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On a swing through Pennsylvania last month, John McCain visited a Manheim Central High School football practice — not to ingratiate himself with the players, who weren't even old enough to vote, but to identify himself with the gritty, down-home lunch bucket values of small-town football. "This is a blue-collar town," Manheim's coach said in his introduction of McCain. "We don't have a lot of flashy athletes. We don't come out with a lot of flash." But the coach explained that his team works hard, plays with discipline, and comes through in the end. "A lot like John McCain," he...

He's a member of the steelworkers union, a registered independent and has championed the need for vocational - not Ivy League - education in his home state. He works the night shift in North Slope oil fields, fishes commercially in icy waters and flies around snowy Alaska in a floatplane, all the while winning four cross-state snowmobile championships. At home, he happily navigates between hardworking man's man and hunky Mr. Mom to the five Palin children, comfortable in his role as rock-solid support spouse to wife Sarah's power career. Now, with her historic nomination as Republican vice-presidential candidate, some are...

MOUNT CLEMENS, Mich. - Michigan's history of racial tensions is tugging against its Democratic tendencies, giving Barack Obama fits when most everything else potentially benefits Democrats: a soaring unemployment rate, shrinking auto industry and depressed housing market. The first minority candidate with a serious shot at the presidency is not running as well as his Democratic predecessors among working-class whites in this pivotal Midwestern swing state, partly because of the color of his skin. "I've got a lot of friends ... (who) are like, `Oh, no,"' when it comes to voting for a black presidential candidate, said John Martin, a...

GREEN BAY -- Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden on Monday stressed his middle class upbringing, his ties to the Roman Catholic Church and his appreciation of the Green Bay Packers in this blue-collar, heavily Catholic region of the state. Biden talked about the difficulties the Fox Valley region is facing, referencing the closing of the NewPage paper mill in Kimberly. "You lose a job, you not only lose your ability to care for your family, you lose a sense of human dignity, you lose a sense of your own self worth," Biden said. "This used to be a country...

The San Francisco Chronicle published an article on September 7 masterful for its underhanded back slapping of John McCain, Sarah Palin and anyone who would vote for them all while pretending to say how successful the McCain/Palin ticket is in garnering support since the end of the GOP Convention. Nearly every "positive" thing said about Republicans and anyone who would vote for McCain was framed as a negative and the way this article states its case proves as one of the most perfectly sly pieces of pro-Democrat propaganda I've seen in a long time. It's so good that you don't...

But now, after a chaotic introductory week that sparked national debates on McCain's judgment, Palin's experience and even her teenage daughter's pregnancy, the initial signs are not entirely positive for the reinvigorated Republican ticket. Interviews with some two dozen women here after Palin's convention speech found that these voters were not swayed by the fiery dramatic speeches or compelling personal biographies that marked both the Republican and Democratic conventions. Instead, they were thinking about the price of milk -- nearly $5 a gallon -- or the healthcare coverage that many working families here cannot afford. Even if they admire Palin's...

Democrats do not think that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's arrival in the enemy camp changes Sen. Barack Obama's path to the White House. As far as they're concerned, Republican John McCain's running mate is President George W. Bush. As Obama told voters in Pennsylvania on Friday, "This race is not a personality contest." That bet is about to be tested. Independent observers in Ohio think Palin does change the race, enhancing the GOP's appeal - not among the women who supported Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, but among white men. They say Palin's most potent weapon may even be her snowmobiler,...

Posted on Sat, Sep. 6, 2008 Biden gets mixed welcome in Northeast Local Dem leaders say race is issue for many voters By DAVE DAVIES Philadelphia Daily News daviesd@phillynews.com 215-854-2595 DEMOCRATIC vice-presidential nominee Joe Biden went stumping for votes yesterday in Northeast Philadelphia, where Democrats need to earn the love of Democrats who voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama in the April primary. He worked a diner, gave a rousing speech on bread-and-butter issues at a union hall, and reeled off a memorable line tying the Republican candidate to the unpopular team in the White House. "My friend...

