I had read something briefly about the Street Money and wondered how it played out in Philadelphia for Obama. But, of course, no whisper of it ever reached the MSM. This stubborn attachment to principle is not something newspapers (or, god forbid, television) likes to acknowledge, nor are they keen on taking a hard look at political machines across the country -- not in this century, anyway. Perfectly OK to talk about Tammany Hall, which is all quaint history, but nothing about how politics is still done, especially in the northeast and mid-Atlantic.

It's a damn shame that the great writers on The Wire aren't cranking out copy for the Times and the Post.

I had read something briefly about the Street Money and wondered how it played out in Philadelphia for Obama. But, of course, no whisper of it ever reached the MSM.

Actually, to the extent it was covered, the question was all about how stupid Obama was to take the stand he did and how the "volunteers" would suffer economic hardship.

As someone who has McElroy and McHenry blood in the veins, my first response to your story here Pat was to get in the car, drive to Sandy, and punch you out.

Two points:

1) Hey, they're my people too, Steve. 2) I'm just about positive that I can outrun you.

So I don't know what in the world Mr. Ryan is referring to when he writes that this was "a little noticed story," or why Jeffrane writes that no whisper of [the street money story] ever reached the MSM." If the LA Times isn't MSM, please tell me what it is.

One article in the LA Times and virtually no follow-up after the primary is little-noticed. And little-covered. All that was reported later was that "Clinton won Pennsylvania" (just like she "won" Texas), with no analysis at all other than "them white hicks just won't vote for a black man."

Pat,

As an almost full blooded Scots-Irish I loved this piece even if I resent the implications to my heritage. My children laugh at the stories of our family's disastrous record in clan fighting, which is probably why my side of the family left for Canada instead of West Virginia.

They swore that it's a very different process than New Jersey's in that the money is actually doled out to cover your gas if you're driving voters to the polls, your lunch and some snacks if you're volunteering the whole day, etc. It is, in their opinion, a pretty legitimate process.

I think that we get that, but I've been volunteering on Oregon camaigns for the last four cycles, and the money always flows the other way. No one's paid me a thin dime to get out there for my candidate.

The process whether legal or no, fosters the corruption of connections that is prevalent in those geographic areas. People raised in a sewer do not gag at the smell of excrement, but it doesn't mean that the are clean only that they are normal.

Obam is trying to redefine normal.

And no, I don't know if it's gonna work, but if it does, the country can say we've taken at least one step out of a thirty year nightmare.

Risky but worth a try.

Interesting post, Pat, though I think that Webb's stuff is historical bunkum, and that if you look at the folks you're talking about around the country a lot of them have ancestors from Poland or Slovenia or Italy or or or -- and of the Irish descended ones, the Catholic Irish Irish outnumber the Protestant Scots-Irish considerably.

But your basic point remains. However, one should also say that liberal multi-culturalism that fails to deal adequately with class issues affecting white men did not invent that divide. White working men are not part of the ruling class an never have been. But large chunks of them were getting persuaded that it was in their own best interests to support Jim Crow (even when the disfranchisement laws prevented a significant group of poor whites from voting) or to participate in a long string of urban anti-black pogroms not only the Southeast but in the Northeast, the northeastern Midwest, and the Midwest, between the 1890s (Wilmington NC) and 1940s (NYC and Detroit). Until the 1960s, that's what "race riot" meant -- white crowds invading black neighborhoods.

But the working class of all colors has been getting hammered for several decades now, and the scapegoat politics of Reaganism has about run its course, and one of the good things that could come from an Obama victory is if he really does follow up on the vision he laid out in that speech, which refuses the lie that looking at the just claims of any of those who have been hurt requires denying the claims of others.

I noticed an Obama ad the other night that used the phrase "repair the world." That is an ancient Jewish ethical injunction about what we are meant to do, tikkun which I have always liked since I first learned of it. There's a quotation from a Jewish sage that seems in the same spirit and also a good expression of the ideals Obama is standing for rhetorically: "If I am not for myself, who will be? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?"

Your Likud line seems somewhat off to me -- actually it applies if at all to New York and its retirement extension in Florida (though we saw how well that worked for Rudy Giuliani). But California? C'mon. Tom Lantos was one guy.

Oh, and I forgot the struggles within the working class and the white working class over racial exclusivism in unions, and the 2nd KKK aimed as much at Catholics and Jews as blacks and hispanics (& filipinos on the West Coast), and let me tell you some time about my interesting experiences in renting in New Haven, in terms of some of the "advantages" some potential landlords & landladies used to tell my white self about their neighborhoods.

I know you know all that's real an are agin' it, it's just that the problem is holding it all in our heads at the same time without having them explode. That was what was so remarkable about Obama's speech.

Larry,

Suspect what you will. I know both poverty and corruption up close and personal. I've lived it for years at a time in my younger days. Corrupt societies that work on the spoils system are directly destructive to the poor whether they are in Paraguay or Philadelphia, and the mindset needed to thrive in such a culture does additional long term damage in breeding cynicism and hopelessness.

Getting a bribe once every two years from the Democratic Party is not a make or break for any individual.

<hr/>

Chris, I do believe that you miss the point when you write:

I think that Webb's stuff is historical bunkum, and that if you look at the folks you're talking about around the country a lot of them have ancestors from Poland or Slovenia or Italy or or or -- and of the Irish descended ones, the Catholic Irish Irish outnumber the Protestant Scots-Irish considerably.

First, I'm more generally citing the Celts, while Webb is focusing more specifically on the Scots-Irish.

Second, the argument is that rather than being culturally aligned with English culture like say Canada or New Zeland, we are more culturally aligned with the remnants of the Outliers of the island kingdom. What Webb alleges is that this culture strongly informs American culture whther they be of Irish, Polish, African, or whatever antecedent, similar to the way that Australian culture has the distinctive flavor of its penal colony roots while New Zeland doesn't.

<hr/>

One example is of a friend who while stationed in Germany in the early 70s, American GIs would routinely brawl and make up in bars while the German customers were mystified and horrified by the behavior.

So too, the German and Scandinavian immigrants may have offered their discreet flavors to the American mix in the upper midwest, but the warrior culture described by Webb now defines Americans regardless of ethnicity, in some ways worldwide, for both good and ill.