From an interesting article in today's NYT Magazine about Obama's prospects in Levittown, PA. An excerpt:
On one of my days in Levittown, I visited with Janet Keyser, a childhood friend from the next street over who is now chairwoman of the local Democratic Party and the director of the water and sewer authority. “There’s not many $25-an-hour jobs anymore,” she said. “It’s very, very sad in Levittown right now. It’s not like it was, where the father got his son a job in the mill, and then when the son got out of high school, he came into the mill full time. We get the list of foreclosures and sheriff’s sales at the authority, and every month, it’s more. And these aren’t bums or people on drugs. They’re good people.”
Near the end of our visit, Keyser asked me if I remembered the milk trucks that came around and dropped bottles into boxes we had in front of our houses. She rhapsodized about the schools that we could walk to, the now-closed public pools and the Woolworth’s and W. T. Grant’s at the old shopping center. Neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama is bringing back any of that. But Hillary Clinton evokes memories of eight years of better times, and she would bring back Bill — who, here in Levittown, is not a damper on her campaign but rather a security blanket.
In early March, Keyser’s Democratic Party endorsed Hillary Clinton. “She’s got the experience of being in the White House,” Keyser said. “That’s part of the asset. And she has Bill with her.”
From the diner where I talked to Keyser, I drove over to Gleason’s Bar, around the corner from my old house. That, too, was a sort of a reality check after spending a few days dwelling with Obama’s devout enthusiasts. Eight men sat around the bar, and not one of them supported Obama.
The cascade down the job ladder — with one job not as good as the last — is a particularly working-class syndrome. It is the sort of slide that makes a person less likely to take a chance and more prone to cling to the familiar. Marty Clark, whom I knew in high school, worked at the mill and then as a longshoreman and now has a nonunion job driving a truck. “I don’t know Obama that well,” he said as he sat at the bar at midafternoon on St. Patrick’s Day. “It seems to me like he’s got no experience. She’d be the way I’d go.”
Steve Woods sat drinking a Coors Light and talking with his buddies. A Philadelphia Phillies spring-training game was on TV, and he glanced up at it every time the audio picked up the crack of the bat. I asked him if the presidential campaign interested him. “Absolutely,” he said. Rapid fire, he told me the issues he cared about: “No. 1, gas prices. It’s killing everybody. No. 2, immigrants. They should go back to Mexico. Three, guns. Everybody should have the right to bear arms. In fact, everyone should have a gun in this day and age.”
I wondered if he was a Republican. “Are you kidding?” he said. “I’m a Democrat all the way. I hate Republicans.”
It would seem that a vote for Obama is hard for people who cannot imagine the future in any terms other than in reference to the past and to what they are familiar with. Clinton is not a natural vote for this constituency, but she has the advantage of being a familiar figure from the past.