http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4521
http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4142
By Tim Graham
Eleanor Clift’s latest online column for Newsweek assumes that white male “Reagan Democrats” are racist and sexist, or at least they’re sickened by appeals by too much focus on the “rights” of blacks and women.
“Whether the term is Reagan Democrats or NASCAR dads, they’re euphemisms for the white men who deserted a party they thought focused too much on the rights of http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4579 and women.”
Isn’t that a bit simplistic? Couldn’t there be a lot of reasons for white male Democrats to vote for Reagan? There’s no room in Clift’s racist/sexist analysis for the possibility that defections came because of issues like abortion, the Vietnam War and the “peace” movement, and later, in Reagan’s case, the Carter mismanagement of the economy and the Iranian hostage crisis. Clift continued:
“No Democratic candidate for president has won a majority of the white vote since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Bill Clinton came close, but with Ross Perot in the race siphoning off votes, even Clinton with his natural affinity for lower-income working-class folks, people he grew up with and understood, fell short when the votes were counted. In an election season focused on race and gender, it’s ironic that white male workers have emerged as the most prized cohort.”Again, the “ironic” import to Clift is that white males, who are by her definition insensitive to the rights of blacks and women, are still a stubborn math problem for people who worry they’re all bigots. Clift loves the John Edwards endorsement, which she wrote “couldn’t have come at a more opportune moment. He is the embodiment of the working-class message that has eluded Obama and that has become the core of Hillary Clinton’s campaign.” She wants Edwards at a VP nominee, or at least in an Obama cabinet.