Hillary Clinton: working-class hero?

As soon as your born they make you feel small,
By giving you no time instead of it all,
Till the pain is so big you feel nothing at all,
A working class hero is something to be,
A working class hero is something to be.
— “Working Class Hero”
by John Lennon

Lexi wrote a good comment after my last post, in which I said I didn’t think it was smart for Hillary to bring up race. Lexi:

The “white working-class” are the vast majority of Americans. If you don’t even have their support among Democrats, you stand little to no chance of gaining “white working-class” Independents and crossover Republicans. Do you what that means? It means you get blown out in the key States that you need to win to put together an Electoral College victory. That’s her point–and she’s correct. They’re the hardest and most important constituency to win over, and once they turn against you, they’re the hardest to get back. Parenthetically, they also love their War Heroes. Get it?

Got it.

Pat Buchanan just wrote something similar:

What Hillary and Begala are saying is politically incorrect, but it is also patently true. Hillary was describing what may now fairly be called the Hillary Democrats — a.k.a. the ex-Reagan Democrats who did not vote for Obama and may defect to John McCain.

If Obama can win over these voters who gave Hillary big victories in Ohio and Pennsylvania, he is the 44th president. If McCain does not win a goodly slice of these Democrats, he will lose.

Who, exactly, are the Hillocrats, half of whom said in the exit polls from North Carolina and Indiana that, if she loses the nomination, they will stay home or vote for McCain?

They are white, working- and middle-class, Catholic, small-town, rural, unionized, middle-age and seniors, and surviving on less than $50,000 a year. They are the people most belittled by the condescending commentary of Barack behind closed doors out at Sodom on the Bay.

So — I could be wrong.

Yet — having come from a blue-collar family from a blue-collar area, and with most of my friends working-class types, it still strikes me as strange that Hillary is a working-class hero. She’s not. She’s the real elitist who wants to run our lives as if we were all her children on an “It Takes a Village” feminist commune.

Obama vs. McCain

As to Obama vs. McCain, that’s a harder case for me to make concerning working-class whites voting for Obama. But it can be made. It’s such folks who gave LBJ his landslide in 1964, when LBJ painted Barry Goldwater as a psycho would get us all killed. Goldwater’s slogan was, “In your heart you know he’s right.” To which LBJ’s people replied, “In your guts you know he’s nuts.”

In the working-class area where I grew up, in my fourth-grade class we had one of those practice elections American schools are fond of. I was one of two kids out of 30 who voted for Goldwater. Of course we reflected the preferences of our families, almost all of whom had a dad who was a UAW member and worked in a factory and mom who was a housewife. Little did they know that LBJ was the one who was the warmonger who would send their sons — the older brothers of my classmates — to Nam, wreck the economy with war spending, welfare and inflation, and wreck neighborhoods with “urban renewal.”

The slogan was wrong about Goldwater being a nutty warmonger, but McCain really is a nutty warmonger. It’s not just the Iraq War and the potential Iran War. It’s Russia and China. With the demise of communism, there’s no reason to antagonize these countries. They’re capitalist now and can be accommodated. A prudent policy would help them mature as countries that are taking back their places as major world powers.

Instead, Dr. Strangelove McCain wants to confront them:

The Arizona senator has already signalled that he intends to confront Russian president Vladimir Putin more directly than George W Bush if he wins the White House in November.

In a recent foreign policy speech, Mr McCain advocated removing Russia from the G8 group of major industrialised powers, while this week he announced he would not attend the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics if he were in office because of China’s suppression of Tibetan protest.

His experience of foreign affairs is one reason why the 71-year-old Vietnam war veteran has drawn level with both his potential Democratic rivals, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, in opinion polls, suggesting the public may accept his more muscular approach to the world.

Robert Kagan, who wrote much of the speech delivered in Los Angeles, told the Daily Telegraph: “Russia will loom large for both Europe and the US, and John McCain has been ahead of the curve and has seen this coming down the road.

“We have made the mistake of being too passive as Putin has consolidated his autocracy. There have been key moments when he took away power of opposition parties, suppressed the media and arrested key figures, which were greeted with relative silence in the West.

“Because Putin feels he has to maintain the trappings of democracy there are opportunities to be stronger but the West hasn’t done that.”

Kagan is the fanatical, warmongering, bloodthirsty, chickenhawk Neocon who devised Bush’s disastrous “surge” in Iraq.

McCain-Feingold-Stalin

It’s also amusing that Kagan, who could be McCain’s pick for Secretary of State, attacked Putin for taking “away power of opposition parties,” when in the United States there are no “opposition parties” (note the plural) only two virtually identical “major parties.” In the “free” USA, third parties are hamstrung by tyrannical regulations that make it impossible to gain traction with the electorate unless you’re a billionaire like Ross Perot.

Third parties were further suppressed by the Soviet-style McCain-Feingold-Stalin election “reform” law that shreds the First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and assembly.

Finally, I wonder how many of those white blue-collar workers are going to back McCain when they’re standing in unemployment lines during the Bush-McCain recession.