The Politics of Poorness

April 28th, 2008 by ROBERT STEIN

Hillary Clinton and John McCain, each of whom has a hundred times the family money of Barack Obama, are out there claiming he is out of touch with the poor.

After drinking boilermakers with the boys a while back, Sen. Clinton is now telling Indiana’s blue-collar voters that “politics has become too abstract, too generalized” in Obama’s elitist world.

“Most people get a lot of meaning in their life from the work that they do,” Clinton says. “People want to be seen, they want to be appreciated, they want to be acknowledged.” And she is out there acknowledging the hell out of them with girlhood tales of helping out in her father’s fabric-printing plant and, according to the New York Times, “sounding less like a Wellesley alumna than Roseanne Barr’s old sitcom character, the den mother of her factory floor.”

Meanwhile, McCain is calling Obama insensitive to poor people by not endorsing his proposal to suspend the federal tax on gasoline this summer, a refusal “to giving low-income Americans a tax break, a little bit of relief so they can travel a little further and a little longer, and maybe have a little bit of money left over to enjoy some other things in their lives.”

McCain, who is still fielding questions about using his wife’s company jet during the primary season, and Clinton, who lent her campaign $5 million from her pin money, seem determined to educate Obama on what he failed to learn as an organizer in poverty-stricken communities.

Cross-posted from my blog. More about a common source of Clinton’s and Obama’s ideas about poverty here.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 28th, 2008 at 2:06 pm and is filed under Bush Derangement Syndrome, Gas Prices, Newsweek Blogitics, Primaries, Indiana, Poverty, John McCain, 2008 Elections, Politics, Economy, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Money/Finance. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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