Ron Brownstein is worth listening to.
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Blue Collar
25 Mar 2007 01:01 pm
Comments (62)
Well, in 1968 the guy who would've beaten McCarthy was assassinated, and in 2000 Gore did win the popular vote and probably would've won the electoral college if not for a highly dubious Supreme Court decision, so I'd say not much.
Matt W - two points. First, from what I've read on the subject, Humphrey would have beaten RFK for the nomination even had Sirhan Sirhan not entered the picture. Besides which, RFK was a brainy liberal beloved of college-educated voters, just like McCarthy. But he happened to get urban black support as well - like Obama will. Second, I think people forget how much the uncovering of Bush's DUI helped Gore in the last weeks of the campaign. It's certainly plausible that Gore would have lost both the popular and the electoral vote had that not come to light.
minipundit, as an historic note, on the face of it, humphrey in '68 already had enough delegates pledged to win the nomination (which is what led to the whole remake of the process in '72, since humphrey ran in precisely zero primaries), but no one can say for sure what inroads bobby kennedy might have made post-california.
and bobby kennedy did have white urban blue collar support, perhaps not unrelated to the identification of urban white blue collar workers with an obviously irish catholic politician....
The Brownstein article could be taken as an argument for John Edwards. I take it that way.
Well, my anedotal evidence as the son of a Chicago union plumber (later business owner, etc), suggests this description of union blue collar tradesman is not universal. My dad seems genuinely excited about Obama. Sample size of one, and all, but I know he's not alone.
In fact, my personal experience from a pool of friends and family, is a genuine groundswell of of interest in Obama, from lawyers to plumbers and from early thirties up to retiree.
The one person in my circle to express any interest in Hillary was a former republican stockbroker presumably looking to recant his past voting by saying, f'it, bring on their bogey(wo)man, will still be better than what this lot have done.
"Portions of the upper Midwest where wine track voters congregate"
I guess Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa are now part of Marin County. (I'm just waiting for the nude in-line skaters). Brownstein made some good points, but that one was way, way too Brooks-like.
Bill Clinton wasn't any warrior either.
Brownstein is positing a socio-economic cultural split between college educated (Obama) Democrats, on the one hand, and blue collar ( Clinton ) on the other. He asserts that this is a continuation of earlier splits, as evidenced by such candidates as McCarthy, Bradley, etc.
While there certainly has been an historical basis for asserting such a split, times now have changed. Basically, unlike times past, outsourcing has progressed so far that white collar workers as well as blue collar workers are threatened while so much damage has been done to America's industrial base that the old fashioned blue collar bastion is largely a dead duck.
That means that the basis for the old divide no longer exists. Rather, we are into a new terrain. I doubt if anybody knows how present circumstances will pan out but "We all hang together, or we'll all hang separately,' sounds like a good message to me.
OT-
So what do you think explains the failure of the mainstream media to cover the purge scandal for so long, and so many other scandals? Do you think somebody just set up newspaper editors to cheat on their wives, and threatened to tell if the editors wouldn’t play ball when they come back some day and ask for something?
It wouldn’t be that hard to do, when you think about it. People wouldn’t talk about it.
I noticed Brownstein mentioned RFK, but not JFK. No doubt the HRC = HHH comparison is valid, but of course Humphrey ran in 1960, too.
I wouldn't say Obama is the new JFK, but surely he resembles JFK more than he resembles Gary Hart or Paul Tsongas. Humphrey/Mondale is probably the right box for Clinton, but Hart/Tsongas/Bradley doesn't fit Obama at all.
This article makes a lot of sense if you ignore that professional firefighters tend to have college degrees and that they make a hell of a lot more than most people who are usually termed "blue collar workers". Most blue collar workers make less than 25K a year. Fire fighters tend to make almost twice that, plus benefits. They also tend to be far whiter than most other blue collar workers. That's the problem with this, it takes one instance that representative of the trend being discussed, effectively creating this trend out of thin-air.
That should read "that is not representative".
"Portions of the upper Midwest where wine track voters congregate"
I guess Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa are now part of Marin County.
Um, yeah, actually. Have you ever actually been to Wisconsin or Minnesota? They're like Vermont. People are still socialists there. Iowa, granted, isn't like this at all, but it's also not part of the upper Midwest. I also suspect Brownstein may have had Chicago in mind...
I thought he was just talking about Madison and Ann Arbor, in which case he'd be right.
I think Brownstein identifies a legitimate trend, but neither Obama nor Clinton fits their assigned roles precisely. Edwards' presence also screws everything up to a certain degree.
In 2004, neither Dean nor Kerry fit squarely into Brownstein's categories either.
Inspirational rhetoric shouldn't obscure the fact that Obama does have real barriers to overcome, unrelated to race or right-wing "madrassa" smears. One of those barriers is that he'll have to find a way to play interest group politics (like the fire fighters' union Brownstein leads with) while trying to pull off his "above politics" schtick.
Well, I've spent about half my life here. "Like Vermont" is ludicrous. Minnesotans don't fit Brownstein's voting profile, so he makes up a silly Brooks explanation which has no basis in reality. Minnesota been more left than the rest of the US ever since about 1925, and Brownstein has no idea why. We've been converging toward the norm during the last couple of decades, alas, though Minneapolis did elect a Muslim to Congress.
If I were Hillary I would worry about Edwards. He has more of a potential to increase his support among blue collar Democrats. He is a southern Democrat with a populist message.
Comparing Minnesota to Vermont isn't ludicrous at all in this context. Brownstein is obviously identifying the combination of self-conscious liberal pseudoagrarianism, college towns, and reasonable proximity to a megalopolis as reasons the upper Midwest is, like the coasts, more likely than the interior states to side with an Obama-type. Which exactly of Minnesota or Vermont doesn't have self-consciously liberal pseudoagrarianism, college towns and reasonable proximity to a megalopolis? Are you trying to shill the Keilloresque "Minnesota keeps it real, it's so real it's REAL" line?
"Edwards' presence also screws everything up to a certain degree."
Yup.
If Edwards didn't exist, I think HRC would beat Obama in a two horse race for the precise reasons Brownstein identifies.
But I don't think a two horse race is what we're looking at.
You're being silly, dude / guy. Minnesota is an actual farm state, it is not a big retirement community, it is not full of East Coast summer homes, Minneapolis is not a megalopolis, Minnesota's colleges (except Carleton) are not elite magnet schools, and Minnesota has a long (albeit declining) leftwing tradition descended from populism.
It is a fact that Minnesota is more liberal than Kansas, but Brownstein just pulled a silly little David Brooks explanation out of his butt because he was writing on autopilot. Why you bought that I have no idea.
It's possible to argue about Brownstein, firefighters, or Minnesota, but Brownstein also points out Hillary is 23 points ahead of Obama among non-college educated whites in a nationwide survey. That's a big hurdle for Obama
I'm not sure Brownstein has identified the key variable in determing whether Hillary or Obama will win. With another 10 months of lead time, both of them have an opportunity to broaden their appeal. Still, Hillary's appeal to non-college educated voters is an indication of a fairly profound shift in public opinios. After fifteen years of fighting in the Washington trenches, Hillary is seen as having enough fire in her belly to represent blue collar perspectives and interests. That's a big plus.
Oh yes, my 72 year old mom in Upstate New York has always loved Hillary. I think she sees Hillary as going through through the same things she's gone through.
It's possible to argue about Brownstein, firefighters, or Minnesota, but Brownstein also points out Hillary is 23 points ahead of Obama among non-college educated whites in a nationwide survey.
Are we really supposed to believe that this is a deficit that has nothing to do with race?
In 2004, neither Dean nor Kerry fit squarely into Brownstein's categories either. - JP
Actually, people were making the "Dean's support is from the college kidz, he can't win 'cause he doesn't have support from the Blue-Collar types" claim back in 2004.
But interestingly, in the lab where I was a grad student at the time, the people most enthusiastic about Dean (admittedly the denizens of a hot-shot biochem lab fall on the college kidz side of Brownstein's categories) were the ones with the most Blue-Collar backgrounds. It was us children of professionals and bourgeois who were worried about "electibility", in ways that turned out to be self-destructive for the Dems. to worry, while the children of actual, honest to goodness proletarians thought Dean was the person to nominate.
So maybe we should actually see whether a person has support among the salt of the earth before deciding "X is so radical and internet-oriented, no way the salt of the earth will support him"?
John may have a point. *My* southern blue-collar sample of one - my father-in-law - told my wife this weekend that he was voting for Edwards if the Dems ran him, but no way could he vote for Hillary or Obama. And his objection to Obama does seem to be race-based.
"Brownstein just pulled a silly little David Brooks explanation out of his butt because he was writing on autopilot."
Autopilot? David Brooks?
This is Democratic Presidential Primaries 101, and it has been for 30 years now. Seriously, if you are going to understand only one thing about the mechanics of nomination races, this is the one thing.
