The GOP's New Ploy: Saying Obama Disses White Workers

In a blog entry at EURweb, Earl Ofari Hutchinson writes that President Barack Obama's re-election campaign is being hammered by ultraconservatives who are painting him as a job killer for white workers. He urges the Obama campaign to respond appropriately.

*The new ploy among ultra-conservatives, right wing talk show jocks, on their websites, and blogs is to claim that President Obama has written off white workers in his re-election bid. This notion has even crept into a few mainstream news outlets that’ve done a spate of stories on Obama’s supposed snub of white workers. Obama, as this line goes, is pandering to Hispanics, Gays, environmentalists, women, and left liberals with his push for comprehensive immigration reform, his inch toward open defense of gay marriage, the scrapping of the Keystone XL Pipe line, his picking a fight with the Catholic Church over contraceptives and abortion, and his relentless drive to tax the rich.

The problem with this silliness is that then Democratic presidential candidate, and after his election, President Obama has been careful to a fault to make sure that he took no stance on issues that did not have either majority or a broad consensus of public support; support that cut across ethnic and gender lines. The even bigger problem is that despite Obama’s caution, and care in hewing close to general public sentiment on policy issues, the majority of lower income, white blue collar workers, especially males, have never bought his policies or him. Polls have consistently shown that this racial gap has perennially been big and daunting for Obama.

The gap is especially perplexing given that Obama in endless forays to cities, workplaces, and outposts throughout the country has made it a point to meet and greet, and hold formal and informal discussions with legions of blue collar, and rural whites. He’s bent over backward to assure them at appearances at plant closings or openings, or jobs or home foreclosure townhalls that his administration is working in their interest.

Read Earl Ofari Hutchinson's entire blog entry at EURweb. 

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