Even the Paranoid New Republic: Alec MacGillis tries to figure out where the idea that Obama’s abandoning the white working class came from:
What’s going on here? Well, we may be witnessing a reckoning with the wisdom of Joe McQuaid, the publisher of New Hampshire’s conservative Union Leader, who noted this week that Mitt Romney was not an ideal candidate for a populist moment since a quarter-billionaire former private equity maven “sort of represents the 1 percent.” If you are worried about your party’s appeal to an aggrieved working class,what better tack to take than simply to declare that your opponent has flat out abandoned these voters, and hope that picks up some steam?
There’s just one problem. Arguing that Obama is abandoning the working class flies in the face of the right’s other argument of the moment, that he has taken a hard populist turn to pander to economically struggling voters upset at the banks and corporations. So which is it? Obama the anti-working class elitist, or Obama the populist rabble-rouser? Hopefully they can work this out soon in the upper floors of News Corp. [E.A.]
So Thomas Edsall is a Murdoch operative/stooge? How does that work? Edsall’s a longtime Dem who’s close friends with Sidney Blumenthal, a hard core Clintonite. … Did I say Sidney Blumenthal? Wait a minute! I see it now. The insidious Murdoch has ordered his cat’s paw, Hillary Clinton, to get Blumenthal to encourage Edsall to propagate this Romney-boosting propaganda, clearing the way for a Hillary run in 2016! It’s clear as day. … Then there’s the well-placed reporter who seeded the ground for Edsall by writing
The working class Pennsylvanians who are resentful that Obama ousted their shot-and-a-beer heroine Hillary may never come around … What he’ll really need are the suburbanites who were never put off by his “bitter” comments in the first place …
Must have been the Koch brothers who got to that guy. …
P.S.: MacGillis does link to this excellent post-Edsall analysis by Jay Cost. …