Grande Un-Americano

by Jonathan Chait

The warm glow of moral self-satisfaction that white Barack Obama voters like me have been enjoying for months has slightly ebbed in recent weeks, as the press has informed us that we are not real Democrats at all, but a bunch of pampered elites.

The trend has been proclaimed for nearly a year--specifically, since last March, when Ron Brownstein of the Los Angeles Times wrote a highly influential column depicting Hillary Clinton as the "beer track" candidate and Obama as the "wine track" candidate. As the voting has proceeded, and Clinton has held the loyalties of the working class, this analysis has spread and taken on an accusatory tone. "If you have a social need, you're with Hillary," sneered one Clinton adviser. "If you want Obama to be your imaginary hip black friend and you're young and you have no social needs, then he's cool." A union president introducing Clinton at a recent speech asked the audience if it wanted an "editor of the Harvard Law Review or a fighter for working families." Thus the strange alchemy of the campaign has transformed Hillary Clinton into Jim Traficant.

Before the Clintonites get too smug about their working-class heroism, though, it's worth pointing out that their proletarian tilt seems to have come as a total accident. Indeed, the well-heeled liberals they now deride are exactly the voting base they coveted during the Clinton presidency.

Swing voters, basically speaking, come in two varieties. You've got the downscale swingers, who have liberal, pro-government views on economic issues, but more conservative views on social issues. They tend to lean right on guns and gays and left on things like Social Security and free trade. On the other hand, you've got upscale swingers, who lean left on social issues but right on economics. Clinton, especially during his second term, chose to woo the well-to-do set.

The apostle of the upscale strategy was Mark Penn, a pollster who joined Bill Clinton in 1996. Penn had a way of slicing the data so that it always supported the same conclusion: Democrats should embrace the upscale center. To this end, he devised a series of swing-voter blocs for each election year--"Soccer Moms" (1996), "Wired Workers" (2000), and "Office Park Dads" (2002).

The political preferences of each group bore an eerie resemblance to one another: Wired Workers "tend to be socially liberal but fiscally conservative. They like Gore's ideas about gun control, global warming, civil rights and abortion, but they are also intrigued by Bush's proposals for tax cuts, school vouchers and investing Social Security trust funds in the market." (This was Newsweek summarizing Penn's findings.) And Office Park Dads, Penn wrote, "are not the downscale conservative men that unions have been pursuing. They are socially tolerant but entrepreneurially-minded and oriented to economic opportunity."