Posted on 10/25/2010 1:18:39 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
ONE of Barack Obama’s political problems, a popular quip has it, is that the remote, dispassionate and professorial president is just “not very good with the humans”. To that it might be added that he does not go down at all well with one sort of human in particular: the white working-class American.
Across the country, Democratic candidates know that victory in the imminent mid-term elections requires them not only to unhitch themselves from Mr Obama’s waning star but also to attack whole chunks of the president’s agenda. This may not be the obvious way for a political party to present itself for re-election, but at the level of individual races it makes sense. In 2008 many Democrats floated into Congress in Mr Obama’s slipstream. Today he has become an albatross around their necks. His own job-approval rating has slumped below 50%. But it is lower than that among whites and lower still among working-class whites.
If the white working class has a capital, says Henry Olsen of the American Enterprise Institute, it is West Virginia, where more than nine out of ten people are white and six out of ten have never gone to college. For more than half a century, the Mountain State sent the late Robert Byrd, a Democrat, to represent it in the Senate. Now the state’s popular governor, Joe Manchin, also a Democrat, is hoping to take his place. But this year everything is different. Despite Mr Manchin’s relentless efforts to distance himself from that fellow in the White House, the race is a toss-up.
No other state is quite like this: in the electorate as a whole, the white working class adds up to perhaps 40% of the voters. But at a time when most working-class white voters are furious at the Democrats, the states where these voters are concentrated have become a happy hunting ground for Republicans. Mr Olsen thinks it no coincidence that a disproportionate number of the Democrats’ most vulnerable House seats in the South, the north-east and the Midwest are in districts dominated by blue-collar whites. Democrats are struggling in the bellwether state of Ohio, and may lose the tight Senate races not only in West Virginia but also in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The revolt of this class, he thinks, could be the defining characteristic of the election, counting more even than the rise of the (also mostly white, but mostly more affluent) tea-party movement.
White working-class voters are the quicksilver of American politics: they are hard to catch and hard to hold. The shifting loyalties of these “Reagan Democrats” (so called because the Gipper detached them from the Democrats in the 1980s, until the wiles of Bill Clinton wrested some of them back a decade later) have helped to swing American elections for decades. Their votes will matter less in the future, as their educational attainment rises and their share of the electorate continues to fall. Minority voters, who cast a mere 14% of votes in 1994, cast more than a quarter of them in 2008, and this share will grow. So plenty of Democratic forecasters from the demography-is-destiny school argue that in the long run the Republicans are doomed unless they can win over more blacks and Hispanics.
Between now and the long run, however, come the mid-terms. And the prospect of a Democratic rout prompts an inevitable question. Have such voters turned on the Democrats because Mr Obama is black? His election was hailed as proof that America had moved beyond race. And yet voting in the mid-terms will be polarised by race. Most whites will pull the Republican lever. Almost all blacks and most Hispanics will vote Democrat.
Race was a factor in 2008, and still is. Why else would blacks alone have stuck so staunchly by their man? As for working-class whites, they did not much care for Mr Obama even in 2008, preferring John McCain by a margin of 18%. But as Mr Obama campaigned, his colour seemed to count for less.
For 20 years Stan Greenberg, a Democratic pollster, studied the blue-collar white voters of Macomb County near Detroit. In 1984 they voted by two to one for Ronald Reagan because, Mr Greenberg found, when such voters heard Democrats talk about economic “fairness”, they saw this as code for transferring money to blacks. Nonetheless, in 2008 Mr Obama won Macomb County with a margin of eight points. Over the course of his campaign, the proportion of Macomb voters who said they were “comfortable” with the idea of Mr Obama as president rose from 40% to 60%. Having watched Mr Obama closely, Mr Greenberg concluded, they “became confident he would work for all Americans and be the steady leader the times required.”
