Maureen Dowd Gets Class-Conscious!
Virtually every pundit, from William Kristol
to Maureen Dowd, invokes the once-dreaded
Marxist terminology in suggesting that Barack Obama can't,
as the director of the Quinnipiac University Polling
Institute put it, "penetrate working-class voters"
Demonizing the White Working Class
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When Al Gore unveiled a modest appeal to "working families" at the 2000 Democratic National Convention, he drew a sharp response.
His Republican opponent, George W. Bush, immediately counterattacked, accusing Gore of unleashing "class war" on the country.
The preferred term of address had long been "middle class"; even the AFL-CIO avoided the shoals of class rhetoric to try to co-opt the conservative family-values agenda.
Yet, today, virtually every commentator, from William Kristol to Paul Krugman, unblinkingly invokes the once-dreaded terminology in suggesting that Sen. Barack Obama cannot, as the director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute put it, "penetrate working-class voters."
What gives? Has Marxist class analysis seeped in and insidiously converted our political culture away from its attachment to individualist opportunity-seekers to a society divided by rigid social-economic boundaries?
The answer is, not quite. Today, "working class" has been effectively defanged of any radical, let alone subversive, intent.
In fact, today's working class looks less the modernist, rationalizing force that Marx projected than a bastion of tradition—that unmoving "sack of potatoes" he identified with the peasantry.
Whether explicit or not, today's invocation of the working class is proceeded by the word "white." And the resulting construct—white men and women who have not gone to college—are regularly presented as a mostly conservative political bloc.
Defensive and narrowly materialistic in their politics, religious and intensely nationalistic in their identities, suspicious and perhaps racist in their instinctive response to an African-American candidate, the working class that Obama can't reach looks to be populated by Archie Bunker and his like-minded descendants.
Yet, surely, the working class is at least as crude as Obama's "bitter workers" caricature of small-town voters. Both generalizations fasten a condescending explanation upon a group economically under pressure but united by no single institution or interest.
A personal example illustrates the point. Working as a park supervisor in a "hillbilly" neighborhood of Indianapolis during the summer of 1968, I watched as the balance of political yard signs switched from Robert Kennedy to George Wallace in the months following the former's assassination.
Clearly, the community was being pulled in conflicting directions.
What, then, should be Obama's working-class strategy? The best he can do is to appeal to the better angels of a complex identity that at times links the hopes of many white workers to those of a more inclusive political coalition.
In his Pennsylvania concession speech, Obama talked of his commitment to an economically as opposed to entirely race-based affirmative-action strategy.
What did he mean and how far would he go? Just as he gained understanding and momentum by addressing the race question following the initial Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. debacle, perhaps it is time for Obama to address social class and opportunity in America.
Such a speech might clear the air for wavering Democrats. Obama could repackage his commitments on jobs, taxes, Social Security, Immigration and trade union rights.
On health care, he should make clear that if his initial proposal does not bring about effective universal coverage, he will move quickly to remedy any deficiency.
Finally, he needs to tie his consistent opposition to the Iraq war to the inequality of sacrifice in this country, an inequality that stacks the children of workers into graves and hospital beds.
As for guns, faith and other social issues that may distance him from the predilections of working-class voters, Obama should let them go.
American workers do not need a president to model their own religious convictions or bowling styles.
No chief executive was likely more removed by upbringing or inclination from what might be better called "blue-collar culture" than Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And no other president more assuredly earned workers' undying loyalty.
Maureen Dowd: It's Enough to Make You a Marxist
Barack Obama is going to get down if it kills him.
Bleeding white voters in North Carolina and Indiana, the Illinois senator headed Thursday evening to V.F.W. Post 1954 in North Liberty, Ind., consisting of a bar, a pool table, a Coors Light clock and a couple of dozen curious white guys.
Checking out what the vets were drinking, he announced, “I’m going to have a Bud.” Then, showing he’s a smart guy who can learn and assimilate, he took big swigs from his beer can, a marked improvement on the delicate sip he took at a brewery in Bethlehem, Pa.
