John but it seems like very few people read Frank\'s Kansas book to the end where he lays the real blame for working-class Republican voting at the feet of the Democrats for taking the workers\' economc issues and the and languages of class and labor off the table.  The corporate Dems denounce all that "old" and "obsolete" stuff as "class warfare,"  - thereby opening the door for the GOP to pick off  a fair portion of the proletariat with abortion, religion, gun rights, gay right and (I would add, Frank did not go there) with race and "national security."\' One thing about Clinton that helped him give effective populist stump speeches (yes, deceptive) was that he did in fact come from a working-class background.  I think that and sharned southernness was also part of what made Edwards (actually from a mill-workers\' household even though he got super-rich later) such an effective populist-like orator.

Anyway, see p. 242-43 and 245 of Tom Frank, What\'s the Matter With Kansas?:

"The Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), the organization that produced such figures as Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Joe Lieberman, and Terry McCauliffe, has long been pushing the party to forget blue-collar voters and concentrate instead on recruiting affluent, white-collar professionals who are liberal on social issues. The larger interests that the DLC wants desperately to court are corporations, capable of generating campaign contributions far out-weighing anything raised by organized labor. The way to collect the votes and --- more important --- the money of these coveted constituencies, \'New Democrats\' think, is to stand rock-solid on, say, the pro-choice position while making endless concessions on economic issues, on welfare, NAFTA, Social Security, labor law, privatization, deregulation, and the rest of it. Such Democrats explicitly rule out what they deride as \'class warfare\' and take great pains to emphasize their friendliness with business. Like the conservatives, they take economic issues off the table. As for working-class voters who were until recently the party\'s very backbone, the DLC figures they will have nowhere else to go; Democrats will always be marginally better on economic issues than Republicans. Besides, what politician in this success-worshipping country really wants to be the voice of poor people?"

"…The problem is not that Democrats are monolithically pro-choice or anti-school prayer; it’s that by dropping the class language that once distinguished them sharply from Republicans they have left themselves vulnerable to cultural wedge issues like guns and abortion and the rest whose hallucinatory appeal would ordinarily be overshadowed by material concerns.  We are in an environment where Republicans talks constantly about class – in a coded way, to be sure – but where Democrats are afraid to bring it up."

John - there\'s a line and I don\'t where exactly to draw it between (i) Obama\'s speaking manner and bearing and his Wall Street world view triggering folks because many people are racist and think he\'s an "uppity nigger" (ii) Obama\'s speaking manner and bearing and his Wall Street world view triggering folks because many people just can\'t stand know-it-all Harvard and University of  Chicago neoliberal types and find such types to be nauseating, droning, irritating, elitist and yet clueless assholes. After hundreds of articles and project studies and two books and countless speeches and policy briefs exposing U.S. racism, I think I can fairly say I have none of (i).  But I have a lot of (ii) with Obama and the people around him. I grew up in the shadows of the University of Chicago (in Obama\'s neighborhood Hyde Park) and the University of Michigan to become a pro-worker anti-capitalist leftist and spent years relegated to the super-exploited (highly proletarianized) margins of "higher education." In  the process of all that I developed a special undying town (us) v. gown (them)  loathing of the corporate liberal (later corporate neoliberal) Ivy League/University of Chicago/Stanford crowd, including people of all colors (though that crowd is disproportionately white of course).  I think working class people\'s hatred of liberal professor/lawyer/politician types is more complex than the conventional white middle-class- progressive wisdom ("they\'re a bunch of bitter backwards racists") allows. The privileged liberal types (many heavily into Obama this last year) are often real class oppressors. They deny it and roll their eyes  in disbelief at the accusation but they are class oppressors; I\'ve experienced their oppression for many years.  I think Mike Albert\'s writing on the the "coordinator class" is a good point of departure for understanding why working people often dislike  flashy upper-middle-class liberals (of all colors and genders).  Here\'s a great movie --- really wonderful --- on the (working-class) town versus (coordinator class) gown conflict , set in Bloomington, Indiana: "Breaking Away."  It\'s a useful antidote to the usual white academic /Richard Hofstaderian interpretation of white wokring class resentment of fancy intellectuals and politicians as nothing more than pathetic and reactionary paranoia. The liberal elite deserves the working class hatred it evokes.  That hatred takes some ugly forms (support for miserable and vicious cretins like John McCain and Sarah Palin, for example) thanks to the relative absence of left working-class political institutions in the U.S. Resentment abhors a vacuum.

