Sunday, November 11, 2007
The regular joe Republican bias
Brian Beutler made an insightful observation several months ago about how the GOP is often swayed by old-school masculinity in a candidate (sorry, Sen. Clinton, but that's just one of the reasons why the GOP wont love you):
“Actual voters made their decisions on the basis of artifice like Fred Thompson's pick up truck and not on the basis of more serious metrics,” Buetler says of Thompson's election to the senate in '94.
Ezra Klein responds by saying (I think, rightly so) that this campaign strategy originally started with Republican pandering of the blue-collar working class by attributing an “ordinary, tough guy” to political office hopefuls (think Reagan, Dubya etc.).
This concept, I have seen elaborated before, quite eloquently by Thomas Frank in What’s the matter with Kansas where he wonders why (and how) the lowly-paid, blue collar worker (whose ideals and way of life are quite clearly patronized by the Democratic policy) became a loyal Bush-loving red-stater. His conclusion is that the battle the guy in rural Kansas wages is directed at the intellectual, irony-loving, coastal, elite democrat who not only gets paid obscene amounts of money to write legal briefs and economic reviews, but also thinks that manual labor (the bread and butter of red-state America) is obsolete.
All this is in keeping with the example Chris Matthews often cites from a poll conducted during the 2004 presidential campaign: if you get a flat tire, who is going to stop and help you? In 2004, people apparently thought that Dubya would. Little did they know then that he’d sooner roll the car off the cliff than tighten a bolt. ¶ 8:46 PM
“Actual voters made their decisions on the basis of artifice like Fred Thompson's pick up truck and not on the basis of more serious metrics,” Buetler says of Thompson's election to the senate in '94.
Ezra Klein responds by saying (I think, rightly so) that this campaign strategy originally started with Republican pandering of the blue-collar working class by attributing an “ordinary, tough guy” to political office hopefuls (think Reagan, Dubya etc.).
This concept, I have seen elaborated before, quite eloquently by Thomas Frank in What’s the matter with Kansas where he wonders why (and how) the lowly-paid, blue collar worker (whose ideals and way of life are quite clearly patronized by the Democratic policy) became a loyal Bush-loving red-stater. His conclusion is that the battle the guy in rural Kansas wages is directed at the intellectual, irony-loving, coastal, elite democrat who not only gets paid obscene amounts of money to write legal briefs and economic reviews, but also thinks that manual labor (the bread and butter of red-state America) is obsolete.
All this is in keeping with the example Chris Matthews often cites from a poll conducted during the 2004 presidential campaign: if you get a flat tire, who is going to stop and help you? In 2004, people apparently thought that Dubya would. Little did they know then that he’d sooner roll the car off the cliff than tighten a bolt. ¶ 8:46 PM
