engineer wrote:I've never heard of Clinton as the champion of the poor. I thought that was Edwards.
Well Edwards was definitely the politician who was the champion of the poor in his speeches, platform and overall campaign. He put that theme center front of everything.
With Hillary, it's not as clear in terms of substance. I do think that the reason she appeals to lower-income and -education Democrats while Obama sweeps the higher-income and -education voters is because she lays a stronger emphasis on bread-and-butter issues. With Obama, the prime emphasis more often lies on postmaterialist things like "changing the culture of Washington" or the like. But yeah, apart from health insurance there arent any great substantive differences that sets them apart in policy.
But then we werent talking about Hillary and Obama themselves, but about their supporters. Obama appeals disproportionally to the overlapping groups of the higher-educated and the well off, that's shown in most every poll out there. And it shows. It shows in how Obama supporters dominate the new media, but it also occasionally comes out in a kind of classist prejudice. Wherein Hillary supporters are put down as a kind of rubes, and their preference is typecast as some kind of irrational knee-jerk thing that, you know, the less informed are just more prone to. It's a distant echo, perhaps, of the way that prototypical coastal elite liberals caricaturise those "rednecks" who insist on voting Republicans - as in, you know, they must just be dumb. This one is much more subtle and much less pronounced, but the same flavour comes through sometimes. And that's one of the two main ways in which Obama's supporters have put me off.
Just my personal impression, of course.. but hey, she asked :wink:
