The media is back to the ole Democrats are too elite for white working class people meme

[BurtWorm]

Ta-Nehisi Coates discusses John Judis's dumbass observation. (Why is it only professional types like Judis and the other gasbags in Beltway-land who know what's in the minds of working folk far from the halls of punditry?):


http://ta-nehisicoates.theatlantic.com/archives/2010/02/obamas_problem_with_the_white_working_class.php

Obama's Problem With The White Working Class

I thought were done with this after the election. Evidently not. Here's John Judis:

Here is a fact: Barack Obama has trouble generating enthusiasm among white working class voters. That's not because they are white. He would have had trouble winning support among black working class voters if they had been unable to identify with him because he was black. He has trouble with working class voters because he appears to them as coming from a different world, a different realm of experience, a different class, if you like. And that's because he does.

Judis continues:

Obama's parents were professionals--his mother was an anthropology PhD and his father was a Harvard-trained economist. How much money they made was immaterial. His grandmother, who raised him in Hawaii, was a bank vice-president. He went to a fancy private school and to prestigious colleges (Occidental and Columbia) that turn out professionals and managers. He clearly was not obsessed with making money, but with performing a public service--yet that doesn't distinguish him from other professionals or other Columbia graduates. It does distinguish him from a working- or middle-class American for whom being a civil rights lawyer or professor or politician is at best a passing fantasy...

Yes, there have been some gifted politicians of an upper class or professional background who have been able to do so. Some, like Bill Clinton, Lyndon Johnson, or Ronald Reagan, could draw upon their working class childhoods; others, like Franklin Roosevelt or Edward Kennedy, could evince a kind of upper-class paternalism. This made them great politicians. It didn't necessarily make them great men or great Americans. Barack Obama is, by any fair measure, a great American, and he could turn out to be a great president. But he is not yet a great politician. He has not been able to transcend the political limits of his own social background. And that has been one of his problems as he attempts to extricate America from the mess he inherited.

I don't really understand this. By Judis' own definition--professional parents, private schools, prestigious college, aspiration to be a politician--George W. Bush was a yuppie. I haven't ran the numbers, maybe Bush's yuppie background kept him from relating to the white working class also.

Judis then charges that Obama, as a yuppie, "has not been able to transcend the political limits of his social background." I call this moving the goal-posts. I think it's fair to say that in 2008, Judis thought those "limits" included winning the presidency, to say nothing of winning Virginia, Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Indiana and Ohio.

I don't want anyone to take this the wrong way, but I think one of two things--and maybe both things--have to be true after the election. Obama, a black man among other things, actually did transcend his "social background" by winning in 2008. Or we need to stop ascribing near totemic power to the "white working class."

[BrklynLiberal]

1. Define the issue, Frame the debate, Define the issue. Frame the debate. Define the issue Frame the

debate.


Gee when in hell will the dems EVER learn?????????????????????????????????

[jobycom]

2. They remind me of Al Capone at the end of the Untouchables.

Earlier he tells Ness he's nothing but hot air and a badge, and he sounds mean and everyone goes "oooo." But once Capone has lost he starts screaming "You're nuthin' but hot air and a badge" because it worked before, but by then everyone just says "Yeah, we heard that before, but you still suck."

That's the Republicans. They are bullies and crooks spouting the same nonsense, and not realizing when the people realize how empty their trash is.

[RUMMYisFROSTED]

3. I think it's true.

[Warren DeMontague]

4. George W. Bush sounds like a moron when he opens his mouth, he's a Jesus nut,

he doesn't believe in evolution, and he likes to "cut brush on the ranch".

Ergo, forget Yale, the Bush family $$$, etc. Bush is a "Real Murkin". :eyes:

[Blue_Tires]

5. maybe Obama can buy a pickup and a 100-acre cattle ranch in Tejas

and wear a ten-gallon hat with denim shirts and work gloves while clearing tumbleweed...That image seemed to work with Bush, and no one remembered his ivy-league New England blueblood roots -- Because it's ALL image...You could look at congress, and see 80+ percent of them were born into their wealth, married into it, or were born connected to it...

[CTyankee]

6. I see a lot of this in New Haven. It's the old "town/gown" dichotomy

that is as old as the hills. The white working class folks feel resentment against two groups here: Yale and the black community. Obama is both Ivy and black and they don't like it one bit...

[HeresyLives]

7. But Dubya cut all that brush, and in a cowboy hat.

And he drove a truck and all. Reagan was often photographed on a horse. There's also a photo of him on the web in a set of goggles while holding a huge chainsaw. Jimmy Carter was sold as a peanut farmer.

It's all image.

[ieoeja]

8. And yet, he carried the rural, white vote in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada.

In Nevada, for example, he won every county but one: Las Vegas (the county where Hillary ironically worked to suppress the vote).