I haven\'t seen any recent Palin Polls in Alaska, but she has to have taken a hit here and come down from her 80% approval rating (and part of the 20% include Republicans who don\'t like her). That Katie Couric interview was horrific. It seems like she\'s got to be mulling over just dropping out at this point. Unless this is all part of the plan, and she suddenly gains amazing abilities for the debate...

I\'m sure Obama is very aware that he shouldn\'t appear too "uppity" if he doesn\'t wan\'t to anger the high number of white racists in this country, while at the same time being smart enough to know he shouldn\'t go out a buck bails in Montana or ride around in a tank in order to appear like something he isn\'t. He played it straight, giving us the professor/lawyer/politician that he is, nothing too exciting but likely a refershing difference for a number of people. I can\'t help but think of Woodrow Wilson, who ended up being pretty nasty, but who knows.

Here is a devastatingly dead-on take on the incredibly boring debate.  Note Cockburn\'s reference to Obama as incredibly timd and as Wall Street\'s "errand boy" and  

Weekend Edition
September 27 / 28, 2008

CounterPunch Diary

http://www.counterpunch.org/

How McCain Blew It

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

In whatever years remain to him – and the health prognoses for McCain are cloudy at best – McCain should look back at the 48 hours up to and including Friday night’s  debate in Mississippi as the Rubicon he was too frightened to cross. He spurned a huge chance to turn the tables on his all-too-decorous opponent.

McCain should have furiously denounced the bailout. There was no ideological impediment, since the Arizona senator has no firm convictions beyond the precepts of his bankrollers – which can be quickly summed up as: less taxes for the rich. Everything else, the thundering about earmarks, the calls for an abolition of “cost plus” in defense contracting (actually, a truly radical proposition if McCain believed a word of it), is hot air.

A McCain “No” to bailout would have put Obama in a difficult position, exposing the timidity of his own posture, and leaving him with the options of continuing as  Wall Street’s errand boy, his  role to date, or if he tried to outflank McCain from the left, as a wild-eyed radical.

But McCain’s nerve failed him. In the opening exchanges of the debate even the sedate Jim Lehrer became impatient as McCain and Obama fled the all important matter of the economic crisis and the proposed bailout and retreated into campaign boilerplate about earmarks and tax cuts.  Sacrifices? It should not have been hard for Obama to say, right up front in stentorian tones, “You ask, Senator McCain, what I propose to cut in this hour of crisis. John, I propose to cut the war in Iraq. Here’s what it has cost to date…” Long minutes went by before he even touched on this issue.

Weirdly, McCain refused to look at Obama. It was a big mistake.  A couple of straw polls from CNN and CBS right after the debate  called it for Obama. In the CNN poll “undecided” women and older people plumped solidly for Obama. It’s in these sectors that the race will be won.

I’ll bet that a lot of those pro-Obama votes from women stem from McCain’s inability to look Obama in the eye. How many women have had to put up with that crap from sulky male spouses and partners? Ask Cindy. Ask any woman.

The biggest win Friday night was for dullness. The two candidates trudged through their dutiful exchanges with even more tedium than the chorus in a Greek tragedy hashing over the whims of fate.

The post-match analysts said that McCain seemed asleep at the wheel during the initial exchanges on the economy, the $700 billion bailout proposed by the Fed and the Treasury, but got snappier when the topic shifted to Iraq and Iran.

Indeed it was clear McCain had forfeited his best shot at turning the tables on Obama the moment he declared that he would vote for the $700 billion bailout package for Wall Street proposed by Bernanke at the Fed and the US Treasury Secretary Paulson  and endorsed by President Bush.

