NY Mag: Obama: Debunking the Latte-Liberal Myth

[babylonsister]

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2008/03/obama_debunking_the_latte_liberal_myth.html?imw=Y

Obama: Debunking the Latte-Liberal Myth
Kidd

Photo: Getty Images

“{Barack} Obama has won the small caucus states with the latte-sipping crowd,” an anonymous aide to Hillary Clinton told the Times of London over the weekend. “They don’t need a president, they need a feeling.” —Times Online



If there’s one piece of partisan analysis that has hardened into conventional wisdom about the 2008 Democratic campaign, it’s that Obama is an uptown guy compared to Clinton’s downtown gal. The argument has been made elegantly, as when Rutgers historian David Greenberg wrote in Slate that Obama’s “real precursors … are the educated, middle-class reformers of the Gilded Age known as the Mugwumps … liberal professionals and gentlemen of the late 19th century who tried to transform both the economic arrangements of the industrial age … and the machine-dominated political system … forebears of the Progressives … but also elitist.” And it’s been made crassly, as when machinists-union chief Tom Buffenbarger called Obama supporters “latte-drinking, Prius-driving, Birkenstock-wearing, trust-fund babies.” The meme is out there, and it’s sticking: To paraphrase Archie Bunker on Harry Belafonte, Barack Obama’s just a good-looking Adlai Stevenson dipped in caramel.

So here’s a question for Professor Greenberg and Mr. Buffenbarger and all the talking heads who sagely quote Ron Brownstein’s division of Democrats into “beer-track” Hillary supporters and “wine-track” Obama voters: Of all the self-styled “progressive” reformers, self-actualizing Prius drivers, Birkenstock-stomping lefty libs and bathrobe-wearing bloggers you know, how many are black? Surely there are many African-Americans who enjoy a tasty latte. But according to our back-of-the-envelope calculations, about 40 percent of Obama supporters happen to be non-wealthy blacks. And those voters seem to drop right out of this year’s breakdowns and equations.

Yes, Obama really is heir to a capital-P Progressive tradition that sees cleaning up politics and runaway capitalism as key to repairing societal breaches. Clinton, having failed to win a critical mass of Democratic voters either through the policy triangulations that worked for her husband or by campaigning as a semi-incumbent, really has fallen back on the virtues of machine politics. She now claims that she’ll fight and she’ll deliver the goods.

But simply to repeat that this divide exists is to miss the very specific way it is cleaving Democrats in 2008. White-collar liberalism puts forth a serious candidate nearly every presidential primary cycle: Stevenson, Eugene McCarthy, Morris Udall, Gary Hart, Bruce Babbitt, Paul Tsongas, Bill Bradley. Said contender is always an anti-politics politician
who typically comes across as ennoblingly idealistic to supporters, annoyingly holier-than-thou to opponents, and interestingly ironic or witty to the press. He then loses. And in going down to defeat, he gains hardly any black votes. Indeed, the Democratic regulars and Southerners who have been the party’s nominees since desegregation have, time and again, relied on overwhelming African-American support to beat back insurgencies, from Hubert Humphrey in 1968 to (most crucially) Walter Mondale in 1984 to Al Gore in 2000.

That’s why what Obama has been pulling off is historically unique. Obama versus Clinton is what you would get if you reran “Clean Gene” vs. RFK in 1968 — if you took African-Americans away from the Kennedy side of the ledger and added them to the McCarthy side. If reform liberalism, in other words, is what turned out to unite Democrats across racial lines, not interest-group liberalism.

That’s why when Bill Clinton says the states voting for Obama this time around “disproportionately favor upper-income voters who don't really need a president but feel like they need a change," he can’t seriously be talking about blacks. It’s not just that if the presidency matters to any one readily identifiable group of Americans, for better or worse it’s African-Americans, who are disproportionately lower-income, disproportionately affected by macroeconomic dislocations, and disproportionately reliant on the government to enforce laws against job and housing discrimination. It’s also that blacks have been among the most regular Democrats, putting party above “feelings” or “change,” for decades. Their break with the Establishment is a huge deal.

more...

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2008/03/obama_debunking_the_latte_liberal_myth.html?imw=Y

[xultar]

1. Latte Liberal applies to y'all white folk. Us black folk aren't included in the Latte Liberal

label.

