Only in America

Imagine what reporters would have written about the dining habits and tastes of patricians like Franklin Roosevelt or John or Robert F. Kennedy—had reporters written about such things. With his cigarette holder and martini shaker and Groton accent, FDR was almost a parody of a rich swell. JFK, who had Palm Beach tastes, liked a daiquiri before dinner; on the campaign trail, at the end of the day, RFK relaxed, not with a boilermaker, but with a Heineken and a bowl of chocolate ice cream (by unwritten rules in a more decorous age, such details were either not mentioned or not dwelled upon by reporters in their daily dispatches).

Obama himself is more than a little vexed by the charge that he is elitist. Of course, there are privileged African-American families; his own daughters, Sasha and Malia, are being educated at a Chicago private school. Obama suggested to ABC's George Stephanopoulos that they did not need affirmative action at a university. "I think my daughters should probably be treated by any admissions officer as folks who are pretty advantaged," said Obama. But his own story is much more hardscrabble. He was raised by a single parent, his mother, who lived on food stamps for a time. He graduated from an Ivy League college—Columbia—but worked as a low-paid community organizer in Chicago. After Harvard Law, he turned down the high-pay, high-prestige jobs in corporate-law firms to work in a small civil-rights firm, mostly on voting-rights cases. He talks about his experiences helping the poor in the shadows of shuttered steel plants in Chicago. "Politics didn't lead me to working folks," he says, "working folks led me to politics." His wife, Michelle, is more emphatic. "I am a product of a working-class background," she says. "I am one of those folks who grew up in that struggle. That is the lens through which I see the world." (A close read of her Princeton thesis suggests where her heart lay even after four years in the Ivy League: the paper is a paean to staying in touch with her black working-class roots.) "So," Michelle recently told a high-school audience in Evansville, Ind., "when people talk about this elitist stuff, I say, 'You couldn't possibly know anything about me'."

Obama's chief campaign adviser, David Axelrod, bridles at the elitist charge: "In terms of his personal habits, this is a guy who is an ESPN sports fanatic, who plays basketball for relaxation. When he's out and about, he's more solicitous of the people around him, the people on the street and the kitchen workers and the police officers than almost any politician I have known. Anybody who advances the argument that he's an elitist simply doesn't know the guy. It's generally the elite who advance the argument."

It is possible to overstate the damage done by Obama's elitist image. It is an old shibboleth that blue-collar voters are a mainstay of the Democratic Party. The paraphernalia of working-class politics have become central to campaign imagery—sharing a beer, going bowling and standing in the back of a pickup truck. The catch is that blue-collar workers make up a much smaller percentage of the population than in the heyday of the New Deal Democrats. Since 1940, white-collar workers have grown from 32 percent to 60 percent, according to a Brookings Institution study. In 1940, three quarters of adults older than 25 were high-school dropouts or never went to high school at all. By 1960, 59 percent still lacked a high-school education. By last year the figure was down to 14 percent.

In Pennsylvania, Obama lost to Clinton among voters earning less than $50,000 a year by 8 points, 54 to 46 percent. But his performance among lower-income voters actually improved in the six weeks between Ohio and Pennsylvania, despite the flaps over Wright and the "bitter" remark. In Ohio, he lost the lower-income vote by 12 percent. But Obama's aides are quick to point out that Obama won among voters earning less than $50,000 in another key industrial Midwest state—Wisconsin, in early February—and that indeed, he has defeated Hillary Clinton among low income voters in 14 of 30 states where there were exit polls. (In many of those states, there are large numbers of poor black voters.) Obama's bigger problem is with older voters, say these aides. Obama's newness and "otherness" seems to be a concern with older, poorer, less-educated female voters. Some elderly voters may have a harder time shedding old prejudices.

It is also worth noting, the Obama-ites say, that in a recent Gallup poll, when asked if each presidential candidate "looks down upon the average American" or "respects the average American," only 26 percent responded that Obama "looks down." That was 4 points more than McCain but 6 points less than Hillary. (In the NEWSWEEK Poll, Obama did better than both McCain and Clinton: 25 percent said Obama "looks down on people like you," versus 26 percent for McCain and 32 percent for Clinton.) In Pennsylvania exit polling, on the critical question of which candidate is "in touch with people like you," 67 percent said Clinton was, versus 66 percent for Obama—a virtual tie.