Denise Bren’s voice trembled as she stood in a city park near her home to ask Sen. Barack Obama what he would do to help people like her struggling to pay their bills....More recently, pundits have told us that the GOP has become "the blue-collar party." They've said that President Biden's student loan bailouts are "elitist."
Skipping any expression of sympathy for Bren’s personal plight on a day when he was focused on the Iraq war, Obama (D-Ill.) launched into a detailed, six-point plan outlining the economic policies he would change as president....
A former Harvard Law Review president and constitutional law lecturer at the University of Chicago, Obama can sometimes seem professorial. It is one of the reasons he sometimes fails to connect with working-class voters.
Pollsters call Bren and those like her “beer-track” voters, while those with higher incomes and more education are dubbed “wine-track” voters. The first group tends to care more about pocketbook issues. The second places greater value on more global matters....
So far, Obama has done well attracting the Chardonnay crowd, but he has had less success winning over Joe Sixpack.
So you'd think they would have wanted Kamala Harris -- the urbane daughter of a college professor and a scientist -- to pick a "beer-track" running mate in order to balance the ticket. But they didn't. Pundit after pundit after pundit urged Harris to pick fellow wine-tracker Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania.
She didn't. She chose Minnesota governor Tim Walz, who is decidedly not a wine-tracker.
Found this image of Tim Walz holding a piglet pic.twitter.com/CpqGhSsXCF
— Populism Updates (@PopulismUpdates) August 4, 2024
No, really:
Walz grew up in small-town Nebraska and was one of 25 students in his high school graduating class. He went to a public college in Nebraska, served for many years in the National Guard, became a teacher, coached football and was the faculty advisor for his school's Gay-Straight Alliance, and eventually got involved in politics and served twelve years in Congress. Being a bootstrapper doesn't seem to have given him dark ideas about mass societal upheaval, unlike the guy he'll soon be debating, J.D. Vance.
Pundits wanted Harris to pick someone much more like herself as a running mate, and more like their own idea of normal. Shapiro is what "regular guy" looks like to well-educated people from the Northeast. Walz looks more like all those Trumpers in trucker hats who got interviewed in diners starting in 2016.
I assume the media won't like this pick, but I do.
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