Booman wrote a post today about the potential impact of Bruce Springsteen’s endorsement of Barack Obama on the PA primary.
I beg to differ.
Read on to understand why.
“White working men”, eh?
The last couple of years I have been driving fairly regularly into Bethlehem, PA. Right in the heart of the rust belt.
First of all, there ARE no “white working men” in the area.
Not very damned many, anyway. The smart ones left 25 years ago and the dumb ones are too busy drinking themselves to death to give a good flying fuck one way or another.
I would guess the population is more like 35% Spanish, 15% black, and 20% or more “white working middle class”. Merchants, teachers, students in the various colleges, etc.
Further…I take the temperature of any area through which I drive by listening to the radio. AM + FM both. Not much on of real interest to me, so I troll.
Springsteen? He’s not even on the playlists. You would catch five polka stations for every one that even MIGHT play a Springsteen song. Hard rock, soft rock, nostalgia, country, right wing talk radio, college stations that have a range of about 10 miles, endless preachers, sports and the occasional NPR-ish station that has enough juice to project its faux-lib bullshit outside of its urban/college-educated suburban area.
Dassit.
The Boss don’t mean SHIT in Bethlehem.
Bet on it.
Yer dreamin’.
He couldn’t help that lame Small K kerry, and he won’t be able to help Obama either. The image of Hillary Clinton hoisting a high hard one in what looks to be a VFW bar somewhere will garner her more votes than if Bruce came in person and sang at every damned Obama speech.
Bet on it.
Y’ALL like Bruce.
That’s cuz he sings to the choir.
YOU folks. The nostalgie de la boue crowd.
The people on whom the vote will really turn in PA?
He’d be better off with Aerosmith, Jimmy Sturr (a polka star), Vince Gill (country) and some Texas Hold ‘Em poker winner as his opening acts. Hard rock, country, polka + poker.
YEE haw!!! R’member thet there Charley Pride feller? I LIKE this guy!
Bet on that as well.
But Obama is too refined, too intelligent, too…reticent…to play that game.
Again…were I to have a choice, I would still choose Obama simply on the basis of symbolism of for no other reason. Plus he is one smart motherfucker who I think learns very quickly . But he is showing his weaknesses as this thing goes on, and I think that he may well get his ass thoroughly kicked in PA. He has alienated the machine vote in Philadelphia; he is NEVER going to be very big with the so-called “white working class”…again, not so much because of race as due to his own intellectual abilities and his patent inability to hide them…and the real rural folks are mostly Republicans who won’t be much involved in this primareyt anyway. Plus there are a LOT of 40+ women in many of these places with enough free time to go vote for their girl Hil.
Watch.
Betcha.
Look for another Iowa “shocker”.
Payback is a bitch, and so is hubris.
And…FUCK the polls. They are either asking the wrong questions of the wrong people or they are tools of the right wing that is simply slavering to get its hands on Obama in a general election.
Watch.
I think…I hope, anyway…that some of you might find a little dip into Joe Bageant’s vast pool of expertise in the area of “white working men” an enlightening swim.
Go here to read his latest.
Media Shit Storms and Heartland Reality
An excerpt:
I’m from Winchester, Virginia, the very kind of place and people Obama was talking about when the rotten tomatoes started hailing down. So allow me to say this: we white members of the sweating class have been working alongside laboring immigrants, legal and illegal, for decades and have not been killing them with our personal arms in a rage of antipathy, in so far as I know. The reason, near as I can tell, is that we do not give a happy shit one way or another because most of us do not have interest or knowledge enough to fester on the topic. Nor the time. When we fester on stuff, it’s about making car payments and trying not to default on our mortgages. Working two and sometimes three jobs per household does not leave much time to develop political opinions, much less informed ones. I’d be willing to bet there is not a working class person within four blocks of where I now sit who has even heard of this media manufactured Obama fracas. Yesterday Smokey, the apartment maintenance man next door, helped me haul a dead washing machine to the city dump. I asked him what he thought about the Obama thing.
“Huh?” he said.
He spoke for millions.
—snip—
November is still seven months away. No normal person can stand, much less relish, seven more months of all this. But we will wallow in it all for the same reason a hog spends most of its life knee deep in shit. It has no other choice, it has plenty of company, and doesn’t know any other way of life.
One of these days, when it comes to the thundering non-controversy of Obama’s remarks, the blogosphere and the media may start asking the right kinds of questions. The kind Smokey asked me after I explained the Obama controversy to him:
“Who the fuck cares?”
Yup.
Springsteen?
Who the fuck cares?
‘Cept fer you intellecshuls, ‘a course.
Later…
AG