The Republican presidential candidate signalled his intentions by using his first weekend of campaigning since his party's convention to launch a political raid into the heart of Reagan-Democrat country, home of the fabled blue collar voters who Mr Reagan captured from the Democrats in the 1980s. Mr McCain, and particularly Mrs Palin, met with a rapturous reception as they held a rally in Macomb County, Michigan, where pollsters first identified the breed of patriotic conservative, blue collar workers who the McCain camp now believes hold the key to victory in November. On Friday night in Sterling Heights, Mr McCain's selection...

Joe Biden once got in trouble for plagiarizing a speech and inflating his academic record. So it will not surprise you to find that his famous working-class background turns out to be mythical. But it may surprise you to learn that Biden isn't the one who has trouble with the facts. In his Wednesday night speech at the Democratic convention, Biden referred to "those of us who grew up in middle-class neighborhoods like Scranton and Wilmington [Delaware]." In the video preceding his address, he said that the people he knew as a boy didn't regard themselves as working class but...

Joe Biden once got in trouble for plagiarizing a speech and inflating his academic record. So it will not surprise you to find that his famous working-class background turns out to be mythical. But it may surprise you to learn that Biden isn't the one who has trouble with the facts. In his Wednesday night speech at the Democratic convention, Biden referred to "those of us who grew up in middle-class neighborhoods like Scranton and Wilmington." In the video preceding his address, he said that the people he knew as a boy didn't regard themselves as working class but as...

As the campaign gears up, Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain are courting the working-class voters whose decisions could sway the election. Watch out, Bruce Peterson -- the presidential campaign is coming after you. Peterson, a political independent from Coon Rapids who works at a manufacturing plant, is worried about disappearing jobs and has not decided yet if he wants Barack Obama or John McCain in the White House. "We really don't know much about him," Petersen, 54, said of Obama as he shopped at an Anoka County discount store Saturday. "But I definitely don't like McCain because of the...

DENVER: When most people think of Joe Biden, they think Senate longevity, confidence, a liberal with a free-wheeling impulse to give you his never-to-be-humble opinion. What they don't think of is a man who could have a great impact in Pennsylvania. The question becomes: Can he make his impact as broad as Hillary Clinton -- another Scranton native -- did in the Pennsylvania primaries? Hillary glowed in Pennsylvania. She made Pennsylvania her second home and it stuck with voters. John Kerry, married to the Heinz ketchup heiress Teresa, did the same thing in his runup to the 2004 election. He...

Nothing makes me feel sorrier for the once powerful local bosses of each political party than the spectacle of a modern nominating convention. In their glory days, these wily neighborhood sloggers would listen to speeches, size up the appeal of each candidate against hometown tastes, wheel, deal and finally make the thousands of individual decisions that would eventually choose the nominee. Today there is only one big decision to be made, and the job belongs to a TV programmer, not a political boss. Conventions are little more than soundstages now. Everything from the backdrop to the musical choices asks the...

OK .. so that's just my guess, but let's see how close I hit this one. Wherever I went during the last weekend – whether a charity golf tournament on Saturday or just hanging around the club or the airport on Sunday – the talk was of Obama and his sense of entitlement and arrogance. Last week there were several media stories – even from far-left MSNBC – about Obama's arrogance and sense of entitlement. I particularly like the quote from Bonnie Erbe – quite the liberal, Ms. Erbe – about Obama's recent efforts: "From using a logo resembling a...

Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream By Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam Doubleday, 256 pp., $23.95 A few months back, Barack Obama explained why he had not won more support from voters in Appalachia. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate,...