The bailout is hugely unpopular across the United States. In the past four days I’ve not been in a cash register line in any supermarket where vivid denunciations of  Wall Street haven’t mingled with sarcasms about the tycoons’ hirelings in Congress now trying to commit taxpayers’ money to bail out their losses. All this while the hoppers riffle through the National Enquirer for news of Sarah Palin’s love life and about the Youtube films of Bristol.

Every politician in Congress is being told by their office staffs that phone calls are running at least 90 to 10 against the bailout. This is why the Republicans in Congress have found it east to resist the frantic appeals of Paulson, formerly of Goldman Sachs, and instead to say No, leaving the Democrats to whinge and trim, with half-hearted “conditions” attached to the bail-out and fake populist squeaks about reducing executive compensation. Will the Democrats also demand that the tycoons surrender all the money they stand to make if a bailout sends the value of their stock holdings soaring? I don’t think I see the bankers’ whore, Senator Charles Schumer, insisting on that.

Last  Wednesday McCain woke up to a thunderbolt crashing into his campaign hq. It arrived in the form of a Washington Post-ABC poll reporting showing that for the first time, among likely voters, Obama was leading McCain by 52 percent to 43 percent. A week earlier the race had been even. This sudden crushing lead told McCain and his campaign managers that the “Palin bounce” had evaporated. The worst financial crisis since the Depression had taken center stage and the voters were clearly assessing McCain as being out of touch.

Perhaps as a relict of his days as a navy pilot, McCain is capable of quick decisions and drastic changes of course. His pick of Palin, snuffing out  Obama’s post-Denver glow, showed that. That Wednesday morning, amid the ghastly shock of the Washington Post-ABC poll McCain seized the initiative. The nation was in danger! He would speed to Washington. He urged Obama to do the same. The debate would have to be postponed.

Obama was already meekly playing along, with talk of bipartisanship. And then… McCain blew his golden opportunity. Since he’s now lagging ominously in the ratings, McCain needed to ignite at least one or two firestorms Friday night, starting with the bailout. Now the chance has gone.

The first function of any presidential debate is to demonstrate to the Big Money that both candidates are “safe”, first  on the matter of keeping the rich secure from worry. The second function is to assure all relevant lobbies that they are ready and willing to blow up the world if American “security” requires it.

In the requisite demonstrations Obama and McCain sang in unison. They are as one with Wall St. They are ready to blow up the planet. Three times Obama said he completely agreed with the elderly madman opposite him. The interactions became progressively more hackneyed and absurd. Obama pledged to “take out” Osama bin Laden. McCain vowed to prevent another Holocaust of the Jews. Obama respectfully agreed with McCain that Putin is a potential problem and that plucky Georgia needs America’s succor. It was nauseating. Most of the world and its problems didn’t feature at all. Latin America? Free trade?

Between the two of them, the candidates affirmed, often in identical terms, almost every lunatic policy position that has doomed George Bush’s presidency and made America an object of derision and loathing among the nations.

It should have been a no-brainer for Obama simply to chain his opponent to all the disasters of the Bush years, about which the American people have reached a firm and hostile verdict. Obama should be setting forth a new agenda. Instead we got Bush/Cheneyspeak from the Democrat about taking out Osama, repeating all the disasters of Iraq in Afghanistan and invading Pakistan presumably when President Zardari is in Alaska, pursuing Sarah Palin. (Who knows? In the event she doesn’t get to Washington as veep, Sarah can dump Todd and the kids and move on to Islamabad, working for Christ and Empire from the inside.)

A born trimmer, Obama is incapable of going for the jugular or even sounding as though he can take a firm stand on anything. This guy’s no leader. He comes across as a trimmer and a wimp.   McCain looks decisive by comparison.  He’s a throat slitter by temperament. He nicked Obama a couple of times, but the Wall Street tycoons went unscarred. At a ripe tactical moment McCain declined the role he affects to love. When the chips are down, he’s no maverick.....