There is a really interesting op-ed by Charles Blow in today's NYT:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/17/opinion/17blow.html?ref=opinion
What it suggests to me is that Obama does not have that much of a problem with "white blue-collar workers" as such--he actually did fairly well even in Indiana, and very well in Wisconsin and, of course, Illinois. In the general he will also do well, I suspect, in Michigan, New York, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania (where he leads McCain handily in current polls). But there is a problem for him in appealing to "white blue-collar workers", or "poor, uneducated whites" more generally, in Appalachia. This raises two questions:
1) Given Blow's point that Obama only has to win the states at the fringes of Appalachia in the general (Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York, perhaps Virginia and North Carolina), without the votes of Appalachia, and can discount states such as West Virginia and Kentucky, how much effort should the Obama campaign put into such states and regions of states, compared, for instance, to the Midwest states where he does fairly well among "white blue-collar workers"?
2) Is Obama's apparent problem with "white blue-collar workers" more a problem with Appalachia and its particular political culture (see Karl Rove's recent--outrageously Know-Nothingist--remarks about what are and are not "American" values--completely identifying "Appalachian" guns'n'religion/us v. them values with "America"). And if so, given 1), is it not then more a problem, a tragically ever-recurring problem, for Appalachia than for Obama?
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