Glenn Harlan Reynolds

President Clinton said, “I feel your pain.” President Franklin Roosevelt had "fireside chats.” And now President-elect Donald Trump is reaching out to forgotten Americans with a message that he cares about their problems, and wants to help. This could be the Democrats’ worst nightmare.

As Walter Russell Mead notes in The American Interest, it’s an old style of politicking that more recent politicos seem to have forgotten. Trump’s Carrier event saved only a tiny fraction of jobs that are being lost around the country, and it might not make much difference in the long run, but that wasn’t the point. The point was “that the people at the top are aware of the problems of the people at the bottom," Mead writes. "It’s smart governance, but it’s something that the technocratic progressive mind tends to undervalue.”

As Trump supporters were quick to point out, when asked by a Carrier worker about saving jobs in Indiana at a town hall event hosted by PBS in June, President Obama dismissed the idea of doing anything. Instead, he said, the answer was job training.

Job training is a nice technocratic solution to factories moving overseas: Lose your current job? No worries, just get trained for another! Problem solved!

There’s even a longstanding program to do this, called Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA). The problem, as NPR recently reported, is that it doesn’t work very well. One reason is that when a factory closes, the local economy is flooded with laid-off people going for job training, mostly in the same areas: electrical work, heating and air, etc. But the local economy can’t absorb that many new air conditioning repairmen and electricians all at once. In the class NPR looked at, according to one worker, the highest wage people could find was $12 an hour, if they were able to find employment at all.

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And that’s typical. The Heritage Foundation recently found that "the TAA program does not work as it is designed. The current TAA program has failed to provide effective assistance.” And of the TAA graduates who managed to find new jobs, “many earned much less that their former wages.”

And even if it did work, a lot of laid-off workers would still be unhappy. Losing a job, especially one you’ve held for a long time, is traumatic for a lot of reasons beyond money. For many people, especially men, a job is a major part of their identity. When technocratic politicians such as President Obama or Hillary Clinton dismiss their feelings, that’s irritating at the very least, especially when the Democratic Party as a whole, as operative Van Jones admitted recently, has a “problem with elitism.” If anything, Democrats have seemed almost smug about the travails of blue-collar America.

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Trump, by contrast, promised to save Carrier jobs during the campaign and then, even though Obama mocked him for it at the PBS town hall (“What are you going to do? ... What magic wand do you have?”) Trump then went ahead and delivered. A conspicuously kept campaign promise that benefits the little guy sends a signal of caring that talk of macroeconomics does not.

FDR knew this. His New Deal economic policies were mostly snake oil — according to a study by UCLA economists, they actually prolonged the Great Depression by seven years. But FDR made people feel like he cared, even though he was a rich man from New York who had never been poor himself.

Now another rich man from New York seems to be repeating the formula. FDR gave the Democrats two decades of political dominance. Today’s Democrats should be worrying that Trump could do the same for the Republican Party.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor and the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself, is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.

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