March 10, 2008--Too Hip By Half?

We know that a lot of politics is cultural. And that there may be an echo of the Culture Wars of the 1990s reverberating in the current battle for the Democratic nomination. As reductionist it may be to think in these terms, these old fights may still be found in the struggle under way between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, with each of them representing opposite sides of that divide and both benefiting and paying the price for how they appear and for what they represent. Including subliminally.

If this is in any way true, it may help explain why Obama has done well in the new Virginia and Hillary in hardscrabble places such as Ohio. And since the next big battleground is Pennsylvania, a state demographically quite similar to Ohio, for Obama to do well there he may have to make some mid-course cultural adjustments in order to connect with voters there.

It remains a mystery to me why Hillary seems to do better with blue-collar voters and so-called Reagan Democrats; but, there is no denying it, she does. Though she comes from an upper-middle-class world and has become in her own way a Fancy Lady with multi-million dollar homes in Georgetown and Westchester County, and has the casual capacity to loan herself $5.0 million, still there is something about her that appeals to working-class, disenfranchised-feeling white people. Perhaps there is a residue of good will toward her husband, though the reasons for that too are a mystery to me, that wafts over her. Perhaps people identify with the fact that she has figuratively been beaten up and beaten down a lot. Just like the way they feel about themselves.

We could struggle all day to figure out the nuances, but—bottom line—Obama has to figure out how better to connect with these crucial voters.

I am coming to feel that the very same things that make him appealing to the so-called latte-set—his youthfulness, urbanity, wryness, cleverness, articulateness, elegance, optimistic sparkle, even the way he dresses, turns almost as many people off as on. He benefits in places where there is a highly-educated, affluent, culturally progressive electorate, but does much less well where people perceive themselves as culturally dispossessed and unfairly treated.

I’m the last one to feel qualified to offer him advice about what to do, but one suggestion would be to back off a bit from his magnificent speeches and add to his mega rallies more intimate, high-touch events. I think he also should let people know more about his biography. He looks fancier than Hillary though the truth of his life is a story very different than hers. He told it well in his autobiography, but a lot of the folks he’ll be meeting in Pennsylvania the next six weeks probably haven’t read it. And if they get to know him this way might find that they share more common ground with him than with the Clintons.