Georgetown and Yale-educated Bill Clinton tries his hand at class warfare against Occidental-, Columbia- and Harvard-educated Barack Obama and the college boys backing him. This time we get an historical re-write of Bobby Kennedy's '68 campaign. First, blue-collar Democrats were likely for Hubert Humphrey and not Bobby Kennedy, who was not viewed favorably by unions thanks to his work on the Senate Rackets Commission and as Attorney General. In addition, while McCarthy's base was definitely on college campuses, Kennedy made gains in this arena, and tried much harder to associate himself with the anti-war cause than Hillary Clinton has ever done.
Then we get this trope that blue collar people "need a president" while the college kids just want a "feeling of change". Let's just lay out the facts here. Both candidate's tax plans retain Bush tax cuts for couples earning up to $200,000 per year, so as not to offend upper-middle class Democrats in New York, New Jersey, California, suburban Philadelphia, Washington State, etc. Clinton voted for the bankruptcy bill in 2001, though she announced opposition to it in 2005 (but did not vote on it). She went in front of the right-wing Chamber of Commerce and told them how young people "think 'work' is a four-letter word". Clinton's father may have hailed from the hardscrabble town of Scranton [ed note: do people from these hardscrabble towns like it when big city journalists and bloggers refer to their home town as hardscrabble, salt-of-the-earth, etc.?], but he wasn't a garment worker; he was management. And then there's her time on the board at Wal-Mart. Now, I think that on balance Clinton's record is a fairly good one, but the second coming of William Jennings Bryan she ain't.
