TPM: "Obama's Biggest Weakness" - upscale supporters mock Edwards, Hillary

[rodeodance]

Forum Name General Discussion: Primaries
Topic subject TPM: "Obama's Biggest Weakness" - upscale supporters mock Edwards, Hillary
Topic URL http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x4462681#4462681
4462681, TPM: "Obama's Biggest Weakness" - upscale supporters mock Edwards, Hillary
Posted by bidenista on Thu Feb-07-08 02:24 PM

This is from someone who voted for Obama. Note that. And read on:



Obama's Biggest Weakness
By Jim Sleeper - February 6, 2008, 2:48AM

...Obama is in trouble if - and I'm not yet sure about this -- too many of his famously small $20 and $30 contributions come not from the people of the lower-middle and working classes whom Ken mentioned but mainly from people like the up-and-coming young white writers and journalists with whom I watched one of the recent Democratic debates from the tony (but not too tony) New York neighborhood of Brooklyn Heights.

Every time John Edwards mentioned broken workers in mills he'd known, the young crowd watching the debate hooted derisively, "The mill!, The mill!" Every time Hillary Clinton mentioned her 35 years of experience, they hooted, too. Sure, the candidates' mantras had become tiresome. But the hooting got so annoying, too, that finally I quipped, "Don't you have to be at least 35 years old before you can make fun of 35 years of experience?" I bit my tongue rather than ask if anyone present had ever been to a mill....

I fear that too many young whites with bright prospects have no really serious intention of redressing the growing inequities which the neoliberal world that employs them is spawning, not just between themselves and poor blacks on the Southside but, these days, between blacks and blacks, and women and women, let alone between cool young whites like themselves and the declasse, lumpy white and Latino workers all around them.

Not that my young friends defend wholeheartedly the system in which they're prospering. To their credit, it makes them uncomfortable. But they grasp at mostly symbolic gestures of a politics of moral posturing that relieves racial and class guilt and steadies their moral self-regard with smallish contributions to Obama, an Ivy alum whom they trust to help those people on the Southside without dragging them too deeply into it; without reconfiguring how we charter our corporations and re-construe the private and public investments that employ upscale young whites and well-behaved non-whites; and certainly without redistributing their own bright prospects and future prerogatives and second homes.

More: http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/02/06/obamas_biggest_weakness