Dave Lindorff: The New Media (and Clinton) Story Line: Democrats Need to Worry about Obama

[babylonsister]

The New Media (and Clinton) Story Line: Democrats Need to Worry about Obama
Submitted by dlindorff on Wed, 2008-05-14 15:29.

By Dave Lindorff

snip//


You read it here: Hillary Clinton clearly has no more chance to win West Virginia in a general election than does Barack Obama.

So let's move on to a more salient question: Does Obama's poor showing in West Virginia mean he is going to lose in other states where many of the voters are white, working class, and don't have high school diplomas or college degrees?

No. Of course not.

West Virginia is not just Michigan without car companies and pasties. It's Michigan without Motown and Rap music. It is, that is to say, an almost totally white, incredibly insular, racist state--the kind of place that if you're a black person traveling through on the Interstate, you'd best stick to the highway rest stops to get your coffee. It has plenty of fine people living inside its boundaries, but it also has people who'd be just as at home in rural Mississippi--except that then they'd have to live--god forbid!--in the vicinity of "colored people" (West Virginia is only 3% African-American--you can walk around even a city like Wheeling all day and not see one).

Certainly Obama will have his work cut out for him winning over working class Americans. Hillary Clinton and her seemingly pump-headed husband Bill (see my April 28 column Invasion of the Pumpheads) have been hard at work turning them against him for months now, and Republican John McCain, who knows a thing or two about how racist some voters can be (Bush's campaign during the 2000 South Carolina primary, successfully spread the vicious lie that McCain's adopted Indian daughter was the "love child" of an adulterous relationship with a mythical black woman) can be expected to pick up where she left off, probably courtesy of surrogates and 526 campaign groups.

But the reality is that most of the American white working class is not racist. In most states, whites and blacks work together every day, share lunch and after-work beers, and get along fine. Most working-class people know that their real political enemies are the bosses who keep cutting their real wages, shipping their jobs overseas, busting their unions and financing the politicians who help them screw average Americans.

All Obama has to do is make it clear, during the general election campaign, that he understands all this, and is really going to take their side, by restoring labor law to some kind of at least impartiality, so that unions can start to organize the vast unorganized workforce whose members overwhelmingly want a union. All he has to do is say that he will call a halt to unfair trade agreements that encourage American firms to move overseas and sell their crap back to the US instead of making it here. All he has to do is say that he will start taxing the rich again, and corporations, and cut the tax burden on working people.

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http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/33418

[LakeSamish706]

1. Thats a great story, thanks for posting. n/t