Word: working-class
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Earlier this year, Senator Barack Obama stirred up controversy when he said that working-class voters were “bitter” because of a lack of economic opportunity. He argued that religious bigotry, nativism, and anti-trade sentiment were an outgrowth of this frustration. Although he phrased his sentiments poorly, Obama touched upon a valid point. When people lose their jobs, the natural reaction for many is to blame someone else. Immigrants, legal and illegal, are an easy scapegoat, especially during economic downturns. Given the endless stream of bad news about the economy as of late...
...there is another Macau, one the high rollers never visit, that sounds plaintive rather than prosperous. Take a taxi from the dancing fountains in front of the Wynn Macau hotel to the working-class neighborhood of Hac Sa Wan, where you can meet Ng Iat-keong, one of the many poor Macanese for whom the casino boom has been a bust. Ng, 45, is a construction worker who helped build some of Macau's hotel-casinos, including the biggest of them all, Las Vegas Sands' giant Venetian. Yet the money sloshing around in their plush suites hasn't found...
...ISSUE Iraq Economy Party Solidarity Work Ethic ACTION The war is back at center stage, with Democrats badgering John McCain for erroneously saying the number of U.S. troops has been reduced to pre-surge levels and accusing the Senator of focusing on the conflict to avoid talking about the sagging economy. Republicans, meanwhile, have been taunting Barack Obama for failing to visit Iraq to observe conditions on the ground firsthand since 2006. With an eye on November, Obama is redoubling his efforts to talk to struggling working-class voters with feel-your-pain intensity and increased specificity about...
...Working-class TV may draw in viewers with the sensational promise of danger. (In Ax Men, computer animation shows what would happen if a logger got speared by a falling branch.) But underneath that is the scary reality, not unique to drillers and fishermen, of surviving boom-and-bust capitalism with no safety net. Deadliest Catch and its ilk celebrate rather than pity their heroes. But for all the big paydays the characters' work can bring, the shows never forget that hard times are one slipup or bad break away. That's the catch, and it's a deadly...
What's been overlooked is that Obama has won plenty of white voters; otherwise he wouldn't have carried Iowa, Idaho, Colorado and Virginia. He won some white working-class voters, too, a lot more than Chris Dodd or Bill Richardson did; he just didn't win as many as Clinton, who tailored her campaign towards the "beer track" after Obama started drubbing her among wine-trackers. Over the next six months, Obama will have plenty of time to let those beer-trackers know that he comes from a middle-class family, that he started his career organizing laid...