"Hillary Clinton is a classic commodity provider. She caters to the less-educated, less-pretentious consumer. As Ron Brownstein of The National Journal pointed out Wednesday, she won the non-college-educated voters by 22 points in California, 32 points in Massachusetts and 54 points in Arkansas. She offers voters no frills, just commodities: tax credits, federal subsidies and scholarships. She has good programs at good prices.
Barack Obama provides an experience. He attracts the educated consumer. In the last Pew Research national survey, he held a 22-point advantage among people with college degrees. Educated people get all emotional when they shop and vote. They want an uplifting experience so they can persuade themselves that they're not engaging in a grubby self-interested transaction. They fall for all that zero-carbon footprint, locally grown, community-enhancing, Third Place hype. They want cultural signifiers that enrich their lives with meaning.
The consumer marketplace has been bifurcating for years! It's happening because the educated and uneducated lead different sorts of lives. Educated people not only are growing richer than less-educated people, but their lifestyles also are diverging as well. A generation ago, educated families and less-educated families looked the same, but now high school graduates divorce at twice the rate of college graduates. High school grads are much more likely to have kids out of wedlock. High school grads are much more likely to be obese. They're much more likely to smoke and to die younger. Their attitudes are different. High school grads are much less optimistic than college grads. They express less social trust. They feel less safe in public. They report having fewer friends and lower aspirations. The less educated speak the dialect of struggle; the more educated speak the dialect of self-fulfillment. Did you hear the message of Clinton's speech last Tuesday night? It's a rotten world out there. Regular folks are getting the shaft. They need someone who'll fight tougher, work harder and put loyalty over independence.
Then did you see the Hopemeister's speech? His schtick makes sense if you've got a basic level of security in your life, if you're looking up, not down. Meanwhile, Obama's people are so taken with their messiah that soon they'll be selling flowers at airports and arranging mass weddings. There's a "Yes We Can" video floating around YouTube in which a bunch of celebrities like Scarlett Johansson and the guy from the Black Eyed Peas are singing the words to an Obama speech in escalating states of righteousness and ecstasy. If that video doesn't creep out normal working-class voters, nothing will."
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