To pretend otherwise is disingenuous.

And after eight years of Bush, we need someone who knows how the game is played, someone with experience working in DC.  

I din't expect Obama and his camp to pull this demographic because they just don't get that. Instead of attempting to understand what drives working class voters, it's so much easier to disparage them. I wish the creative class lots of luck. It's pretty apparent, they're gonna need it, from where I am sitting.

[Bill Clinton] won those voters by reaching out to them politically, and by speaking their language.

Obama can't do that, and will never be able to do that. No politician is more deficient in the "common touch" than Obama, and that's not capable of remedy. He's adored by the elites not despite his failure to have a common touch, but because of it -- because he suggests to them their own sense of superiority.

For PA voters link:   http://tinyurl.com/4gy8f

What this party leadership or lack of, I should say, Dean, Pelosi, Brazile, Reid, Hoyer etc. makes me sick. First they took impeachment off the table, then did not de-fund the war, they shut down FL and MI .... swing states of all things. Brazile should be very aware of the FL fiasco. Now the sexism and TOTAL lack of r-e-s-p-e-c-t. for the whole Clinton "wing", makes me even sicker. I hope Obama loses and all of the people I listed are replaced. I will vote McCain, but will vote Dem down ticket. The DNC however, will NOT get a dime. I have had it.

Yup.  And thus the source of my love for Johnny Edwards and my lack of enthusiasm for Obama.

I had this epiphany on the Obama blog, but it was so concises and perfectly formulated that I even got some recommends from the Obamaclub gestapo.

What it comes down to is how we think about voters.  We have books like "What's the matter with Kansas?" and "Don't think of an Elephant."

These books talk down to voters.  We think they don't but they do.

Here's the epiphany.

"What's the matter with Kansas?" is the Democratic Party going meta while the folks in Kansas say "Nothing's wrong with us at all, what the F is wrong with YOU?"

Which is why for all his warts and conflicts of interest some folks really should reconsider Mark Penn and his attitude towards politics that began with an assumption made by V.O. Key.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V._O._Key%2C_Jr.

In his posthumous work, The Responsible Electorate: Rationality in Presidential Voting 1936-60 (1966), he analyzed public opinion data and electoral returns to show what he believed to be the rationality of voters' choices as political decisions rather than responses to psychological stimuli.

Time to start thinking.

Clinton won cause Clinton never thought for a second something was the matter with anyone!!!!

Ok.  Good.

Btw, this is why Obama will lose.  He oozes contempt for anyone not already indoctrinated into his intellectual thought processes.

Certainly Obama seems to have a lock on AAs and kids. And Clinton seems to have a lock on white blue collar. But the rest of the electoral universe is a whole lot more diverse and multidimensional than your tendentious, repetitive references to Obama supporters as the Creative Class warrant.

Of the few hundred people in my personal social sphere the vast majority of them fit within Florida's definition of the Creative Class. Yet certainly more than half are Clinton supporters.

I don't read what any of these bloggers over there type. People like Bowers et al. who lack sense of history re everything they write. History starts with Dean, I guess. And now Obama ;-) The nineties are onehundredthousand years ago. Basically they don't have a clue what the Clinton admin was all about. What Bill Clinton was all about.

Well, I thought I would give this piece a try since BTD started the post with an OL article.

Markos is an ex-marine and lots and lots of the diaires are about  healthcare horror stories and real people with economic problems etc...the diaries are not about the best lattes in Denver.

You paint a picture of bloggers in a dark back room plotting to destroy the "clinton wing" and I am not evern sure what the Clinton wing is. I hate to use a tired phrase but that is just tin-foil hat time.

Talking about class in American politics -- especially to the elite media -- is like cutting a loud fart at one of Sally Quinn's dinner parties.  Witness Johnathan Alter going on about the "nonsense" of Hillary Clinton making appeals to the working class.

But once a candidate is well on the way to the nomination, so that he or she can't simply be eliminated by media narrative drying up his or her funding, then you actually can talk about class.  Which is why Hillary Clinton was able to do so later in the campaign.

The problem that people like me have with the "Clinton wing" of the Party is that talk is all they ever did.  I remember very well the populist appeals Bill Clinton made during the 1992 election -- his promises to invest in people, to build infrastructure to provide jobs, to train lots of folks.  It was very smart politics, at least in the short term.

But once he was in office, what did we get? The only two things Clinton ever pulled out all stops to get passed were NAFTA and WTO.  The other big economic feather in his cap was welfare reform -- part of the Republican agenda.  We got Ron Brown, Mickey Kantor, Terry McAuliffe, Robert Rubin, Mike Espy.  Tommy Boggs had a direct line to the White House while Ron Brown was head of the Commerce Department.

When it came to union-backed anti-scab legislation, Clinton gave it tepid support and sat on his hands, letting it die in Congress.

Economic inequality advanced apace during the eight years that Clinton was president.  The Gini index of inequality went from .454 to .462 while Clinton was president.  As the Washington Post put it:

During the Clinton years, however, every income group showed real income growth.
But the rich got much richer. It was a good time, the 1990s, to already have a million dollars.

What we got was populist rhetoric covering for strategy cooked up by people like Dick Morris.

The only problem I've ever had with Hillary Clinton as a candidate was the people she surrounds herself with -- Mickey Kantor, Terry McAuliffe, Mark Penn.  People who are the exact opposite of any real populist impulse.  And it is they -- not the Clintons themselves -- who are the wing of the party we really should jettison.

They establish their influence in the party by exploiting the anti-democratic impulse to accept large donations from the very wealthy -- the real base of the Republican Party.  And they -- the Terry McAuliffes and Mark Penns -- use this money to win primaries and get their candidates to be the Democratic standard bearers.

A foundation for democratizing the Party should be that no candidate can accept more than $100 from any one person for spending on achieving the nomination.

Even their spouses, children, and superdelegates know what to do now, and they are, in fact, doing it.

There's a WHOLE LOTTA FENCE-MENDING going on upstairs...

Let it play out.

I think the real Bill Clinton in this race is Obama himself. He is running the exact rhetorical nothingness campaign that Bill himself ran. 92 was the last time Iv voted for a Dem. Like, BC, if Obama gets elected he will have no mandate and his only accomplishment will come with making deals with the right. We need to remember that BC had a privatization scheme on the table in 96, the same guy whose advising Obama BTW, that was only stopped because of this famous intern.