Obama is also doing his best to impress hoop-crazed Hoosiers with his passion for basketball. On Thursday night, in shirt and tie, he took on an eighth grader named Aaron at a backyard picnic in Union Mills in an impromptu game of P-I-G. “You know, he’s tough,” Obama laughed about his 14-year-old opponent. “He’s like Hillary Clinton.”
The lioness of Chappaqua is hot on the trail of the Chicago gazelle, eager to gnaw him to pieces, like a harrowing scene out of a George Stubbs painting.
Proclaiming that the upcoming elections in Indiana and North Carolina would be “a game changer,” Hillary and her posse pressed hard on their noble twin themes of emasculation and elitism.
Cherry-bombing the word “pansy” into the discourse, Gov. Mike Easley of North Carolina said Hillary made “Rocky Balboa look like a pansy.”
Paul Gipson, president of a steelworkers local in Portage, Ind., hailed her “testicular fortitude,” before ripping into “Gucci-wearing, latte-drinking, self-centered, egotistical people that have damaged our lifestyle.”
James Carville helpfully told Eleanor Clift of Newsweek that if Hillary gave Obama one of her vehicles of testicular fortitude, “they’d both have two.”
Then came the Big Dog, crazy like a fox, for the coup de graceless. Campaigning in Clarksburg, W. Va., he said that his scrappy wife can win working-class voters, as compared with Obama’s Viognier-and-Volvo set.
“The great divide in this country is not by race or even income, it’s by those who think they are better than everyone else and think they should play by a different set of rules,” the former president said. “In West Virginia and Arkansas, we know that when we see it.”
Oh, well, at least Bill didn’t use the word uppity. And don’t you love this paean to rules coming from a man so tethered and humbled by rules that he invented an entirely new sexual etiquette to suit his needs in the Oval Office?
Why does Obama, the one with the bumpy background and mixed racial heritage, the one raised by a single mother who was on food stamps, seem so forced when he mingles with the common folk?
Karl Rove and other Republicans say he comes across as the snooty product of a Hawaiian prep school, Cambridge, Columbia and Hyde Park, and that is what led to the damaging anthropological “bitter” disquisition.
Yet George H. W. Bush’s attempts to paint over his patrician style with a cowboy veneer was a silly sort of masquerade, obviously engineered by Lee Atwater, who brought the props of pork rinds and country music.
Voters also don’t seem to mind Hillary, with her $109 million bank account, selling herself as the champion of the little people. The blue-collar queen shared her thoughts about the “outrageous” Rev. Wright with the blue-collar king, Bill O’Reilly, last week.
In reality, as first lady, Hillary was renowned for her upstairs-downstairs tussles in the White House, and her high-handed treatment of the little people in the travel office, on the switchboard and on the residence staff.
The reports were legend about the Clintons’ problems with the Secret Service, and I once saw Bill dress down an agent in a humiliating way over a couple of autograph seekers who got past a rope line in Orange County, Calif.
Obama, on the other hand, may seem esoteric, and sometimes looks haughty or put-upon when he should merely offer that ensorcelling smile. But he is very well liked by his Secret Service agents, and shoots hoops with them.
And I watched him take the time one night after a long day of campaigning to stand and take individual pictures with a squadron of Dallas motorcycle police officers on the tarmac.
It must be hard for Obama, having applied all his energy over the years to rising above the rough spots in his background, making whites comfortable with him, striving to become the sophisticated, silky political star who looks supremely comfortable in a tux. Now he must go into reverse and stoop to conquer with cornball photo ops.
“I do think that one of the ironies of the last two or three weeks was this idea that somehow Michelle and I are elitist, pointy-headed intellectual types,” he said, adding sincerely, “I filled up my own gas tanks.”
It’s hard not to be who you are, but it’s doubly hard to be who you’ve strived not to be. Obama not only has to figure out how to unwind with a Bud. He has to rewind his life.
