Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Obama lo yuppie

http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/hes-yuppie?utm_source=TNR+Master&utm_campaign=ce4a25012c-TNR_Daily_020410&utm_medium=email
Here is a fact: Barack Obama has trouble generating enthusiasm among 
white working class voters. That’s not because they are white. He would 
have had trouble winning support among black working class voters if 
they had been unable to identify with him because he was black. He has 
trouble with working class voters because he appears to them as coming 
from a different world, a different realm of experience, a different 
class, if you like. And that’s because he does.
I have recently read several stories about Obama that treat these 
difficulties as if they were paradoxical. The latest is from The 
Washington Post. “Despite his roots,” the article is headlined, “Obama 
struggles to show he’s connected to middle class.” And the story—which 
seems to use middle class, working class, and blue collar 
interchangeably—describes his supposedly non-elitist roots as follows: 
“He turned down high-paying jobs after graduating from Harvard Law 
School and became a community organizer, compelled by the experience of 
growing up with a single mother who sometimes lived on food stamps. He 
married a woman from a working-class family on the South Side of 
Chicago, and they rented a walk-up condominium in Hyde Park.”
The first thing to note about this description is that, like many 
accounts I have read of Obama’s life, it gets its facts wrong. He didn’t 
become a community organizer after graduating from Harvard Law School, 
but after graduating from Columbia. He left community organizing to 
attend Harvard Law School. After graduating from law school, he joined a 
prestigious Chicago law firm with offices just off Michigan Avenue. In 
1991, he began teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago. 
He was chair of a Chicago branch of the Annenberg Foundation. Obama’s 
wife, who admittedly did grow up working-class, nevertheless graduated 
from Princeton and Harvard Law School. And Hyde Park is a pricey 
upper-middle-class section of Chicago.
The second thing to note is something about class in America. By Marx’s 
definition, what we have in America, and in other developed capitalist 
countries, is a large, diversified working class that ranges from 
low-paid laborers and clerks to engineers and teachers, all of whom work 
for someone else, and cannot claim to own or control the means of 
production. But even if one accepts this account of the working class, 
there can be enormous social divisions between parts of it. Race and 
income are important, of course, but so is function, which separates 
people who perform routine or menial or manual tasks from people who 
produce ideas and complex services. College professors do not always 
make more money than electricians; but they live in a different world. 
In census terms, it is the world of professionals compared to that of 
operatives, laborers, clerical workers, and technicians.
Obama’s parents were professionals—his mother was an anthropology PhD 
and his father was a Harvard-trained economist. How much money they made 
was immaterial. His grandmother, who raised him in Hawaii, was a bank 
vice-president. He went to a fancy private school and to prestigious 
colleges (Occidental and Columbia) that turn out professionals and 
managers. He clearly was not obsessed with making money, but with 
performing a public service—yet that doesn’t distinguish him from other 
professionals or other Columbia graduates. It does distinguish him from 
a working- or middle-class American for whom being a civil rights lawyer 
or professor or politician is at best a passing fantasy.
It is admirable that Obama spent three years after graduating as a 
community organizer on Chicago’s South Side, but many graduates of elite 
colleges spend several years after college doing something unusual, 
before returning to graduate school or settling into a profession. Some 
travel around the world; some join the Peace Corps; some try to write 
novels. In the days of Theodore Roosevelt or George H.W. Bush, some 
became cowboys or oil wildcatters. It’s a tradition that goes back over 
a century. It’s called “sowing your wild oats.” Afterwards, they usually 
return to more sober and sedate occupations appropriate to their social 
background and education. That’s what Obama did. As I wrote of his 
community organizing period, he became weary of the life of the 
community organizer. He doubted he was accomplishing much, and decided 
to go to law school. He didn’t choose to go to Kent College of Law or 
John Marshall Law School—schools where he could have retained his ties 
with working class Chicago—but to Harvard Law School.
Once out of law school, Obama lived and worked over the next decade in a 
grey area between the very upper reaches of professional America and the 
country’s managers, owners, and rulers. He didn’t just have access to 
more money and live differently from ordinary Americans; he possessed 
power and authority that they didn’t have. He was of a different world, 
even if as a politician he would occasionally visit theirs.
There is no paradox, therefore, in Obama’s distance from white working 
class voters. What would be unusual is if he were able to echo their 
concerns in a deeply moving rather than in a somewhat mechanical way. 
Yes, there have been some gifted politicians of an upper class or 
professional background who have been able to do so. Some, like Bill 
Clinton, Lyndon Johnson, or Ronald Reagan, could draw upon their working 
class childhoods; others, like Franklin Roosevelt or Edward Kennedy, 
could evince a kind of upper-class paternalism. This made them great 
politicians. It didn’t necessarily make them great men or great 
Americans. Barack Obama is, by any fair measure, a great American, and 
he could turn out to be a great president. But he is not yet a great 
politician. He has not been able to transcend the political limits of 
his own social background. And that has been one of his problems as he 
attempts to extricate America from the mess he inherited.

 class voters.
manca ancora la fondamentale spiegazione del perchè solo i lavoratori
BIANCHI non si sentono vicini a Obama, mentre quelli di altri
"colori" (anche gli ispanici) la vicinanza la sentono....