looking for work.
Yet today, despite all our advances, fewer Americans are moving than ever before. One of the laid-off steelworkers I met in Kentucky told me he found a good job in Columbus, Ohio, but he was doing the 120-mile commute every week because he didn’t want to move. “People from Kentucky, they want to be in Kentucky,” another said to me. “That’s something that’s just in our DNA.” I understand that feeling. People’s identities and their support systems—extended family, friends, church congregations, and so on—are rooted in where they come from. This is painful, gut-wrenching stuff. And no politician wants to be the one to say it.
I believe that after we do everything we can to help create new jobs in distressed small towns and rural areas, we also have to give people the skills and tools they need to seek opportunities beyond their hometowns—and provide a strong safety net both for those who leave and those who stay.
Whether it’s updating policies to meet the changing conditions of America’s workers, or encouraging greater mobility, the bottom line is the same: we can’t spend all our time staving off decline. We need to create new opportunities, not just slow down the loss of old ones. Rather than keep trying to re-create the economy of the past, we should focus on making the jobs people actually have better and figure out how to create the good jobs of the future in fields such as clean energy, health care, construction, computer coding, and advanced manufacturing.
Republicans will always be better at defending yesterday. Democrats have to be in the future business. The good news is we have a lot of ideas to help make life better in our modern economy. As you saw earlier, I proposed a whole raft of them in my campaign. So even as Democrats play defense in Trump’s Washington, we have to keep pushing new and better solutions.
On that trip to West Virginia, I spent some time with a group of retired miners who were concerned about losing the health care and pensions they had been promised for years of dangerous labor, often in exchange for lower wages.
One retiree told me a story that has stuck in my memory ever since.
Many years ago, when he first went into the mines, he told his wife, “You’re not going to have to worry. We’re union. We’ll have our health care, we’ll have our pensions, you won’t have to worry about nothing.” But quietly, he still worried about his neighbors who didn’t have the same benefits.
In 1992, he decided to vote for the first time in his life. He wanted to vote for Bill. When his friends at the mine asked him why, he said the only reason was health care. “You’ve got health care; what are you worried about?” they asked. But he was adamant. “There are other people that don’t have health care,” he would say. And when Obamacare was finally passed, he thought it didn’t go far enough.
Now some coal companies were trying to take away benefits that had been promised long ago. The security he had assured his wife was rock solid was now in jeopardy.
“People need to worry about one another,” he told me. “We are our brother’s keeper, and we need to worry about other people. Me, personally, I have faith; I know God is going to get us through it. But we need to be worrying about our brother.”
Most of the folks I met in places like Ashland, Kentucky, and Williamson, West Virginia, were good people in a bad situation, desperate for change. I wish more than anything that I could have done a better job speaking to their fears and frustrations. Their distrust went too deep, and the weight of history was too heavy. But I wish I could have found the words or emotional connection to make them believe how passionately I wanted to help their communities, and their families.
Those Damn Emails
Where there’s a will to condemn, evidence will follow.
Imagine you’re a kid sitting in history class thirty years from now learning about the 2016 presidential election, which brought to power the least experienced, least knowledgeable, least competent President our country has ever had. Something must have gone horribly wrong, you think. Then you hear that one issue dominated press coverage and public debate in that race more than any other. “Climate change?” you ask. “Health care?” “No,” your teacher responds. “Emails.”
Emails, she explains, were a primitive form of electronic communication that used to be all the rage. And the dumb decision by one presidential candidate to use a personal email account at the office—as many senior government officials had done in the past (and continued to do)—got more coverage than any other issue in the whole race. In fact, if you had turned on a network newscast in 2016, you were three times more likely to hear about those emails than about all the real issues combined.
“Was there a crime?” you ask. “Did it damage our national security?”
“No and no,” the teacher replies with a shrug.
Sound ridiculous? I agree.
For those of you in the present, you’ve most likely already heard more than your fill about my emails. Probably the last thing you want to read right now is more about those “damn emails,” as Bernie Sanders memorably put it. If so, skip to the next chapter—though I wish you’d read a few more pages to understand how it relates to what’s happening now. But there’s no doubt that a big part of me would also be very happy to never think about the whole mess ever again.
For months after the election, I tried to put it all out of my mind. It would do me no good to brood over my mistake. And it wasn’t healthy or productive to dwell on the ways I felt I’d been shivved by then-FBI Director Jim Comey—three times over the final five months of the campaign.
Then, to my surprise, my emails were suddenly front-page news again. On May 9, 2017, Donald Trump fired Comey. The White House distributed a memo by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein that excoriated Comey for his unprofessional handling of the investigation into my emails. They said that was the reason for firing him. (You read that right. Donald Trump said he fired Comey because of how unfair the email investigation was to… me.) Rosenstein cited the “nearly universal judgment” that Comey had made serious mistakes, in particular his decisions to disparage me in a July press conference and to inform Congress that he was reopening the investigation just eleven days before the election. Testifying before Congress on May 19, 2017, Rosenstein described Comey’s press conference as “profoundly wrong and unfair.”
I read Rosenstein’s memo in disbelief. Here was Trump’s number two man at the Justice Department putting in writing all the things I’d been thinking for months. Rosenstein cited the opinions of former Attorneys General and Deputy Attorneys General of both parties. It was as if, after more than two years of mass hysteria, the world had finally come to its senses.