Is it any wonder really that white working class voters don’t feel connected to the Democratic Party? While it’s true that picking up the phone to keep some 1,000 jobs is not in itself a policy to reinvigorate the manufacturing sector — after all, 85% of manufacturing jobs have been lost due to automation, not globalization – dismissing “saving” jobs as lacking meaning is tone deaf, at best.

For that matter, complaining about tax incentives that, when broken down over ten years, equal about $700 in tax credits per employee per year is a bizarre argument coming from a party that claims to want to use the government to better people’s lives. If this is “corporate welfare,” then it’s the kind of corporate welfare Democrats should support: rather than giving someone a hand-out, the government is helping people keep their jobs as well as their sense of purpose, all for a relatively small cost.

Perhaps just as problematic is the inability of too many Democrats to understand the power of symbolism. The complaints that Trump got credit for the Carrier deal, but Obama didn’t for the auto bailout (a debatable claim), completely miss the point. As the maxim goes, “a million deaths is a statistic, but one death is a tragedy.” This is true of jobs as well. Trump gets this.