What Anglachel said

instead of defending the honor and integrity of fellow voters, we attempt to show that Hillary’s supporters aren’t Bunkers and Bubbas, that we’re nice, clean upper-middle class professionals thankyouverymuch.

I've done that.

Excellent post, thanks for linking to it. Scary smart indeed.

The liberal "intellectuals" seem to get a thrill up their legs when they use that phrase to describe themselves. The thrill that Chris Bowers seems to get from that term is almost as embarrassing as Chris Matthews' thrill (and his flight-suit fetish).

I do hope my periodic lashing out ends this weekend...

I basically agree with this analysis.

I have hated all the blogospheric talk about the "moron consituency" of the Democratic party, about disdain for the Archie Bunkers, etc. I have been complaining about it for YEARS, ever since the liberal blogosphere got going. It has been the lodestar of my thinking long before that, that is, for most of my adult life.

And yet I can't give the "Reagan Democrats" a complete pass. I've lived through some stuff. I lived through Chicago 1983-87 where the Chicago Democratic Party literally melted away rather than support a Black Democrat - our late lamented Mayor Harold Washington - who, by the way, was every bit the fighter that Barack Obama never has been. I was a young kamikaze, going door to door for Harold in neighborhoods where 10% of the vote was a pipe dream. There was a small core of real Democrats, primarily union people, who somehow saw through the BS and did the right thing. In a close election every sliver of the vote could be the crucial difference.

Racism is real - even if some of the OFB don't know "shit from shinola" about it. The whiny PC quality of some of these barbs drive me crazy. Many of the attacks laid at the door of the Clintons are, indeed, bogus. But not all.

I continue to be bothered by their campaign surrogates' semi-subterranean efforts to keep the Wright story alive (Yes, Mr. Harold Ickes, I'm talking about you). The politics of denunciation (denounce who I tell you to or you don't get in the room) has a long racist tradition and it hasn't gone away. Democrats should never engage in it.

Race issues are political dynamite in this country. What might fly in one period may not in another. To view racial attitudes as an immutable historical fact for political purposes ("Latinos won't vote for blacks and everyone knows it") is giving in to racism. To say that the Wright issue cannot be overcome once the Republicans start hitting it, and that we are doomed forever to repeat a Ground Hog Day of Willie Hortons if we nominate Barack Obama is giving in to racism. Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton are not racists but they are giving in to racism as a political strategy. They should be ashamed of themselves, and, I believe, they probably are. If they weren't, they'd be openly disparaging Wright instead of having surrogates do it.

So yes, the college-educated left needs now and has needed for years to get out of its ivory towers and learn how to talk to working people including white working people. It needs to check its elitist condescension at the door. It needs to stop imputing racism at the drop of a hat to OTHER PEOPLE.

But at the end of the day, yeah, racism does exist, and its quite possible to sweep it under the rug, and there's some of that going on in this campaign too.

i don't think it's the party that's done it but the media, aided by the GOP of course. That since Reagan the party bigshots have absorbed it and bought into it is another thing and the votes gotten each cycle prove it false.

We have been the party that helps and protects working people this whole century--the only party that does so, btw.

Unions know it, and working people know it too. It's the use of other issues to get people to vote GOP--resentment, hatred, fear, religion, bigotry, tribalism, faux patriotism, etc--that has peeled some away--and they've absorbed the same rightwing labeling and messages.

It's why "unity" and "postpartisan" shit is so extremely damaging--it gives the GOP a pass, denigrates Democratic history and basic issues, and falsely presumes that everyone in the country wants the same things and can meet in some "middle ground"...

"... The Democratic Party has spent four decades demonizing working class whites as the stupid rubes who are a drag on the American Dream instead of taking seriously the need to assuage the hidden injuries of class. ..."

This cycle is actually showing it to be more false than ever--with working class people showing total loyalty to the party and responding to and voting for the partisan Democrat they know--instead of the postpartisan guy they don't know. And Union support and bread-and-butter domestic economic issues have always been our strength.

I think it's since the 50s & Stevenson, but the more "elite" candidates usually don't get to be the nominee (see Bradley for a really good example) --and when they do, they always lose. The problem is that the alternatives to those "elites" haven't been appealing to enough working class people, and are usually the DC establishment pick (see Kerry).

populist or working-class person to be any party's candidate anyway--it's too threatening.