Politico's John Fortier writes:
"The rural and blue-collar voters of Ohio are likely to be more important swing voters than those Obama courts. Obama appeals to independents, but to young, educated and upscale independents. Picture the guy consulting on his MacBook Air in Starbucks, not the cable guy. Take California, for example, which Clinton won but where Obama won independents by more than 20 points. A recent study by the Public Policy Institute of California found that the state’s independent voters were younger and more educated, and favored Democrats over Republicans by 13 points. These independents are Obama voters, but most would likely vote for any Democrat in a general election.
On the other hand, rural and blue-collar voters are more up for grabs. Whether you call them Reagan Democrats, Perot voters, NASCAR dads or security moms, they are not completely at home with either party. In some instances, economic populism might incline them to vote for Democrats, while traditional morals, patriotism or distrust of government can pull them into the Republican camp. Most importantly, these voters are concentrated in key Midwestern battleground states."
Fortier points out that Obama has pulled impressive support among blue collar voters in Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri, and Minnesota. This is true. However, it's important to note that union households and blue collar voters sans union make up less of those electorates than they do in key states like Ohio and Pennsylvania. And, at the risk of jinxing whatever ticket emerges from the Democratic Fracas of 2008, the states Obama won (excepting, perhaps, Iowa) are reliably blue. The Democratic nominee can more or less count on winning Minnesota and Wisconsin, at any rate, and their best bets lie with the candidate that pulls in overwhelming blue collar support in the battlegrounds of Ohio and Pennsylvania.
Calderone makes a funny, Keith Olbermann loves Hillary.
One more thing. While we're still all ruffled over Geraldine Ferraro's ill-advised, if arguable, statements on the nature of Barack Obama's candidacy and it's success, vis a vis race, Kathleen Parker writes in RCP:
"There are lots of reasons for Obama's success that have nothing to do with race. But there's also this: You can't separate race from who Obama is. He is the biracial man. Although he self-identifies as African-American, it is precisely his dual race -- and his own personal work toward identity integration and transcendence -- that allows him to speak effectively of racial reconciliation and national unity in ways that a white male, or another black male for that matter, could not."
Welcome to the land of the double standard. I work in politics, so I'm used to it. However, as I wrote, perhaps in vain, to the stridently prObama editor of somethingawful, the concept of the race card is a two lane street:
"...You don't preach at Dr. King's church and then turn around and say you're a post-racial candidate. You can't have it both ways. Well, I guess you can, if you're Barack.
[His campaign] has gone out of his way to characterize fairly innocuous statements by Clinton surrogates and supporters as racially tinged when they were making race-neutral statements of fact. Take, as one of several examples, Pres. Clinton's characterization of Barack's stance on the Iraq war as a "fairy tale". Pres. Clinton used the phrase by way of pointing out that while Sen. Obama stood against the impending war in 2002, he shut up about it when he got his Senate seat (as an aside--this is the type of disingenuousness and duplicity that, for some reason, is credited almost solely to Sen. Clinton, who voted for the AUMF and won't apologize for it, like a wheedling, finger-in-the-wind scumbag). And then, he turned around and voted for increased funding! Somehow, this completely accurate (and race-neutral) statement was twisted to mean that Sen. Obama's candidacy (the unstated portion of that sentence being "...as a black man") is a fairy tale. That's total bullshit.
And how about when Bill Shaheen said that the republicans would make an issue of of Sen. Obama's admitted used of cocaine? He got thrown off the campaign, stripped of his unpaid, ceremonial duties. Mark Penn brings it up again in an interview and is widely castigated by pundits. Read today's "headlines": Erick Erickson, who writes for redstate.com, refers to Barack as a "self-admitted former cokehead"."
It's only going to get worse from here. And I wrote that over two weeks ago.
Of course, Ms. Ferarro's statements were fairly unambiguous. She was pointing to the beneficial effects of politically correct speechifying with regards to Sen. Obama's candidacy. Perhaps factually accurate (arguably), but certainly not race neutral. But, I find it interesting that no one affiliated with the Clinton campaign is allowed to even mention the issue. Race seems to be the elephant in the room.
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