cross-posted from SavagePolitics.com

I have rarely read anything on the subject of class that was worth the effort it took to get to the end of the article. Defining class usually requires endless dry paragraphs, and no one is ever satisfied by the outcome. Raise the subject of class in conversation and someone from across the room will scream that class in America is dead. And yet class is as palpable to me as how I walk and talk, who I find funny and why, where I went to school, how I speak and to whom. Class is today's invisible prejudice. It is the cut no one sees or worse still, thinks is funny. It is a million dirty jokes, the last place you can put your disdain for others and no one will think less of you.  Class is also the issue that is gumming up this primary campaign like crazy glue.

After the Democratic primary results in Ohio on March 5, 2007, Heidi Przybyla on Bloomberg.com wrote:

Barack Obama has an Archie bunker problem. The white, blue-collar voters personified by the 1970's fictional television character cost Obama yesterday. His Democratic presidential rival, Senator Hillary Clinton of New York beat him 54 percent to 44 percent in industrial Ohio and 58 percent to 40 percent in heavily Catholic Rhode Island. In Ohio's 10th district of Cuyahoga county, a suburban enclave on Cleveland's west side that includes a large population of Polish-Americans, Clinton trounced Obama 61 percent to 37 percent, according to exit polls. In the state's Belmont county, an economically depressed Appalachian border area that is predominantly white, she had a 50-point lead over Obama...

Przybyla reported Joe Trippi, a former senior strategist for John Edwards, as saying:

Obama has had a problem with lower-income, downscale, blue-collar democrats from the beginning. He typically appeals to better educated, upscale Democrats.

Obama's chief strategist, David Axelrod, has denied this. But how he could do so is a puzzle to anyone who has followed Chicago politics.

There's more...