With senator Barack Obama poised this week to clinch his party's nomination for President, there are growing fears in some quarters that the Democratic party may not be choosing its strongest candidate to beat Republican John McCain. Senator Hillary Clinton has been making that argument for weeks. Now some recent polls and analysis, looking particularly at vital battleground states and support among white voters, have bolstered her case - even as Obama looks certain to become the nominee. Obama supporters reject this argument and point to his record of boosting Democratic voter turnout, especially among the young. But sceptics in...

Sen. Barack Obama is close to clinching the Democratic presidential nomination, but he faces trouble on several fronts in the general election with blue-collar workers and other parts of the electorate who question his lack of experience, foreign-policy judgment and social liberalism. Fewer than a few dozen delegate votes away from making history as the first black to win the nomination of a major party, the freshman senator is also showing signs of weakness among white voters in Midwestern and Southern battleground states, including Ohio and Florida, which Democrats must carry if they are to win the White House. A...

. . . Before the April and early May primaries, cultural and racial politics seemed to throw the Obama campaign off its stride, especially as the controversy over Obama's former minister, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, smoldered, then flared again. It angered Don Lutes, a retired steelworker and union official from Griffith, Ind., who voted early for Clinton. "All this came out with the Rev. Wright and this [former Weatherman] Bill Ayers deal," Lutes says. "I can't believe he knew this Ayers. They bombed the Capitol. How could he associate with people like that? That really turned me off. And [Obama's]...

Democrats bristle at talking about this in plainer terms. They say Sen. Hillary Clinton has found her base -- the "working class." That's why she won in the Rust Belt primaries. That's her great hope in Kentucky and West Virginia. But calling Clinton's strategy one of kowtowing to the "working class" doesn't quite say it, does it? Isn't this just old-fashioned racism within the Democratic Party? When Hillary strategists say they are winning the "working class," they don't mean they are winning working people with a household income of, say, less than $50,000. All the exit polls show quite clearly...

His lead strategist says if McCain were to get 20 percent of these voters he will win. WASHINGTON - With the other party still waist-deep in its presidential nomination fight, John McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee, has been quietly courting the white working-class Democrats who have proved elusive for Barack Obama, his most likely rival in the fall. In the two weeks since Senator Obama's loss in Pennsylvania, Senator McCain has visited the struggling steel town of Youngstown, Ohio, to promote programs to retrain workers. He has gone to Allentown, Pa., to push a gas-tax holiday and argue that the...

The bloviating white men of political television are obsessed with maintaining their blue-collar cred. But their obsession with keeping it real blinds them to their own wealth and leads them to mindlessly victimize Democrats. The cover story of last Sunday's New York Times Magazine profiled Chris Matthews, host of MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews and leading light of the political-media universe. The article portrays Matthews as a pathetically insecure man, searching for his face on barroom television screens -- desperate for everyone to acknowledge his importance. In a different time, someone like Matthews would be eagerly casting off his modest...

PITTSBURGH - The Lawrenceville neighborhood, with its car-repair shops and convenience markets giving way to coffee houses and yoga salons, represents both sides of the upscale/downscale electoral coalition that Democrats hope will carry them to the White House in November. But Lawrenceville, like many Democratic precincts, is increasingly divided in its politics along class lines. Last week, while 27-year-old Bronwyn Loughren, co-owner of an art gallery called La Vie, was expressing disgust over Hillary Clinton's hardball political tactics, beautician Jenny Skrinjar, 53, of the Style North Hair Salon was fuming about Barack Obama. "He looks down on people," she said....

Democratic presidential hopeful ,Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., tosses back a shot of Crown Royal with Bronko's owner Nick Tarailo, second from right, and Ed Hall, right as she stops at the bar during a campaign stop at Bronko's restaurant in Crown Point, Ind., on Saturday, April 12, 2008. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster

PITTSBURGH—Barack Obama ridiculed rival Hillary Clinton for a shot-and-a-beer photo op over the weekend in Indiana as he sought to counter the controversy over remarks he made about “bitter” feelings in small-town America.

