Working Man

A staunch conservative, a prairie progressive, a pro-détente RT America anchorman - Ed Schultz was all of these.

The former MSNBC commentator, who died at 64 of undisclosed causes a few days ago, shifted political positions but never wavered from his working-class base.  He appealed to liberals of all stripes as a progressive talk show host on MSNBC, but he aimed his commentary especially at the working class, and he focused on the labor movement at a time when most liberals would not (and still will not) address labor's concerns.  He always strove to relate to Joe Sixpack, originally as a right-leaning talk-radio host who bashed the elites and then becoming a liberal as he saw how supply-side economics was wreaking havoc on the economy and on the American worker.  He carried that spirit to MSNBC when he joined the network in 2009, and he valiantly kept it up for six years before MSNBC fired him.

MSNBC never really cared all that much about reaching working-class folks, though, and Schultz must have known that; toward the end of his run there, he was doing things to keep his job like defending Beyoncé's stage act ("Feminism is anything women want it to be") - hardly a concern to iron workers who listen to (as well as work with) heavy metal. Former MSNBC host Krystal Ball recently came right out and said that the cable channel dropped him because the working class he was catering to didn't fit its desired demographic.  Coincidentally, she also noted, he was let go right after Donald Trump declared his presidential candidacy and went after the same people Schultz pursued.

"I find it really ironic that they took this incredibly pro-working-class voice off the air right before the Trump era when obviously you had a lot of working-class voters who didn't feel like they had a home in the Democratic Party any more," Ball said.  "To me, there was a correlation there between MSNBC not really understanding his audience and not really wanting to court his audience and moving him off the air and then what happened in the Trump era."  Schultz's dismissal from MSNBC turned out to represent another step by the Democratic Party and Democratic media toward Whiggish irrelevance.

Schultz ended his career under humiliating circumstances - as a news personality for RT America, the U.S. channel of Russia Today, a state-supported Russian network.  This led Schultz to downplay Russian influence in the 2016 election (Hillary Clinton, whom he once stood up for, wasn't entirely blameless for her loss, but Ed was convinced that Putin, a man he had once criticized and dismissed as a dictator, was completely blameless for it).  Here's how he analyzed the choice of former ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson as Trump's first Secretary of State:

"Why is [Tillerson's] business relationships and successes with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the business world and in the energy industry, why is that a negative on Capitol Hill?  Isn’t that a positive thing that he knows Putin?"

Tillerson turned out to be an okay guy, but that's beside the point.  Schultz went from Putin critic to Putin cheerleader without skipping a beat.  Was it worth compromising his integrity to stay on something resembling the TV airwaves (RT America doesn't get much distribution on cable television, but it is available online)?       

Perhaps it was.  Schultz was the only person on TV speaking for American labor and the American worker in any capacity, what with Fox going for a conservative white-collar audience and MSNBC and CNN pursuing bourgeois liberal audiences who look down their noses at proletarian types.  I may have stopped listening to him when he belittled Martin O'Malley (and to this day I have no idea why he, of all people, had to be so nasty toward the former Maryland governor), and I may not have the type of job that requires me to take a shower after work (a common Schultz phrase), but I still agreed with virtually everything else he stood for.  I'm only sorry he met his end while shilling for the Kremlin.  RIP. :-(