The Trump-Clinton divide on little people: Column

I have now listened to the two major presidential candidates present their economic plans. And what I heard revealed major differences between them.

Republican nominee Donald Trump offered a plan Monday at the Detroit Economic Club that seemed to come from a 30,000-foot view of the economy. He offered a few big sweeping macroeconomic measures pitched as lightning bolts from on high to fix an ailing economy: big tax cuts, big trims of regulation, putting China in its place and redoing trade deals like the North American Free Trade Agreement.

All it takes, he seemed to say, are a few of these big broad strokes and all will be well. Or as Trump himself put it, "I want to jump-start America and it won't even be that hard."

By contrast, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s plan outlined Thursday in nearby Warren seems to accept that, yes, it will be hard. Therefore she attacks the problems at ground level — down where entrepreneurs need working capital and commuters need reliable public transit and school kids need high-speed broadband.

Trump’s plan, with its emphasis on tax cuts and getting those intrusive government regulators off our backs, comes from somewhere high atop one of Trump’s skyscrapers. It’s a view from the boardroom, from a place where the big deals are done and the little people remain out of sight.

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But Clinton’s plan seemed to acknowledge each and every one of those little people. She hopes to counsel first-time homeowners on handling debt. She wants to put at-risk youths to work, and to help returning offenders find jobs, and to bankroll entrepreneurs with their dreams. Her plan has a granular quality; on public transit, for example, she focuses down to the level of bike and pedestrian lanes needed in cities.

There’s an old saying that nothing works but that everything might: that no one silver-bullet solution will turn things around but that if we try 100 different things and each one moves the needle just a bit, then we might make real progress. That seems to be Clinton’s approach.

Another big difference between the candidates: As Clinton said in Warren, Trump paints a bleak picture of America as a nation in decline, almost a Third World state. Certainly Trump’s dark portrait of Detroit on Monday ignored the city’s recent steps toward revitalization, its emergence from bankruptcy and its booming downtown.

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By contrast, Clinton now projects the sunny morning-in-America profile that used to be the province of Republicans like Ronald Reagan. Trump’s gloom has allowed the Democrats to take over that optimism for their own. Clinton on Thursday found lots to cheer about: She touted Michigan’s automotive comeback and the revival of Detroit’s Midtown and the booming tech scene in Ann Arbor.

“You can really feel the dynamism that is driving this state’s comeback,” she said to cheers and applause. Trump, she said, “is missing so much about what makes Michigan great. ... He describes America as an embarrassment. He says we’re becoming a Third World country. Look around you, my friends.”

For a long time many people have viewed presidential candidates as uniformly barren of ideas or hope, dreary in their sameness. But not this year. The economic plans offered by Trump and Clinton come from very different places, and would take us in very different directions.

John Gallagher is a business columnist for the Detroit Free Press, where this piece first appeared. Follow him on Twitter @jgallagherfreep.

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