Anyway, I also think that it's not a given that "economic populist" arguments are necessarily sufficient to overcome the backlash among white workers. This is because so many "economic" issues are ultimately about race. Talk to people about universal healthcare, and there's a segment of people -- if not a majority of workers, then a very large minority of white workers -- who will say flat out that *some people* don't *deserve* healthcare. Which people? The subtext is clear, even when they don't say so explicitly.
I should tell an anecdotal story that is hardly exceptional. Today I was knocking on the doors of union members and talking to them about the election. I was in Perrysville and Brighton Heights, places on Pittsburgh's North Side that -- were I a 1970s "blockbuster" real estate agent -- I would call a "transitional neighborhood." In working-class places like this the response is usually good, just not uniformly so. Anyway, the list I was working from was not well-updated, so that some of the union "retirees" are long dead. At one house an elderly white woman emerged and, when I asked for the guy who turned out to have been her husband, informed me that her husband was dead, she had never voted in her life, and she was not about to start now. She further informed me that she hated her neighborhood because every day her front yard was "like a playground" because the "whores" who were her neighbors kept having their "brat kids." She also talked about a "Down's Syndrome bastard" who lived across the street from her.
The message was pretty clear. It was striking that even though this crude, rude, crabby and vile old woman otherwise had no hangups in saying awful things, she still held back from referring to her "whore" neighbors as "n-words." But there's no doubt that's what she meant. And there are millions like her -- including ones that vote, too.
- - - - - John Lacny http://www.johnlacny.com
People of the US, unite and defeat the Bush regime and all its running dogs!