"Minneapolis is not a megalopolis"
No, but Chicago, which in the broader sense takes in most of Wisconsin, is one.
Look, Minnesota is filled with (among other sorts of people) college kids, boutique farms, and chardonnay-swilling lefties in a way Indiana isn't, and that's why it's probably going to shake out as Obama territory. Why anyone who actually lives there would deny this, or that it has more in common with Northern California or Vermont than it does with, say, southern Indiana, is absolutely beyond me.
Obama is McCarthy, then Edwards is Bobby Kennedy
I thought it was the other way around.
I thought it was the other way around.
Obama is Edwards and McCarthy is Bobby Kennedy?
"I thought it was the other way around."
There's a very smart Ron Brownstein piece in today's LATimes that you might want to read to get up to speed on the discussion.
It's likely that racism IS a factor here, but female gender is also seen as a negative by at least 7-8% percentage of the population. I also remember seeing surveys race and gender are less salient than age or Mormonism. So, I'm not sure how it all works out.
I support Hillary and think Hillary is highly qualified to be president for the difficulties of 2008-2016 period. But I'd also like to see Hillary cop to her 2002 vote being a mistake and I'd also like to see her do better in impromptu situations. I'm high on Obama as well and am excited that the Dems have two strong presidential candidates.
"I thought it was the other way around."
Or to try to actually explain:
In '68, Humphrey's appeal was to downscale Dems. McCarthy's appeal was to upscale Dems. But RFK had appeal to both groups.
And as the '08 race plays out, I think you'll find Edwards filling the RFK role quite nicely.
Well then H-Rod Clinton is Hubert Humphrey.
With a bigger cock.
I think Hillary is grateful for Obama being in the race. Obama blocks Edwards from challenging Hillary one on one.
Of course that might change down the road. If it become a 2 person race between Hillary and Edwards she will have a real fight in her hands.
Well, that is a pretty naïve read of the situation. Hillary despises Obama; she may be many things, but a good actress is not one of them. Young, black Obama supplants her as the sexiest candidate in the race, and by sexiest, I mean gimmicky. Being a female and a legitimate candidate for PotUS is a bonus in the Democratic primary.
But Obama's blackness outshines Hill's womanhood edge, or at least cancels it out. If anything, Edwards will benefit from an electorate divided between voting for the Woman and voting for the Black Guy and will swoop in on the wings of The Issues and latent white liberal race/sexism. It could be worse. But to discount Obama offhand and see it as Hill/Edwards at this point is delusional. As of today, Obama has as good a chance as any, and between him and Edwards, I think the Dems have decent horses for '08.
Why do blue-collar Democrats have a habit lately of picking people in the primary that middle-America hates in general elections?
Does the frame of "warrior vs. priest" really make more sense than the frame of "establishment vs. new guy"? The only evidence against the "name recognition" theory is the response of one batch of fire fighters.
but Chicago, which in the broader sense takes in most of Wisconsin, is one.
Thought you were arguing about Minnesota. Or does Wisconsin in the broad sense take in Minnesota? Anyway, I'd be hard pressed to say that the residents of Milwaukee (where I've lived) are wine track rather than beer track voters. If Milwaukee isn't beer track you need a new metaphor.
I also don't see why southern Indiana should be the point of comparison. AFAICT it doesn't contain a lot of white-collar Democrats, but it doesn't contain a lot of blue-collar Democrats either.
HRC a progressive? Brownstein can't be serious!! I don't understand HRC's appeal to blue collar workers. The Big Dog passed NAFTA and other blue collar job killers.
"Why do blue-collar Democrats have a habit lately of picking people in the primary that middle-America hates in general elections?"
Well, they were with Bill Clinton in '92...
But to answer your question, downscale Dems almost always follow the choice of the Democratic establishment. In other words, they went with Kerry in '04 not because they loved Kerry, but because the Dem establishment told them that Kerry was the guy.
They're party loyalists, for not entirely irrational reasons.
i'm mostly interersted in this thread for the historic component, so petey, i can't help but note that although you rightly note that in the open primary era, rfk would have beaten humphrey (although a 3-way would have been complicated then, too), but humphrey's winning the nomination had nothing to do with his appeal to blue-collar democrats (strong as his bonafides were in that area) and everything to do with his appeal to establishment democrats who rallied round him when lbj announced that he wouldn't run for re-election.
now, ok, you might argue that the establishment dems of the day rallied round humphrey precisely because they believed he appealed to the traditional FDR coalition voter (as distinct from the anti-war intellectualism of mccarthy or the radical-for-a-senator-with-his-own-power-base rfk), but still....
and we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that george wallace was also appealing to blue-collar dems and not just in the south....
