The Debt-Shaming of Stacey Abrams

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/17/opinion/columnists/stacey-abrams-georgia-governor-debt.html

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The campaign for governor of Georgia is a supersaturated microcosm of American politics right now, offering the starkest possible choice between irreconcilable visions of the country’s future. The Democrat, Stacey Abrams, former minority leader of the Georgia House, aims to become the first African-American woman governor in American history. She seeks to harness her Southern state’s changing demographics, assembling a coalition of minority voters and white urban and suburban liberals. Her opponent, Secretary of State Brian Kemp, is a Trump manqué skilled in voter suppression. He boasted in a campaign ad, “I’ve got a big truck, just in case I need to round up criminal illegals and take them home myself.”

It’s going to be a tight race: Abrams and Kemp are currently tied in the polls. But Republicans think they can damage Abrams by going after her on the issue of her personal debt, which totals more than $200,000. Last week, an ad from the Republican Governors Association hit her for lending money to her own campaign while owing $54,000 to the Internal Revenue Service, describing her as “self-serving” and “fiscally irresponsible.” Kemp himself made a baseless suggestion that Abrams might have violated the law: “Instead of paying more than $50,000 in back taxes, she gave $50,000 to her campaign. If that’s not criminal, it should be.”

This line of attack throws a pernicious political dynamic into high relief. The financial problems of poor and middle-class people are treated as moral failings, while rich people’s debt is either ignored or spun as a sign of intrepid entrepreneurialism.

Abrams, after all, isn’t the only progressive this cycle to be attacked by opponents over personal finances. Kathy Hochul, lieutenant governor of New York, recently went after Jumaane Williams, a left-wing New York City councilman challenging her in the Democratic primary, for owing money on a failed restaurant venture and for losing a house to foreclosure. During his recent Democratic primary campaign, Randy Bryce, an ironworker and Army veteran running for Paul Ryan’s House seat in Wisconsin, faced criticism for his debt, including $1,257 in late child support that he paid off last year, as well as a 1999 bankruptcy. These issues are likely to arise again in the general election.

With left-wing groups intent on recruiting nontraditional candidates, issues of personal debt and financial instability are likely to come up more often. “We’re seeing a trend now of more working-class folks, especially more people of color and women of color, run for office,” said Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party, a progressive group that endorsed Abrams, Williams and Bryce. Naturally, said Mitchell, some of them “are dealing with a lot of the issues that regular working people deal with every single day.” The question is whether voters will relate to these candidates, or if they'll be hurt by the stigma around economic distress.

Obviously, men who don’t pay their child support on time are not exactly sympathetic, though Bryce’s ex-wife has defended him, telling Vice that he reached out to her when he fell on hard times, and they worked things out privately.

But you don’t have to approve of every choice Bryce has made to appreciate that he went bankrupt following a fight with cancer, which he faced without insurance. Donald Trump, by contrast, has had six business bankruptcies. There are several administration officials who, like Abrams, owed tens of thousands of dollars in back taxes when they were hired, including Justin Clark, head of the White House’s Office of Public Liaison.

The financial judgment of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who has a wide-ranging government portfolio, has proved calamitous; he paid a record-setting $1.8 billion for a tower at 666 Fifth Avenue in 2007, near the height of New York City’s real estate market. His family’s company struggled to deal with the resulting debt before being bailed out this month by Brookfield, a real estate company whose investors include the Qatar Investment Authority. Any ordinary person who repeatedly squandered family money on bad bets the way Kushner has would most likely be seen as a deadbeat and a loser.

Then there’s Kemp, Abrams’s opponent, a multimillionaire who is being sued for allegedly failing to repay a $500,000 loan used to buy supplies for an agricultural company he invested in. It says something about the racial and class politics of owing money that Republicans nevertheless feel safe attacking Abrams for her debt, most of which she accrued putting herself through school and helping to care for family members in crisis.

It remains to be seen whether voters will recognize the double standard. Mitchell is convinced that attacks on candidates for their financial troubles will prove counterproductive, since many Americans find shouldering their debt a challenge. “When folks raise this as a moral issue, it’s actually enraging” to most people, he said.

That may be especially true among young people. Amanda Litman, a founder and the executive director of Run for Something, which helps progressive millennials run for office, told me that while older voters might look down on candidates with messy finances, “for 20- and 30-somethings, it’s the norm.” Indeed, according to Litman, many Run for Something candidates want to go into politics in part to address the stifling burden of student loan debt. “It’s something that really inspires them to take on the system,” she said.

As the system stands, people with thousands of dollars in debt are shamed, while those with millions of dollars in debt rule the world. There are reasons people want to keep it this way, but they have nothing to do with fiscal responsibility.

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