Losing the Rich

As I was watching Chris Matthews absolutely tear into Republican Congressman Eric Cantor tonight on Hardball, something occurred to me. The cratering of the stock market over the last few days has personally affected our millionaire press corps in a way that none of the other failures of Republican leadership over the last decade has.  It's personal now.  I'll bet Chris Matthews lost a few hundred thousand dollars over the last few days, at least. You could tell from his tone that he was pissed off and he wanted the Republican party--who he rightly blamed for the mess--to be held accountable.

This is something new. Up until very recently, people on the upper end of the income scale (a group that includes most of the reporters and journalists we see on television every night) had done pretty well under the Bush administration. While the middle class had lost ground, the stock market and corporate profits were up. Rich people were doing pretty well.  The economic problems facing regular Americans, to the extent they registered at all, were remote, something that could be discussed in an almost clinical way.  But the stock market is now down over 25% since last year, completely erasing all gains made over the last eight years. For the investor class, that's a huge blow to their bottom line.

Now it's entirely possible that over the next few weeks, the market will rally and much of the recent losses (and associated anger) will be erased. But if it doesn't, if we continue to see the stock market at or below the level it was eight years ago when Bush took office, then I think there's a real possibility of a major shift in voting patterns. 

While there are a lot of different components to the modern Republican coalition, one major component is the so-called country club Republican. This is the kind of person (I know many of them) who doesn't particularly care about social issues or neoconservative adventurism, but votes Republican primarily because he doesn't want to pay any more taxes than absolutely necessary. Many of these people have also rationalized their continued support for the Republican party by convincing themselves that the Republicans are better stewards of the economy, at least the part of the economy they care the most about: our capital markets.

But no amount of GOP spin is going to put money back in their brokerage accounts. If the market doesn't turn around soon, it's going to force many of them to question their assumptions. An email posted on CNN tonight summed it up pretty well:

Republicans lowered my taxes, and will keep them low. But the value of my home has dropped 20%, my health insurance costs have doubled, gas costs $4 a gallon, and my investments are in the tank. Please, tax me.

Now, I'm not sure how typical that response is, but at the very least, there have to be a lot of typically Republican voters out there right now who are questioning the Republican party's knee-jerk aversion to the kinds of sensible regulation that could have averted this economic meltdown. And at some point, some of these folks may question how much tax cuts are really worth to them if their investments aren't growing at all and the government is sliding into an ever more precarious financial state.

For the rich, the rationale for voting Republican--even from a purely selfish economic standpoint--is looking weaker by the day. If this market slide continues, I wouldn't be surprised to see more fits of righteous anger of the kind Chris Matthews displayed on Hardball tonight.  For the first time in a long time, the rich may actually start to question whether the Republicans are good for their bottom line.