Obama: Debunking the Latte-Liberal Myth

[Adelante]

Obama: Debunking the Latte-Liberal Myth
—Peter Keating, March 10 2008

-snip

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.

But the Clintons know they can rely on the media to miss African-Americans among working Americans. When Chris Matthews rhapsodizes about “working people,” he synonymizes that phrase with “ethnic people” and “regular guys,” meaning white Catholic males. When Joe Klein worries that Obama’s rhetoric won’t connect with “working-class voters,” he means white working-class voters. When Katie Couric visits with “blue-collar” voters, it’s with white restaurant owners and white Honda employees. Like sportswriters glorifying Brett Favre, the political press gets a chance to go authentic by rubbing elbows with honest-to-goodness hardhats during presidential campaigns. And lo and behold, all the faces under the helmets they interview turn out to be white.

Entire article

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2008/03/obama_debunking_the_latte_liberal_myth.html

[BeyondGeography]

1. It is an obvious point that they always pretend to miss

Then again, they'll say blacks are voting on affinity, not self-interest. Then again, then again, whites and women may well be doing the same thing, right?

[jody]

2. How can anyone clain BO is heir to anything when as a political chameleon he keeps changing? n/t

[Cha]

3. Yeah, hilary's got a piece

of gopervert politics in 'er alright.

"Until the Obama-Clinton battle, however, this tactic of defining the opposition as worthless, as opposed to wrong, had been relatively rare within intra–Democratic Party battles. In constantly rewriting various groups and states out of votes that “matter,” Clinton and her surrogates are fulfilling a Republican double fantasy: labeling white Obama supporters as effete snobs and rendering black voters invisible altogether". —Peter Keating

Blowback to hilary.