Obama and blue-collar workers

It seems that the latimes.com thinks Barack Obama won't do well with blue-collar workers. And that doing well with blue collars, Hillary's stronghold, means the election in 2008.

Obama's early support is following a pattern familiar from the campaigns of other brainy liberals with cool, detached personas and messages of political reform, from Eugene McCarthy in 1968 to Gary Hart in 1984 to Bill Bradley in 2000. Like those predecessors, Obama is running strong with well-educated voters but demonstrating much less support among those without college degrees. (latimes.com)

So far at least, Hillary Clinton fits the mold of the winning candidate, the one whose “greatest strength is usually persistence, not eloquence; they don’t so much inspire as reassure,” Ronald Brownstein writes. “Think of Harry Truman in 1948, Hubert Humphrey in 1968 and, in a somewhat more diluted fashion, Walter Mondale in 1984 and John Kerry in 2004.”

There is “one twist” to this old story in the 2008 campaign, Brownstein concedes. “Obama’s African American heritage is helping him, already, to split the black vote fairly closely with Clinton in most surveys.” (Chris Suellentrop, The Opinionator, NYTimes)

theteach