Barack Obama emerged from his hotel in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in the gray rain early Monday morning and climbed onto his campaign bus for a long day of events. Swinging onto the highway, his motorcade passed a marquee across the street that read "Welcome, Senator Clinton." Six hours later Hillary Clinton would pull off that highway ramp and turn into the Capitol Diner for a roundtable discussion on the economy. ...... Obama's best shot at winning Pennsylvania, or at least closing the gap, is rallying Democrats in and around Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, the state's two largest cities. So why is he...

March 6 (Bloomberg) -- Barack Obama is having trouble with Archie Bunker. The white, blue-collar voters personified by the 1970s fictional television character cost Obama this week. His Democratic presidential rival, Senator Hillary Clinton of New York, beat him 54 percent to 44 percent in industrial Ohio, and 58 percent to 40 percent in predominantly white Rhode Island.

Summary: Average Household Income of Pro-Lieberman Towns (44) = $71,008 Average Household Income of Pro-Lamont Towns (125) = $90,994 Details: TOWN Avg Household Income Lieberman N. Lamont %Lieberman Cornwall 95,727 24 243 8.988764 Canaan 74,757 19 96 16.521739 Salisbury 103,762 100 436 18.656716 Lyme 89,208 66 208 24.087591 Sharon 110,723 68 209 24.548736 Warren 114,824 28 78 26.415094 Mansfield 66,702 554 1,451 27.630923 Roxbury 92,568 60 157 27.64977 Sherman 147,226 76 195 28.04428 Essex 84,834 242 596 28.878282 Redding 186,142 255 595 30 Washington 97,666 116 266 30.366492 Kent 72,232 112 249 31.024931 Hampton 64,533 72 158 31.304348 North Canaan...

If he'd been born a little earlier, Sam Alito would probably have been a Democrat. In the 1950's, the middle-class and lower-middle-class whites in places like Trenton, where Alito grew up, were the heart and soul of the Democratic Party. But by the late 1960's, cultural politics replaced New Deal politics, and liberal Democrats did their best to repel Northern white ethnic voters. Big-city liberals launched crusades against police brutality, portraying working-class cops as thuggish storm troopers for the establishment. In the media, educated liberals portrayed urban ethnics as uncultured, uneducated Archie Bunkers. The liberals were doves; the ethnics were...

Amid its disarray last week, the House of Representatives did do one good deed: It included the repeal of the anti-trade Byrd Amendment as part of its budget reconciliation. The White House is also pushing repeal, so opponents are now hoping Senators (including a Republican who wants to run for President) will keep this protectionism alive. "Byrd" is named after West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd, who snuck it into a 2001 spending bill without debate. The amendment gives companies that sue for "anti-dumping" relief any duties that the government imposes on foreign competitors. U.S. companies that decline to join any...

Democrats: the party of the little guy. Republicans: the party of the wealthy. Those images of America's two major political wings have been frozen for generations. The stereotypes were always a little off, incomplete, exaggerated. (Can you say Adlai Stevenson?) But like most stereotypes, they reflected rough truths. No more. Starting in the 1960s and '70s, whole blocs of "little guys"--ethnics, rural residents, evangelicals, cops, construction workers, homemakers, military veterans--began moving into the Republican column. And big chunks of America's rich elite--financiers, academics, heiresses, media barons, software millionaires, entertainers--drifted into the Democratic Party. The extent to which the parties have...

Democrats: the party of the little guy. Republicans: the party of the wealthy. Those images of America's two major political wings have been frozen for generations. The stereotypes were always a little off, incomplete, exaggerated. (Can you say Adlai Stevenson?) But like most stereotypes, they reflected rough truths. No more. Starting in the 1960s and '70s, whole blocs of "little guys" — ethnics, rural residents, evangelicals, cops, construction workers, homemakers, military veterans — began moving into the Republican column. And big chunks of America's rich elite — financiers, academics, heiresses, media barons, software millionaires, entertainers — drifted into the Democratic...