And as a sidebar to the Brownstein piece, I'll note that at some point in the past decade, Harold Schaitberger has become the single most important power broker in the Democratic party.
I fully assume that HRC will win Schaitberger's backing for '08, but if he actually backed Edwards instead, I think that would make Edwards the favorite to win the race.
Matt Weiner— The original point is that some dude was claiming Minnesota is not within reasonable proximity to a megalopolis, which is akin to saying that New York exerts no weight on Vermont.
Southern Indiana is a point of comparison because... Brownstein was comparing the upper Midwest and the coasts to interior states like Indiana.
Look, Minnesota is filled with (among other sorts of people) college kids, boutique farms, and chardonnay-swilling lefties in a way Indiana isn't, and that's why it's probably going to shake out as Obama territory. Why anyone who actually lives there would deny this, or that it has more in common with Northern California or Vermont than it does with, say, southern Indiana, is absolutely beyond me.
Because they're not a moron and know what they're talking about, maybe?
Brooks and Brownstein have this inane stereotype of chardonnay-swilling liberals. They use this to prove that anyone who is a liberal swills chardonnay, and that Minnesota, Vermont, and Marin county are about the same. Isn't that a stupid sort of lumping? Yet you believe them. The only evidence for Minnesota (and Wisconsin and Illinois) being "like" Marin County and Vermont is the fact that they all vote Democratic.
Minnesota is not full of boutique farms. It is not full of destination colleges, though it's a relatively well-educated state. It does have one big city, but Vermont doesn't, so what does that prove? Something you might consider in the comparison with Indiana (and Missouri, and Ohio) is that Minnesota (like Wisconsin and Michigan) has suffered almost not migration from the South, and that the predominant churches are Catholic and Lutheran, not born-again (though that's changing, and as it changes Minnesota is becoming more Republican).
I have no idea why you're helping Brooks extend an inane stereotype even further.
"The only evidence for Minnesota (and Wisconsin and Illinois) being "like" Marin County and Vermont is the fact that they all vote Democratic."
Of course Minnesota is unlike Marin County and Vermont in many ways. Marin County and Vermont are unlike each other in many ways too.
But it's certainly not just that they all vote Democratic. All of these places regularly elect the kinds of liberals who would be utterly unelectable in most places in the country. Al Franken is a viable candidate for statewide electoral office in Minnesota fergawdsakes.
The original point is that some dude was claiming Minnesota is not within reasonable proximity to a megalopolis, which is akin to saying that New York exerts no weight on Vermont.
The southeast corner of Minnesota is about 350 miles from Chicago (measuring from Rochester, MN). This is not only farther than the distance from northern Vermont to NYC, it's farther than the distance from northwestern Ohio to Chicago. Indiana is also at points close to Chicago. (And he didn't mention Indiana -- he mentioned Ohio, Missouri, and Tennessee, at least two of which have better claims to be swing states.) This makes the line about proximity to megalopolises look pretty ad hoc.
It's true that New York has a big influence on Vermont, because New Yorkers have vacation homes there -- and because Vermont's so tiny that this turns into a significant slice of the population. Emerson says, and he would know, that Minnesota is not full of Chicagoans' vacation homes. I'd add that, though Wisconsin does have Chicagoans' vacation homes, the Democratic strongholds nearest Chicago (Milwaukee and Racine) are paradigmaitcally beer track. If they don't drink beer in Milwaukee, where do they drink beer?
Petey, Brownstein's modern-day beer-track warriors are Truman, Humphrey, Mondale, and Kerry. This makes it hard to believe that what makes Minnesota wine-track is the kind of people it elects.
I don't think Hillary is popular with blue collar. They are suspicious of her. She has never been liked by them. I live in a middle class neighborhood with a mix of blue and white collar. I may not be able to really gage this as I live in Illinois where support for Sen. Obama, who is very liked and respected, is quite high. I do know he carried both the white collor gop districts as well as southern Il. districts (which is very rural and very much the south) in his senate race. He caused great excitement. And the people who go see him and are supporters are all ages and groups.
I just read where support for Clinton with what she thought was her lock: African american women, are overwhelmingly supporting Obama.
