Paul Street writes:
Whatever his motives, if Obama loses to the arch-reactionary McCain-Palin ticket, it won't be only because of racism. Among other things, it will also be because he and his campaign were unwilling or unable to make an aggressively populist case for voting Democratic to the American working class.
. . .
This was the deeper elitism that "mainstream" (corporate) media coverage deleted when Obama helped provoked charges of class and cultural snobbery with some revealing comments to an elite gathering of fundraisers in San Francisco prior to the April 22nd Democratic primary - won decisively by Hillary Clinton with large support from white working-class voters - in Pennsylvania. "You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone for 25 years and nothing's replace them...And it's not surprising," Obama told his wine-sipping West Coast listeners, "they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them." Later, in clarifying his comments, Obama said that poor white small town Americans simply "don't vote on economic issues," turning instead to things like guns, gay marriage, abortion and religion [14].
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