There are Democrats, particularly blue-collar Democrats, who defect to McCain because they see McCain as a patriotic figure and they see Obama as an elitist who's looking down his nose at 'em. Which he is. That comment where he said, you know, "After 9/11, I didn't wear a flag lapel pin because true patriotism consists of speaking out on the issues, not wearing a flag lapel pin"? Well, to a lot of ordinary people, putting that flag lapel pin on is true patriotism. It's a statement of their patriotic love of the country. And for him to sit there and dismiss it as he did—
This way of creating non-patriots out of thin air goes back to the campaigns of George Wallace and Richard Nixon, who piggy-backed on Wallace's success. The emergence of the "southern strategy" was not just a way to use coded language to lure southern whites away from the Democratic Party by reassuring them that the Republicans would defend the peculiar institutions of white supremacy. It helped create the appearance of an emergent national majority by appealing - rhetorically if not electorally - to what became known in the literature as "urban ethnics". One of the principle researchers on the relationship between ethnicity and political identity, Andrew Greeley, did his most influential work in the early 1970's, and discovered that "urban ethnics" - self-identifying members of various national groups usually a generation or two removed from arrival in the US - were the most resistant to Civil Rights, feminism, anti-Vietnam War rhetoric, and other liberal causes.
Greeley's findings included the discovery that part of this lay in a certain sense of ethnic solidarity, as well as resentment, a resentment exploited by Wallace and later Nixon with all his blather about "the silent majority". The politics of racial and cultural division began not with the phony "race hustlers" but with racist white politicians who separated groups along a cultural, rather than socio-economic, divide. The end result of the politics of racial and ethnic division was not so much the creation of a Republican majority through the emergence, by the late-1970's and 1980 of "Reagan Democrats" but the depoliticization of an entire class of formerly engaged groups. The Republicans promised solidarity with what can best be described as the emerging petit bourgeoisie, but delivered little. By the time of the 1980 Presidential election, the lack of any coherent policy left the Republicans with a wonderful political advantage - they could continue to appeal to white ethnics, who would not vote, so they had no reason to follow through.
My problem with Greeley's research is that, by focusing on "ethnicity" as a variable - and it should be noted that he did in fact control for income and other economic variables - he further broke up any sense of solidarity among various voting blocs, creating a situation now where people like Chris Matthews can carry on about "the Irish" and "regular people" in ways that make no sense in regard to our current ethnic complexity, our socio-economic conditions, educational attainment, and other factors. In other words, this is an old way of thinking. Familiar, yes, and rooted in a passing snapshot of the American people, but hardly indicative of where we are now.
The fact that various folks, including an idiotic lip-flapper and dime-novel political manipulator, continue to talk this way shows how bereft our public discourse is; the transparency, the falseness of this entire way of discussing who we are, and what our politics is like should be obvious. The fact that Karl Rove can accuse others of being elitist - that's chutzpah, a sign of really big balls, rhetorically speaking (of course).