AS a lifelong Democratic activist and steelworking shop steward in the key swing state of West Virginia, Rick Casini is exactly the kind of man Senator John Kerry needs to help him claw his way back into a presidential campaign that is in danger of slipping away from him.Casini works at the 95-year-old Weirton steel mill on the Ohio River in America’s industrial heartland. Within a few minutes’ drive of this soot-stained West Virginian town lie the borders of Ohio and Pennsylvania, closely contested states Kerry must win if he is to wrest the White House from President George W...

Michigan, the ancestral home of so-called "Reagan Democrats," is back to its old ways. The Great Lake State is filled with blue-collar workers stung by the ailing economy but wary of Democratic stands on social issues such as abortion, gay rights and gun control. President Bush and Democratic Sen. John Kerry have different approaches in courting the same voters. Kerry hopes to make the election about the state's 6.8 percent unemployment rate, and the 194,000 jobs lost since Bush took office, including nearly 167,000 in manufacturing. The Republican incumbent is appealing to conservative Democrats, particularly Catholic voters, in suburban Detroit...

Last update: August 26, 2004 at 11:20 PM Nick Coleman: No free lunch for John Kerry Nick Coleman,  Star Tribune August 27, 2004 John Kerry could have had a free lunch Thursday, but it's good he didn't take advantage of the offer from the Outpost Bar and Grille on Hwy. 10...-- snip -- ...The Outpost is a working man's bar in a bellwether piece of a battleground state. These are the voters who elected Jesse Ventura governor and who helped deter him from running for a second term when they fell out of love with him. But if John Kerry had...

Bush works to woo conservative Democrats, independents in Saginaw By KATHY BARKS HOFFMAN The Associated Press 8/5/2004, 9:45 p.m. ET SAGINAW, Mich. (AP) — President Bush brought his message on the economy, education and health care on his latest visit to Michigan, but saved the bulk of his time for talking about keeping the country safe and protecting institutions such as marriage. "If America shows uncertainty and weakness in this decade, the world will drift toward tragedy. This will not happen on my watch," Bush said Thursday evening, bringing a cheering crowd of more than 6,000 to their feet at...

KERRY'S HIDDEN BLUE-COLLAR APPEAL. Class Conflict by Michael Crowley Post date 02.19.04 | Issue date 03.01.04 The year is 1996. The scene is a gathering of Massachusetts politicians somewhere near Boston. In walks Senator John Kerry. Although Kerry is a major VIP by most standards--at this point, he has been a U.S. senator for eleven years--the local pols in attendance mostly snicker at his arrival. To the blue-collar Irish and Italians who dominate the state Democratic machine, Kerry is a stiff: a spoiled kid who can't tell a joke and never remembers their names. They look forward to seeing him...

<p>COSTA MESA, Calif. - Rosario Marin, a Mexican immigrant from a blue-collar family, sees herself as the best weapon California Republicans have against incumbent Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer.</p> <p>She believes her background can diffuse the two-term senator's strategy of portraying her opponents as right-wing extremists.</p>

Recapturing the loyalty of blue-collar and moderate-income Democrats has emerged as one of Gov. Davis' most pressing problems as the recall election approaches. In both public and private polls, Democrats with less income and education have displayed much higher support for the recall than more affluent and college-educated party members. Even Democrats who belong to labor unions, ordinarily one of the party's most loyal constituencies, have been abandoning the governor in greater numbers than other Democrats, according to the most recent Los Angeles Times poll. "There's no burning enthusiasm for the governor," acknowledged Miguel Contreras, executive secretary and treasurer of...

<p>My party, the Republican Party, has failed me and thousands of other blue-collar workers across the nation.</p> <p>Thousands, maybe millions, of us voted Republican because of the Democrats' social agenda. We have been the forgotten voters in the Republicans' dash to appease their business and influential friends. They forget who put them in office and who may not put them back in for another term.</p>