I think, Rig, that the perfect candidate for the working class voters you are referring to might be Sylvester Stallone...he'll never talk down to them! ;-) Arnold Schwarzenneger would also be great, only he was born in Austria (sigh)...that is a danged shame, eh? He would make the ultimate Republican presidential candidate.

The anti-intellectual streak that runs deeply through American society is a peculiar phenomenon. I think it has something to do with the frontier heritage. That and almost a hundred years of westerns and dumb action movies.

You know, Jesse Jackson has always really annoyed me. Why? He's got a really BIG mouth and he panders to people's lower instincts with his emotional dramatics all the time. No wonder he wants to "cut Obama's balls off"...that tells you what you need to know about Jesse Jackson right there. No chance of Jesse Jackson being mistaken for an intellectual, right? No chance of Jesse Jackson being mistaken for a person who can think outside of the narrow definition of his own racial heritage.

If working class people feel safer with a primitive like that than they do with someone who has a bit more class and who doesn't deliberately dumb down the dialogue to appear like "just plain folks"...as so many politicians do...well, then working class people have consented unwittingly to their own enslavement by hucksters like Jesse Jackson, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush. A lot of those guys talk a lot "dumber" than they really are (Bush being a possible exception). You know why? They figure it will get them votes.

That is just sad.

Obama doesn't do that. He doesn't pander to a pre-calculated "working class" style of lingo just to get votes from people who fear intellectuals or anyone who is different from themselves. He doesn't engage in the sort of crass, imitative supposedly "Black" histrionics of a Jesse Jackson. He talks like an educated man who is of no particular race whatsoever. That's refreshing to me.

What he does do, though, that concerns me is he talks mostly in very broad generalities that sound good...but it's hard to figure out the specifics from what he says. This worries me some. It doesn't worry me anthing like McCain does.... (grin) But it worries me some.