All blog posts are cross posted

Sunday, January 31, 2010

Who ARE the Voters?

This article in the Telegraph(UK) says it is the same group in the US as in the UK, and President Obama has learned his lesson on who that would be. What do you think?
Barack Obama finds out who really holds power
by Janet Daley
Barack Obama is in big political trouble, so he has to make an explicit appeal to American middle-class voters. Gordon Brown is in big political trouble, so he has to make an explicit appeal to traditional British working-class voters. The funny thing is that these two groups are really the same sort of people. In the US, "middle class" means "middle income" – not the rich, or even highly educated professionals, but ordinary working people in skilled blue-collar or clerical white-collar jobs, or who run small businesses (such as "Joe the Plumber", who became John McCain's most famous supporter during the presidential race). But in Britain, "middle-class" means "bourgeois", with all the Marxist connotations, and it is as much a cultural as an economic classification. It is possible to be middle-class in one's tastes and attitudes (toward education, for example) and quite poor, or to be working-class in one's tastes and attitudes, and quite wealthy – a phenomenon that the British tend to find utterly hilarious.
We all know Great Britain has, or had, a well defined class system that the US has not. At least ours is not as defined and many people pass through several levels in their lifetimes. Read on to get the whole article here.

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