Colour me fickle
If such voters have now changed their minds, the reason is not that Mr Obama is black—he was black in 2008. And for all its momentous symbolism, his election is not the most recent evidence that America has turned the page on race. In June, in South Carolina of all states, Tim Scott, a black Republican, defeated the son of the segregationist Strom Thurmond in a primary, and is on his way to a seat in the House. Compare that to 1983, when a disgraceful number of Democrats in Chicago voted for the Republican rather than send the black Harold Washington to city hall.
All of that has gone. The electorate may be divided by race, but no longer mainly because of race. Some of Mr Obama’s enemies have tried to harness pockets of bigotry by painting him in various ways as un-American. But outright racism in politics is now beyond the pale and will probably have little to do with the coming rejection of the Democrats by the white working class. A wrecked economy and the feeling that their president is out of touch are reason enough. It has, after all, happened before. In two short years from 1992 to 1994, when Bill Clinton was president, white working-class support for the Republicans soared like a rocket from 47% to 61%. Nobody blamed that on skin colour.
Brilliant we are divided by race but not because of race. Hits the nail right on the head. Shout this from the rooftops.
“Some of Mr Obama’s enemies have tried to harness pockets of bigotry by painting him in various ways as un-American.”
Calling an America hating, anti-captalist, socialist muslimphile unAmerican is not bigotry; it is honesty.
The author is obviously a racist.
black hack illinois commie dick hendon calls Brady racist...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hI8vS1BQ_0o&feature=player_embedded
Then who are the other 60%?
Non-White Working Class?
Non-Working Class?
Rich folks make up <5% of the population and pay >70% of the taxes.
If this is correct about the 40%, this country is done for.
Add in the middle class and the underclass and you’ll be at least to 100%.
Anti-obamism is the same as anti-wall street and anti-big politics. This election is about people at the top getting something for “nothing,” taking advantage of their position, or in this case race, to steal money from the rest of us. A white man or woman following obama’s career track would still be manning a two-bit office of a flimsy non-profit in Chicago. There’s no evidence obama ascended through merit.
Race card users kick dog.Want race to still be #1 tool.
Perception that the Obama administration is screwing working-class whites in favor of minorities will do more to put race front-and-center than anything the Klan could have done. Obama will soon be seen to have put race relations back decades, if not a century.
What? Racial profiling is acceptable when demeaning the White Taxpayers, but not illegal immigrants or little gangstas slinging crack on the street corner.
Any person in Congress that voted for DeathCare, the stimulus and/or cap and trade MUST be defeated. Already, several won’t be back for the next Congress.
It doesn’t matter what they SAY to get elected, look at what they DID.
No. They have turned on him because;
1)He is a marxist
2)He hates America
3)He refuses to disclose any of his documents, including birth cert. and cert. of repatriation
4)He rammed massively unpopular bills down America's throat, especially obamacare, despite the fact that 70% of Americans were and are against it.
5)He believes that our constitution is a flawed document because, "It has no provision for the redistribution of wealth"
6)He wants an international tax to prevent global warming, with modern nations (read America) picking up the tab for south america.
7)He and his wife party on America's time and dollar, and during a recession.
The list could go on and on...
>>Perception that the Obama administration is screwing working-class whites in favor of minorities will do more to put race front-and-center than anything the Klan could have done. Obama will soon be seen to have put race relations back decades, if not a century.
The New Black Panther voter discrimination case has opened a lot of eyes.
Really the entire Dem party is built around racism, in the form of racial quotas in hiring for favored groups. Here is a great story about how a Clinton-appointee Federal judge is attempting to impose racial quotas in hiring on FDNY:
Fighting Fire with Quotas - A federal judge’s dangerous crusade against the FDNY
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2613873/posts
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He's also a racist of color - him, and his wife.
Real Americans are awake. And pissed off at what the foreign occupier and his Marxist minions have done to our country.
He lied in everything he tried to sell - everything! The stimilus is needed so that unemployment won't go above 8%. Obamacare will cut costs and the deficit...
Zer0 and the Rats are shovel-ready for the dust bin of history.
Don’t forget! Punctuation and capitalization are good things.
Pretty much.
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