How Blue Is Your Collar?

[babylonsister]

http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=how_blue_is_your_collar

How Blue Is Your Collar?

The bloviating white men of political television are obsessed with maintaining their blue-collar cred. But their obsession with keeping it real blinds them to their own wealth and leads them to mindlessly victimize Democrats.


Paul Waldman | April 15, 2008


How Blue Is Your Collar? The bloviating white men of political television are obsessed with maintaining their blue-collar cred. But their obsession with keeping it real blinds them to their own wealth and leads them to mindlessly victimize Democrats.

snip//

The contempt for the eggheads and latte-sippers may be offered with an angry sneer from the likes of O'Reilly and the pretense of objective analysis from the likes of Matthews and Russert, but the motivation is one and the same, the millionaire media giant's hope that his own authenticity hasn't disappeared with his high station, that under it all he's still one of the guys.

And the easiest way to show you're still cool with the folks back in the neighborhood is to blather on about how Democrats (and it's always only Democrats) aren't. Had you been watching cable television in the days following the release of Bill's and Hillary's tax returns, you would have seen copious braying about whether the fact that the Clintons have made over $100 million since leaving the White House means that Hillary will have trouble "connecting" with regular folks with modest incomes. But no one brought up the fact that, according to the Associated Press, Cindy McCain is worth the same amount, $100 million. Among the McCains' many homes are a $4.6 million condo in Phoenix (that must be some condo), another condo in Virginia, and their $1.8 million estate on 15 acres in lovely Sedona.

But the default assumption for the press is that Republicans, no matter where they summer or who their fathers were or where they went to school, just relate to honest, hardworking folks. For Democrats, on the other hand, the assumption is just the opposite. Would any Democrat whose father was a president and whose grandfather was a senator, and who attended Andover, Yale, and Harvard, have been able to get away with George W. Bush's down-home reg'lar fella routine without the likes of Matthews and Russert ridiculing them mercilessly for being not just an elitist but a phony to boot? Not in a million years.

Asking whether a Republican might be an elitist would run the risk of committing that most cardinal of sins, "class warfare." Chris Matthews, Tim Russert, or Bill O'Reilly can pretend that they prefer Schlitz to chardonnay, but they can't pretend they're not the people who benefit from the offerings on the GOP economic menu. What does John McCain drink, on the other hand? Nobody asks, and nobody cares.

[Cresent City Kid]

1. I don't need them to relate

Some politicians come from poor or middle class backgrounds, but by the time they're running for President, this part of their lives is a memory. No one who is currently blue-collar with only blue-collar friends is going to be in position to be President. It's always a question of "Which one of these rich guys/gal is going to make life easier for the average person?"

[LSparkle]

2. "That most cardinal of sins ... 'class warfare' ... " Well ...

WE (THE HAVE-NOTS) NEED TO START FIGHTING BACK!

This warfare has been going on since the days of Ronnie RayGun, yet
because "it just isn't done" or "just isn't discussed" or it's "unseemly,"
the HAVE-NOTS have not been fighting back! This has been a one-sided
fight, which we on the losing side have been mind-f***ed out of even
taking part in.

That's part of why I believe in Obama -- because he's running his
campaign with small donations of over a million supporters, not getting
his marching orders from the TRULY ELITE "haves" in D.C. and the media.
Electing him as president will perhaps be the beginning of our self-
defense.

[Yavapai]

3. I agree fully with LSparkle!

And the Corporate masters are in total panic that their hand picked candidates (Hillary and MC-Same)are going to lose. Wonder if that is why these two corporate whores sound so very much alike in their rhetoric?