Wisconsin and Minnesota are like Vermont in the sense that they are a part of the Yankee belt of settlement, which extends across the nothern tier of states from New England to the Pacific northwest. Oregon, Washington, and northern California were also Yankee regions. (The predominance of Yankee settlement is less pronounced in the sparsely poulated northern plains and Rocky Mountain west). Later waves of European immigration brought Irish and Italian Catholics to New England, Germans and Scandinavians to Minnesota and Wisconsin, with large numbers of Slavs, especially Poles, settling in Wisconsin. Southern Indiana, by contrast, was settled from the south, by poor white Virginians, many of them "Scotch-Irish," migrating up the Ohio River valley. Ohio, in terms of early settlement patterns, is divided in two, with a northern region populated by New Englanders and a southern region populated from Virginia; the dividing line is roughly I-70. Iowa has many Yankee outposts, but was mainly populated by southerners migrating up the Mississippi. Later waves of migration, both from overseas and internally, complicate the picture enormously, but the distinctive political cultures of American states and regions owe a great deal to the historical regional cultures from which they originated. This is l'Amerique profonde. All the Brooksian pop sociology is just so much froth on the surface.
Anyway, just a side note about Marin County - don't go too wild supposing that Marin has historically been liberal - it hasn't. In fact, Marin County often voted Republican at the national level until the 1980s. Up until the mid-60s, Marin had a large number of liberal Republican governments.
Compared to San Francisco and Alameda counties, Marin is less liberal - and Marin's liberalism was always more hedonistic than substantive. And Marin is not that much more liberal than San Mateo and Santa Clara counties, either.
No, Chicagoans do NOT vacation in Minnesota - the hotspots for my Chicago friends are Jamaica, Aspen, Acapulco and the cheapskates go to Door County, Wisconsin. Except for crazed fisherman, no one even suggested going to Minnesota.
OK, what I objected to was this Brooksian inanity of Brownstein's:
Portions of the upper Midwest where wine track voters congregate.
This just seems stupid. It's the first time I've EVER seen Wisconsin and Minnesota sneered at for not drinking beer -- usually it's the other way around. More important, "wine-track vs. beer-track" is a stupid analytic paradigm (a term which gives it more dignity than it deserves.)
I didn't actually think that my point was very weighty or controversial, but apparently it was.
One of the facts about American life is that, if Brooks' Blue vs. Red, coastal vs. interior, elite vs. bluecollar analysis had any power, the Democrats would be extinct. Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Minnesota, and sometimes Iowa pull the Democrats through.
The urban-rural divide is real, the North-South divide is real, and the Great Plains and Rockies tend Republican. But Democrats shouldn't mess with Brooks's silliness.
"One of the facts about American life is that, if Brooks' Blue vs. Red, coastal vs. interior, elite vs. bluecollar analysis had any power, the Democrats would be extinct. Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Minnesota, and sometimes Iowa pull the Democrats through."
If you look at a county map of America, the Democratic counties in the Upper Midwest tend to almost all be on the Great Lakes or on the Mississippi River system.
Nationally, outside of a few black counties in the South and a few Hispanic counties in the Southwest, pretty much all of the Democratic counties are places that boats go. The divide may not be coastal vs. interior, but it is water vs. landlocked.
"This just seems stupid. It's the first time I've EVER seen Wisconsin and Minnesota sneered at for not drinking beer"
It seems stupid to you because you're taking a metaphor bizarrely literally...
Petey, think abotu where big cities are; that explains the wateryness of democratic support.
Petey, should politics be understood in terms of silly metaphors like "wine-track"? Isn't that both dumb and misleading? Rather than use a silly metaphor and smirk at people who fail to realize it has no literal content, shouldn't we just squash the metaphor when it appears? Especially when the intended and actual effect of the metaphor is to claim that liberals are silly people?
You want to add "access to waterways" to the already-existing, very robust North-South / urban-rural explanations. On the other hand, you have the Gulf Coast, southern Atlantic coast, and Lower Mississippi, so we can scrap that one.
And you know, they swill latte and chardonnay in Colorado.....
br, Weiner and Mininpundit are of course all ignoring the fact that the press was in the tank for the entire 2000 campaign (going back as far as 1997). No discussion of 2000 should forget this.
But to answer your question, downscale Dems almost always follow the choice of the Democratic establishment. In other words, they went with Kerry in '04 not because they loved Kerry, but because the Dem establishment told them that Kerry was the guy. - Petey
I'm not so sure of this. Do we really know that "downscale Dems." went for Kerry in any big way? From what I know, "downscale Dems" (or at least their kids) went for Dean (which does not, btw, mean they are particularly liberal -- remember, Dean was not the liberal the media was making him out to be, and the kids of downscale Dems, smarter than many of us, knew that) ... 'cept by the time the primaries came to NJ, Dean was already out of the race.
