A Class On Catering To Crackers

By Kleinheider Posted on May 26, 2008 at 12:49 pm

Harold Ford, Jr. gives Barack Obama a lesson in how to reach the white working class in the pages of Newsweek magazine:

Do many rural or working-class people have questions about Obama? Sure. But these are less about race than about culture. Obama has not lived their lives.

That’s OK. In the weeks and months ahead, he just needs to show that he respects them and understands the issues that matter to them—that he can make their lives better. Obama has run a first-rate primary campaign, energizing countless new voters. Now he’s got to get off the big stage more often and meet with people where they work, play and pray. That means getting out to schools and factories, coffee shops, fairgrounds and houses of worship. He needs to earn their trust.

That lesson was driven home for me during my run for Senate in 2006, at a little bar-restaurant called the Lil’ Rebel in Jackson, Tenn. I’d been to church, and during a morning prayer, Pastor Nathaniel Bond held my hands. “There are more Davids than Goliaths, and more answers than there are problems,” he said. Later that day, as I was driving past the Lil’ Rebel for the second time, heading out of town, I decided that I had heard those words for a reason. We turned the car around and pulled in. I wasn’t scared, but my aide—a white guy—was slightly nervous. He told me that “if things don’t go right, we’ll just go.”

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Tags: Appalachia, Barack Obama, Confederate flag, Harold Ford, pickup trucks, rural voters, white working class  

Class The Problem With Obama, Not Race?

By Kleinheider Posted on May 9, 2008 at 7:15 am

GoldnI points to the Economist:

Mr Obama’s main problem with white voters may have more to do with class than race. To the white working man and woman, he has been seen too often as an aloof elitist, who can’t drink whisky, displays a suspicious familiarity with the price of an arugula salad and memorably bowled a deplorable 37 in Altoona, Pennsylvania. Toffishness doomed John Kerry; but with Mr Obama, a child of a single mother who sometimes used food stamps, that picture is surely reversible.

Meanwhile, Mr Obama attracts other voters in a way Mrs Clinton never has. For every white bigot who switches sides because of Mr Obama’s skin colour, there is likely to be a white independent—especially a young one—running to support him. The data show that young people, both black and white, prefer Mr Obama. Against Mrs Clinton, Mr McCain might have swept up all the independents; with Mr Obama he will have to split them.

Is the Economist correct that it is class, not race that alienates white working men and women from Obama or is it a more sinister combination of both?

Is it that, on some subconscious level, the white working class don’t appreciate someone of Obama’s race being someone of Obama’s class?

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Tags: Clinton, Obama, race, white working class