Has Barack Obama’s Democratic party given up on winning the votes of the white working class? Thomas Edsall, the longtime Washington Post reporter now with the Huffington Post, thinks so.
Surveying the plans of Democratic strategists, Edsall wrote in the New York Times on November 28 that “all pretense of trying to win a majority of the white working class has been effectively jettisoned.”
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Of course, an Obama campaign spokesman issued a prompt denial. No campaign wants any groups of voters to know that it has written them off.
But Edsall is plainly on to something. Obama campaign strategists have made it known that they are concentrating on states like Colorado and Virginia — states with high percentages of college-educated voters, young voters, and minorities.
Obama carried both these states in 2008, even though Republican presidential candidates had carried Virginia in every election and Colorado in all but one election between 1964 and 2004.
Not all Democrats accept the Colorado/Virginia strategy. William Galston, a top domestic aide in the Clinton White House, has argued that the Obama campaign should concentrate on states like Ohio, with an older and more blue-collar population.
Only one Democrat in the last century has won the presidency without carrying Ohio, Galston points out. If John Kerry had run just two points stronger there in 2004, he would have been elected president.
And Ohio’s demographics look a lot like those in Pennsylvania, which Obama carried by ten points in 2004 but where he is now running behind in the polls.
But Galston’s advice has been spurned, and perhaps that just reflects an acceptance of a longstanding reality.
For the Democratic party has not been the party of the white working class for a very long time. Democrats lost the support of white non-college voters starting in the late 1960s, as rioters burned city ghettos and college campuses were beset by student rebellions.
Democratic politicians responded by seeking to assuage what they considered to be righteous grievances.
For more than 50 years, from 1917 to 1968, the Democrats were the more hawkish of the two major parties, more likely than Republicans to support military intervention. Since 1968, they have been the more dovish party.
For more than 30 years, from 1933 to 1964, the Democrats pushed programs designed to help the working class: Social Security and Medicare, FHA home-mortgage loans, support for labor unions. But since the middle 1960s, when anti-poverty programs took center stage, Democrats in Washington and big cities have pushed welfare programs for the poor and lenient measures against crime.
The Democrats’ shift produced vote gains in some segments of the electorate. Blacks, who voted 62 percent for John Kennedy, have voted about 90 percent Democratic starting in 1964.
If the white working class behaves at the polls in a way that is statistically distinct from the non-white working class, then the term has value. If it does not, then you are correct. But no sensible political (or marketing, for that matter) analyst would do away with it as long it serves that purpose.
I read recently that fully one fourth of the US population consists of women over age 40. If Obama starts mentioning ideas that benefit their interests he may be able to win the election.
All Obama ever does when he addresses groups is "starts mentioning ideas that benefit their interests" -- it's called playing the audience, and it's all he's ever known how to do. The problem is, he never follows through or backs up that talk with anything substantial because he doesn't know how, and everybody's finally woken up to the fact that he's just an empty-headed empty suit.
Writing off the white working class? Uh, I think it's the Republicans doing that with their full support for the Bush-era tax cuts that greatly benefit the wealthy, and their non-support for Obama's payroll tax cut that greatly benefits the non-wealthy. More and more non-wealthy GOP voters are starting to wake up that unless they're a millionaire or billionaire, the GOP wouldn't pee down their throats if they were on fire.
The vast majority of the Bush tax cuts went to people who weren't wealthy. That's why the percentage of all income taxes paid by the wealthy went up after the Bush tax cuts took affect.
As to Obama's tax cut, why do you liberals want to bankrupt Social Security and Medicare?
Oh, *please*! Like you Repubs give a darn about those things! Just like you don't give a darn about the deficit being that Bush's tax cuts were unpaid for and the money had to be borrowed -- and also in that the last three GOP presidents left office with a record deficit. (I remember National Review running a big article several years ago during W.'s presidency with the title "Why Deficits Don't Matter". Then when Obama gets in there, all of a sudden deficits *do* matter! As far as I'm concerned, for true shared sacrifice, we should put an end to both the payroll tax cut and the Bush tax cuts, and go back to the Clinton-era ones. We'll survive -- the non-wealthy can stop wasting money on Lotto tickets and eating out so much; and the wealthy, well, they certainly haven't been creating jobs with the tax cuts they've been getting for 10 years, so it's not exactly going to have any factor in the unemployment picture.
My dad was a blue-collar factory worker and union organizer before he retired. Always left-of-center, staunch Democrat.
He fled the Dem Party after you Dems started playing identity politics, cheering gays and lesbians and feminists and welfare recipients instead of blue-collar workers; turning a blind eye to rising crime and urban decay; and leaving the working class to deal with it all.
And now? He can't stand Obama. He would rather have Romney (so much for your trying to play the working class against the wealthy).
"And Ohio’s demographics look a lot like those in Pennsylvania, which Obama carried by ten points in 2004 but where he is now running behind in the polls."
