The Daily Show and the White Working Class
Robert Goidel
Posted: 05.16.2008 / 5:47 PM EDT
Let me begin with a confession. I am a Daily Show junkie.
Another confession: I am from Kentucky, live in Louisiana, and went to college at James Madison University in Virginia. In the 1980s, on the road from Lexington, KY to Harrisonburg, VA, I routinely drove Route 60 through small West Virginia towns where the face of poverty is decidely rural, white and working class.
The two confessions intersect in the Daily Show’s West Virginia primary spoof. The joke is easy. Jon Stewart as the white redneck or hillbilly, drinking whiskey and then moonshine, and displaying racial ignorance and insensitivity. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel, or whatever other cliche you want to apply.
But if parodying rural white stereotypes is an easy target for late night comedy, it is no joke when it comes to electoral strategy. Like it or not – working class whites – Democratic identifiers uneasy with a secular Democratic Party, often uncomfortable with racial differences, and unsure that government does much to help them – are critical to the Democratic Party’s chances of winning the presidency.
Republican successes in appealing to these groups on social issues, moral values, a commitment to national security, and the promise of lower taxes explain much of the 2000 and 2004 elections (not to mention 1980, 1984, and 1988). Democrats can scoff at such voters as ignorant or racist, but if they talk down to these voters they will lose.
Bill Clinton may have lost some of his lustre as a result of missteps in this campaign but as a candidate he understood this at a gutteral level - even to the point of parody.
Understanding the frustrations of the white working class, understanding how to weave these together with the frustrations of the black community so that they see more commonality than difference - that is Obama’s great task as the Democratic nominee. (And yes, he will be the nominee).
For a Democratic Party ready to nominate the first African American presidential candidate in its history, the million dollar question is whether Barack Obama can connect with these voters. The Obama loss in West Virginia (with Kentucky to follow?) raises more questions than a John Edwards’ endorsement can answer.
Barrack Obama seemed to understand this in his speech on race (which I have quoted at length below).
“Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience - as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense….
And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns - this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.”
Many of these voters - call them bitter if you will - will be resistant to a message coming from an African American nominee described as the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate by the National Journal. They can be won over, however, if the campaign shows that it understands their concerns, ala Bill Clinton “I feel your pain.” As Obama himself notes, Democrats have to recognize that white working class resentments are grounded in legitimate concerns (such as an economy that has left many of them behind).
Equally important, the Obama campaign must explain how Democratic policies - on health care, the economy, the war in Iraq - will make their lives better than Republican tax cuts. They’d like help, but if nothing else, they would at least prefer a government that doesn’t do any more harm.
