Jane The Hairdresser

I was fumbling around the internet and found someone saying the same thing I said, but about an actual conversation with his hairdresser instead of the abstract hand-wringing I was doing. He also attributes the self-sabotage to a fear of socialism rather than, as I do, to being wealth groupies. Here's Peter Ross Range writing in Der Spiegel, emphasis added:

So I'm sitting in the hair salon, getting a haircut, and my Korean immigrant hairdresser begins telling me all the reasons she plans to vote for John McCain.

First, she says, Barack Obama wants to "give away money to the poor people." That, she declares, “is socialism.” Admitting that she earns about $30,000-40,000 a year before tax, she begins defending the lawyers who earn $250,000 or more and would have to pay a higher tax rate under Obama’s tax plan. "These are my customers. They have lots of bills, two or three kids in college, big houses, two cars. Things are hard for them, too."

It was breathtaking.

Here an up-by-her-bootstraps first-generation immigrant, who lives in a small city apartment that she shares with her sister, is coming to the rescue of highly-paid Washington lawyers with big houses in the suburbs. "They shouldn’t have to pay more taxes than other people," she continues, snip-snip. "They work hard, just like I do." Snip, snip.

Her sister, who also earns around $30,000 per year, pipes up. "I know his tax idea is probably good for us. We don’t earn so much. But it’s wrong that he wants to tax other people so much. I will vote for McCain."

It was a bracing moment, and a quick reminder of the power of misinformation. We’re only two blocks from the White House. My interlocutors (the two sisters) are self-proclaimed "news junkies." And yet they’ve bought into one of the biggest canards of the McCain propaganda machine: that Barack Obama is a socialist.

In the American political lexicon, socialist is a dirty word second only to communist. Both words translate into "un-American," which is maybe the worst epithet of all.

The fact is that only 5 percent of US households have incomes greater than $250,000. And the analyses I’ve read suggest Obama’s plan to raise taxes on those households, though supposedly a 3-percent increase from 36 percent to 39 percent, would in fact translate into relatively modest tax hikes. Silly me, I thought everyone understood that.

Not my hairdressers. And to the extent that one of them grasped that she would be better off under Obama’s plan, her devotion to the anti-socialist principle leads her to vote knowingly against her own self-interest.