On May 7, 2008, at 12:10 PM, James Heartfield wrote:
> If I understand it right, Obama's appeal is a kind of Blairite (or
> even Clintonite) transcendence of the 'old politics'. His core base
> is black and young, but to show that he is of a different stripe,
> he has to distance himself from race politics.
Yup. Except that he's triangulating the Clintons too.
> Hillary hoped to play up her experience, but that has been boxed in
> to an appeal to older voters against younger, and to white working
> class voters, afraid of change.
Yup there too. In the last few weeks - after she fired Mark Penn - she's emphasized her utterly phantasmic identity as a tribune of the working class, "fighting for you." She's been hoping to use her uphill struggle as a point of identification for working class voters struggling to pay the bills. It's probably helped some, but it was too late.
> And is it right that it would be too problematic for the
> superdelegates to overturn Obama's majority of the committed
> delegates?
Almost certainly, unless something dramatic happens in the next few weeks (e.g., Obama is discovered snorting coke with a revolutionary cell).
> Does that mean an election between Third Way Obama and McCain
> pushing a kind of old, white resentiment against change?
Yeah. I've resolved not to repeat the "mania" trope, but most left Obama supporters will insist that he's not Third Way, but he is.
Doug