Insulting Your Voters

A very strange, repeated trope of the Clinton 2008 campaign has been to attack not Obama but groups of people perceived as likely to vote for Obama. Sometimes this takes the form of dismissing whole states, other times:

The strategist also said Clinton’s agents are making more subtle pitches.

“I’ve heard people start to say: Have you looked at the vote in Ohio really carefully? See how that breaks down for him. What does that portend?” said the strategist. “Then they point to Pennsylvania: In electorally important battleground states, if he is essentially only carrying heavy African-American turnout in high-performing African-American districts and the Starbucks-sipping, Volvo-driving liberal elite, how does he carry a state like Pennsylvania?”

It's a very strange way to behave. Presumably if magic delegates arrive out of heaven and give Hillary Clinton the nomination, she'll be expecting African-Americans and "the Starbucks-supping, Volvo-driving liberal elite" to vote for her, etc. Why would you refer to core Democratic voters in terms literally lifted from a Club for Growth ad?

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2008/03/insulting-your-voters/43929/