344 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biographylater when he referred derisively, on the stump in Indiana, to a sudden “political flare-up because I
said something that everybody knows is true.” Culturally as well as politically, Obama’s dismissal
of white working people represents a sea-change in the Democrats’ basic identity as the
workingman’s party - one that has been coming since the late 1960s, when large portions of the Left
began regarding white workers as hopeless and hateful reactionaries. Faced with the revolt of the
“Reagan Democrats” - whose politics they interpreted in the narrowest of racial terms - “new
politics” Democrats dreamed of a coalition built around an alliance of right-thinking affluent
liberals and downtrodden minorities, especially African-Americans. It all came to nothing. But after
Bill Clinton failed to consolidate a new version of the old Democratic coalition in the 1990s, the
dreaming began again - first, with disastrous results, in the schismatic Ralph Nader campaign of
2000 and now (with the support of vehement ex-Naderites including Barbara Ehrenreich and Cornel
West) in the Obama campaign. (Sean Wilentz, “Barack Obama and the Unmaking of the
Democratic Party,” Huffington Post, May 23, 2008)
OBAMA BETRAYS THE FORGOTTEN AMERICANS
Wilentz correctly concludes that the Democratic Party is about to cast its fate to the winds in a
way which has obviously tragic implications for the party’s working-class base, many of whom
need the urgent help of a president who is actually sympathetic to their plight and inclined to do is
something about the Bush economy and the related accumulative wreckage of the Bush era.
Wilentz sums up: ‘Obama must assume that the demographics of American politics have changed
dramatically in recent years so that the electorate as a whole is little more than a larger version of
the combined Democratic primary constituencies of Oregon and South Carolina. In any event,
Obama had shown no ability thus far to attract the one constituency that has always spelled the
difference between victory and defeat for the Democratic Party. The party must now decide whether
to go along with Obama and renounce its own heritage — and tempt the political fates.’ (Sean
Wilentz, “Barack Obama and the Unmaking of the Democratic Party,” Huffington Post, May 23,
2008)
The crackpot notion that Obama can somehow win the Electoral College without blue-collar
workers, the white working class, and the Reagan Democrats even spawned a totally new school of
pseudo-sociology. The premise here was that the United States was now a totally parasitical
country with no working-class worth mentioning that was left over. It is of course true that
productive jobs in the United States have been wiped out since the Carter Volcker era at an
unprecedented rate, but it is at the same time a total illusion to think that the Democratic Party can
mean without the support of its traditional working-class base; the defeats of the effete patricians
Gore and Kerry proved just the opposite, in contrast to the victories of Clinton, who did have some
considerable populist appeal. A certain Chris Bowers indulged in a lengthy hallucination about a
utopian world having very little relation to present day reality. Gary Hart in 1984 had claimed that
he would win thanks to the new social ascendancy of the yuppies or young urban professionals.
During the 1990s, a class of affluent young housewives known as soccer moms were supposed to
provide the key demographic for getting elected. After 9/11, these soccer moms became security
moms. Generally speaking, the more elaborate the demographic theory, the smaller the real chance
of the candidate to get elected. This rule of thumb points to big trouble for Obama, since his
signature demographic theory is one of the most arcane to come along in many moons. Obama, you
must realize, is being touted as the candidate of a new, glamorous, and dynamic population group
known as the “creative class.”