This is a really good article by George Packer in this weeks New Yorker:

[Bread and Circus]

The Hardest Vote
The disaffection of Ohio’s working class.
by George Packer

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/10/13/081013fa_fact_packer

Obama understands that he is an imperfect vehicle for an already difficult message. In April, at the San Francisco fund-raiser where he damaged himself with working-class whites by delivering a speech connecting their “bitter” outlook to guns, religion, bigotry, and xenophobia, Obama also described the situation of voters like Barbie Snodgrass acutely. “In a lot of these communities in big industrial states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, people have been beaten down so long,” he said. “They feel so betrayed by government that when they hear a pitch that is premised on not being cynical about government, then a part of them just doesn’t buy it. And when it’s delivered by—it’s true that when it’s delivered by a forty-six-year-old black man named Barack Obama, then that adds another layer of skepticism.”

During the first Presidential debate, Obama spoke directly to “middle-class” economic anxieties several times, and he later attacked McCain for never even using the word. But Obama’s middle class has no face, no name, no story. Even as he becomes more specific on policy, partly in response to criticism, he still has trouble making a human connection. Bill Clinton could always employ the drawl and roguish charm of Bubba to let the working class know he was one of them, but Obama’s life story is based on upward mobility, on transcending his complex origins. There’s no readily apparent cultural identity he can fall back on—no folksy or streetwise manner he can assume—that won’t threaten more white voters than it attracts

[Old Codger]

1. Well he does fine

His calm measured demeaner and basic straight talk is what is needed from what I see, People are tired of being treated like idiots and attempts to frighten them into following a leader who is in fact lost himself...