[babylonsister]

2. Not me; I'm white, but I drink Private Selection from Krogers; with 2%

milk, unwarmed. What does that make me? :crazy:

[SoFlaJet]

4. what else?

a TRUE blue democrat

[xultar]

6. A Private Selection Liberal...

ROFL!!!!

Whew, I crack myself up.

[babylonsister]

7. Ha! You crack me up, too, xultar. nt

[roseBudd]

3. African-Americans are falling further behind whites economically.

http://elsie-news.over-blog.com/pages/Forty_years_after_the_Civil_Rights_Era_AfricanAmericans_are_falling_further_behind_whites_economically-141226.html

A new study by Julia Isaacs, a fellow with the Brookings Institution, paints a dark picture for black families, and especially for the large group of African-Americans who moved up and into the middle class following the hard-fought gains of the 1950s and 1960s.

Isaacs looked at a unique set of data, one that allowed her to compare the incomes of people in their 30s in 2004 with their parents' generation in the mid-'70s (this allowed her to compare people at the same general stage in their careers -- apples and apples).

While white men's incomes have been stagnant for the past three decades -- for both white and black families, most of the increase in family income was a result of women entering the work force rather than wages increasing -- the current generation of 30-something black men actually earn, on average, 12 percent less than their fathers did in the mid-1970s.

That trend toward downward mobility has an enormous impact on the black middle class. While children of middle-class whites tend to do better than their parents did at the same age, a majority of middle-class African American children do worse than theirs, both in income and in terms of their position on the nation's economic ladder. According to Isaacs, "only 31 percent of black children born to parents in the middle of the income distribution have family income greater than their parents, compared to 68 percent of white children from the same income bracket."

[katty]

5. so it's: LatteLibPriusBirkies?

[reallyreallyreally]

8. Latte Liberals for Hillary

Hi all,
I'm one of many Latte Liberals for Hillary.
As a Seattlite in the "big tent" of the democratic party- I really don't mind the label.
I will set the record straight- I don't wear birkenstocks or drive a prius.

I personally don't need universal health care or many of the other government programs.
I probably would have my taxes raised under Hillary but I'm for her and these programs as politics for me is to serve the greater-good. Bettering my fellow men and women.
Hillary appeals to the people that really need the democratic party to yes..."fight" for them.
I'm for Hillary because she has a better chance at affecting the things the Obama people want as well but they don't realize that she infact, would be more effective at getting it done.

I'm concerned about Obama's choice in "personal spiritual advisor."
Hate speech on the Left is no less ugly than hate speech on the Right.
I personally think "it's over for Obama." It may be a long slow end with other twists and turns but the ability for him to win a national election for the democrats is OVER ALREADY. Bummer but true.

Hillary is our only shot at getting a democrat back in the whitehouse.

[susankh4]

11. ibid.

Nice description, BTW.

[susankh4]

12. Welcome, BTW!

And do drop over to Hillary group.

[roseBudd]

9. ..."it’s African-Americans, who are disproportionately lower-income"

I cannot worry about low income elderly white women when


http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/031907LA.shtml

Capitol Hill Holds Hearing on Black Male Unemployment
By James Wright
The Afro-American News

Wednesday 14 March 2007

The Black male unemployment rate is unacceptably high and it is time for the federal government to do something about it. That was the conclusion of a March 5 hearing held by the Joint Economic Committee, a bicameral, bipartisan committee of U.S. representatives and senators who are charged with studying the nation's economy and making recommendations to the government for changes, if necessary.

U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) is the chairman of the committee. He convened the hearing as a part of a series dealing with America's unemployment rate despite record economic growth in many parts of the country. There are no Black members of the committee because Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) opted not to sit on it and the members of the House had not been selected at AFRO press time.

Schumer bemoaned the high rate of unemployment among young Black males.

"The crisis is profound, persistent and perplexing," he said. "Both across the country and particularly in my home state of New York, far too many Black men are facing difficulty finding and keeping work. The numbers are staggering and getting worse, particularly for young Black males."

[Oak2004]

10. I think we ought to worry about all of us

because I think the divide-and-conquer effect of "interest group politics" has been sinking us all. There's no question that certain groups, such as black men, have been getting it worse than others, but no one ought to be getting the wrong end of the stick at all. United -- not fake "unity" that favors one group over another, but real unity -- we can't be defeated. Divided, we get fascist ubercapitalism, war, and death, at least 'till the looming environmental disaster destroys what remains of human civilization.