The Washington Post today has a fantastic piece looking at Clinton and Obama's efforts to wrap themselves in the blue collar in order to attract working class votes. The piece is taken from the perspective of an actual genuine working man who "has watched on television in his double-wide mobile home as Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama have traveled around the country and imitated his lifestyle. Badly."
The piece illustrates how in post-modern political life, image is entirely and unquestioningly disassociated from substance. See Clinton, the one-hundred millionaire Welsley and Yale grad who began the campaign as the heir to the Democratic throne and the candidate of inevitability, successfully re-brand herself as a working-class mama, in Maureen Dowd's phrase, after early exit polls showed white down-scale voters had flocked to her.
Obama too has sought to don the blue collar, most visibly in Pennsylvania, but he is so laughingly unconvincing (see his bowling score and his rejection of "some designer beer" at a Pennsylvania sports bar) that he seems to be poking fun at the process. Like London mayor-elect Boris Johnson saying, "I can't remember what my line on drugs is. What's my line on drugs?"
When Karl Rove managed to convince the American electorate that the Andover and Yale educated George Bush, a scion of a wealthy oil and political family, was somehow less "elite" than Al Gore and John Kerry, some critics announced that cultural identity and its trappings had supplanted socio-economic status as a class determinate. I disagree. To me Rove's achievement was to bring to politics the same vapid logic that had convinced American consumers that one brand of dish soap, say, was superior to another.
I sense that Americans after eight years of Bush have learned to see through political image and branding, and that white working class voters back Clinton not because they deem her one of them, but perhaps because they trust her more rival on the economy, say. But these rituals seem bound to continue until the voters or the candidates reject them.