*
Also, thank you for the clarification of the analogy. I still see Obama as more RFK (i.e. the sexy one) and Edwards more as McCarthy, although the latter is more a matter of how the GOP has been able to spin him (in as much as Edwards can be painted as a fancy-pants lawyer, that places him as the candidate of professionals, not unlike McCarthy, albeit McCarthy was appealing to a slightly different kind of professional class). I guess if Edwards can overcome the GOP-spin, he can be the RFK of this race (probably more so than Obama currently is seen as such by some), while Obama risks turning into the McCarthy -- but according to the current media stereotyping of them, Obama is definitely RFK and Edwards is more McCarthy-esque.
"Do we really know that "downscale Dems." went for Kerry in any big way?"
Yes we do.
"From what I know, "downscale Dems" (or at least their kids) went for Dean"
It's just not the case. They do polling, y'know.
Downscale Dems did not go for Dean. His votes skewed massively upscale. Edwards also skewed upscale, although not nearly as much as Dean.
And FWIW, your "kids of the proletariat" in fancy professional college programs are no longer downscale Dems by any commonly used standard. Neither is Matthew a downscale Dem even if he's currently living on a limited budget.
"Dean was not the liberal the media was making him out to be"
Most definitely. He was a classic DLC pol except for the war.
Polling data?
Shorter me: I know the plural of anecdote is not data, but when the so-called data is so distant from what I see "on the ground", frankly I don't trust the data.
Burritoboy— thanks for your clarification about those yuppified luxury-car hot-tub-liberal denizens of Marin County. Truthfully, my problems with the term "liberal" aside, true progressives are found in pockets all around this country. There are high concentrations in certain parts of San Francisco, Contra Costa & Alameda Counties— and to a lesser extent Marin and San Mateo Counties— but the whole Bay Area is so expensive that many true dyed in the wool pinkos like myself are getting priced out of the market and gentrifying yuppie guilt/superiority-based "liberals" are dominating. The hippie generation is dying, moving rightwards at a frightening clip. That's what gets me about Bill O'Reilly's cockeyed conception of "San Francisco Values." Consumerism and selective social pet issues are trumping the hardcore inclusiveness and egalitarianism of the latter quarter of 20th century Bay Area politics.
With that, I'm off to read Valleywag through pirated wireless on my dying laptop and burn the San Francisco Bay Guardian for warmth because PG&E cut off my power. Toodles!
I guess if Edwards can overcome the GOP-spin, he can be the RFK of this race (probably more so than Obama currently is seen as such by some), while Obama risks turning into the McCarthy -- but according to the current media stereotyping of them, Obama is definitely RFK and Edwards is more McCarthy-esque.
The media always loves the High Church Wine Country Dem, lie Bill Bradley, Gary Hart (pre-Monkey business), and Paul Tsongas. Obama may yet become the RFK, or may not need to due to his greater African American support, but the press's narrative is beside the point on that.
One more "sample space of one" my wife is a school teacher and invited some of her friends from school, which of course means Democrats, into our normal group of conservative Christians. The husband of one of the teachers was an incredibly foul-mouthed working class Democrat (why do homos put flags outside their houses? I don't hang a flag with a titty on it outside my house).
When politics came up we had some fun asking him who he would vote for:Hillary or Obama. He did not like either one of them, and as far as I can tell, the reasons were sexism and racism. But he may have been picking up on the fact that both of them seem like elites.
Edwards might be the smartest choice for the left.
"when the so-called data is so distant from what I see "on the ground", frankly I don't trust the data."
Well, then, you're never going to have a particularly good understanding of electoral politics.
Neither is Matthew a downscale Dem even if he's currently living on a limited budget.
Just did my 2006 taxes -- I'm actually pretty rich these days.
Comments closed April 08, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
Obama's early support is following a pattern familiar from the campaigns of other brainy liberals with cool, detached personas and messages of political reform, from Eugene McCarthy in 1968 to Gary Hart in 1984 to Bill Bradley in 2000. Like those predecessors, Obama is running strong with well-educated voters but demonstrating much less support among those without college degrees.
Wait a minute... in all of those years the eventual Democratic nominee lost. What's the lesson to draw from that?
Posted by br | March 25, 2007 1:08 PM