Racial Division accomplished . . . Now on to class warfare

May 11, 2008

Jake Tapper, reporting for ABC, quotes President Clinton on Friday in Ripley, W.Va.:

“Hillary is in this race because of people like you and places like this and no matter what they say,” Clinton said. “And no matter how much fun they make of your support of her and the fact that working people all over America have stuck with her, she thinks you’re as smart as they are. She thinks you’ve got as much right to have your say as anybody else. And, you know, they make a lot of fun of me because I like to campaign in places like this, they say I have been exiled to rural America, as if that was a problem. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather be here than listening to that stuff I have to hear on television, I’d rather be with you. There is a simple reason: You need a president a lot more than those people telling you not to vote for her.”

I think this kind of rhetoric pretty clearly shows that the Clinton’s are dead settled on trying to turn this election into a divisive maelstrom of class and race warfare. Mr. Obama–the effete, gentile black man–doesn’t care about working class white people who are struggling. No, he just cares about other black people, the wealthy, etc. I mean does anyone seriously think that Obama, Pelosi, or Reid–all presumably subsumed under the ominous “they” Clinton keeps referring to– are “making fun” of him for campaigning in rural America? Paul Begala invoked the same argument on CNN when he said that Donna Brazile, who has all but officially endorsed Obama, was somehow asserting that “there’s a new Democratic Party that somehow doesn’t need or want white working class people and latinos.” When has anyone said that this constituency was unimportant?

Mr. Begala’s point seems to be that if you think Mr. Obama should be the nominee then you are devaluing working class white voters, who he says do not want Mr. Obama to be the nominee. Note how things get personalized here: because Obama wins approximately forty-percent of working class whites, endorsing him as the nominee means the party doesn’t care about working class whites. Yet, would we make the same argument about Senator Clinton with blacks or with young voters: “If we were to have Senator Clinton as the nominee we would be telling young people, new voters, and blacks that they don’t matter to the Democratic Party.” It’s the exact same rationale, so why isn’t this valid? Any candidate is going to have demographic challenges–I’m just curious as to why Obama’s relative weakness among working class whites is supposedly fatal to his nomination when he has done well in a ton of states that are almost entirely white (Iowa, Vermont, Washington, North Dakota, Wyoming, etc.)

Clearly, the Clinton’s want to have huge voter turn-out in West Virginia in order to accent their point about Obama’s troubles with working-class white voters. As I have argued elsewhere, this is the only basis for her candidacy that still stands and is Obama’s greatest liability as a general election candidate. Yet, what this requires, from a strategic standpoint, is that the Clinton’s keep “ginning up” (Tapper’s phrase) class divisions in a manner right out of Karl Rove’s playbook. This is a classic Karl Rove/Lee Atwater strategy whereby you pit middle class voters against parasitic poor people on the one hand and the liberal elitist upper class who supposedly resent your way of life on the other. Then the election can simply become a referendum on who is more American, Christian, etc. and we don’t have to talk about any issues that actually pertain to the struggles of working class people.

Tony and I will be discussing this on our podcast this week. I am especially interested in how pandering to socially conservative working class whites would change her public declarations about gay issues. Rich Lowry, editor of the conservative National Review, took note of Hillary’s turn towards social conservatism in a recent article. Things are getting very interesting.

Posted by MATT Posted in Bi/Partisan Politics, Current Events, Posts by Matt