Class Issues in U.S. politics

I am starting this because our attention to the U.S. election seems to have devolved to snickering about Palin.
From a fascinating blog, [url=http://anglachelg.blogspot.com/2008/09/apprehension.html]Anglachel's Journal[/url]:

quote:

---

Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Apprehension
The polls are rattling nerves up and down the Democratic ladder as Obama and Biden turn a “No way to lose!” election year into a “How are we going to win?” nail biter. They are apprehensive of how the race is shaping up.(...)

---

Looking at why ""pink collar", rural, "older", non-professional women (AND men) are drifting away from Obama", the blogger quotes from an [b]n+1[/b] article entitled [url=http://www.nplusonemag.com/obama]Obama and the Closing of the American Dream[/url]:

quote:

---

This classless universality —the hope that every American citizen, through free labor, could enjoy middle-class respectability, economic freedom, and the intellectual benefits of education— lay at the core of the dreams championed by farmers, small-business owners, and factory workers. In the nineteenth century, such universal rhetoric coexisted with the practical exclusion of blacks and women, who were considered to be beneath citizenship. Crucially, however, there was nothing intrinsic to farming, wage earning, or entrepreneurship that required the permanent separation of these groups from the promise of social respectability. Today, one can and should hope for an American dream that truly includes all Americans, and which recognizes and respects all the different types of labor the country needs. This would fulfill the promise of nineteenth-century aspirations.

Instead we have been left with the professional ideal, which values only certain types of work and thus implicitly disdains the rest. It is an inherently exclusive ideal, structured around a divide between those engaged in high-status work and those confined to task execution. The political theorist Iris Marion Young writes, "Today equal opportunity has come to mean only that no one is barred from entering competition for a relatively few privileged positions." The idea of exclusivity is a necessary structural feature of professionalization. As a model for society, however, it validates an economic and cultural divide between those with meaningful access to social respectability and the vast majority of Americans, who remain consigned to low status and low-income employment.
(...)

From 1932 until 1968, the Democratic Party rested on two descriptions of American life—the American dream as embodied by the rural farmer and the industrial worker. It gained sustenance from a respect for these accounts of middle-class achievement, economic independence, and democratic inclusion. Today's party, however, has given up on establishing new forms of solidarity for nonprofessional citizens. All it has to offer is a lose-lose proposition: join the competition for professional status and cultural privilege at a severe disadvantage, or don't join it at all. The party holds on to the social programs of the past, but in ever more truncated form. It presents a politics of consensus while ignoring the fact of basic division.

---

Certainly enough to get us started.