The Speech and Obama's Political Potential
Tue Mar 18, 2008 at 11:14:06 AM PDT
I have no idea what the impact of Obama's excellent speech will be, but it gave me new optimism about his political potential--in particular his capacity to appeal the white working class. While political observers sometimes fetishize this group of voters at the expense of other groups, there's no question that blue collar whites are a critical swing group in national elections, one that presents a challenge to Obama.
A recent Pew poll taken before the Wright controversy found that:
One-in-five white Democrats (20%) say that they will vote for McCain over Obama, double the percentage who say they would switch sides in a Clinton-McCain matchup (10%).
That's why this passage in the speech is so politically important:
In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience – as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.
Matt Yglesias makesa critical point, one that had never occurred to me: precisely because he's black, Obama can speak effectively and openly to the anger of whites:
The kind of white resentment Obama is talking about here has been a problem for the Democratic Party for decades now notwithstanding the fact that you rarely see the party nominating African-Americans to run in majority white constituencies. What Obama is showing us here is that precisely because he's black, he's able to acknowledge and validate these resentments in a way that would be very difficult for a white liberal politician.
I don't want to overstate the power of rhetoric: to do so would be to trivialize the very issues Obama addresses in his speech. In appealing to the white working class, rhetoric is no substitute for apopulist, anti-corporate agenda. But my hope is that the empathy expressed in his rhetoric leads him to intensify his populism. Those two things--his ability to speak to the pain of working class voters combined with a move left on economic policy-- could help Obama not only to beat Clinton and McCain but to bring the Reagan Democrats home to stay. And realign the country in the process.
Unless, of course, race proves just too big a hurdle to overcome.
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