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Can Obama close the white working-class gap?

Is Barack Obama starting to close an important gap with Hillary Clinton? I don’t mean the delegate count, although of course that is important, and he shrunk it substantially with his impressive wins over the weekend. I mean the white working-class gap. It’s the egg that comes before the chicken of the Democratic nomination, if he is to have any chance of winning it.

So far, Obama has been taking the black vote and the upwardly mobile white vote. Washington state, for example, which he carried easily on Saturday (February 9), is full of young-ish, white professionals in new technology jobs who are naturally drawn to his message of hope and post-partisanship. These are people, by and large, who aren’t counting on the federal government for direct material needs, so they don’t really need a candidate who offers them specific goods. They’re a large and important part of the new Democratic coalition, and it’s no surprise they love Obama.

Meanwhile, there are Democrats who are looking to the government for specific goods. They’re working class, and mostly white, although they’re also Latino (he has the support of the black working class). For the most part, they’re Democrats either because they’re in unions or because they’re being buffeted by economic forces they consider the Democrats more likely to address. And they’re less moved by Obama’s soaring rhetoric, which doesn’t sound to them like it’s going to help pay for job retraining skills or for their kids to go to university.

Let’s backtrack to Super Tuesday (February 5). In his speech that night, Obama was, to my ear, several atmospheric layers above terra firma. It was a very moving speech to voters who already counted themselves as part of his movement. But as I listened, trying to envision how a white working-class voter heard his words, I imagined a $40,000-a-year white plant worker in Ohio saying to himself: “I’m just not getting this.”

Now, flash forward to Obama’s victory speech on Saturday night, delivered in Richmond, Virginia, a crucial state that votes on Tuesday(February 12). That speech was completely different. On Saturday, early on in his remarks, he said that as Washington dithers, “another family puts up a For Sale sign in the front yard. Another factory shuts its doors forever. Another mother declares bankruptcy because she cannot pay her child’s medical bills. And another soldier waves goodbye as he leaves on another tour of duty in a war that should’ve never been authorised and never been waged”.

The entire speech flew at a much lower elevation than last Tuesday’s. It was a little more like a typical Hillary Clinton speech. She has sometimes been accused of nicking an Obama theme and inserting it into her speeches. Now, Obama seems to be returning serve. Is it working? We don’t have a mountain of evidence yet, but I see hints as I look through exit-polling data from Louisiana that he’s moving some white voters in his direction. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2008

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