Prometheus 6

“The problem with talking about hope all the time is that these are not hopeful lands; Obama is talking change to people who equate change with life getting worse,” said Hank Sheinkopf, a Democratic Party consultant who has studied the political culture of these working-class states with a Talmudic intensity....

“If you’re an unemployed steelworker, a former coal miner, you want to know about job training, who pays your health care,” Dr. Madonna said. “Obama’s speeches are uplifting but without much specificity, and that’s a tough sell for working people who don’t live in a world of ideas.”

I think it is remarkable how, for all the different ways people "define" themselves, they all feel the same limits, all have the same needs and desires.

Obama Is Moving to Down-to-Earth Oratory
By MICHAEL POWELL

STATE COLLEGE, Pa. — The Speech is his finely polished sword, a transcendent weapon. Seen and heard on a thousand YouTube postings, Senator Barack Obama’s speeches have made a happening of that hoariest of campaign forms, the stump speech.

But Mr. Obama sheaths that sword more often now. He is grounding his lofty rhetoric in the more prosaic language of white-working-class discontent, adjusting it to the less welcoming terrain of Pennsylvania. His preferred communication now is the town-hall-style meeting.

So in Johnstown, a small, economically depressed city tucked in a valley hard by the Little Conemaugh River, Mr. Obama on Saturday spoke to the gritty reality of a city that ranks dead last on the Census Bureau’s list of places likely to attract American workers. His traveling companion, Senator Bob Casey, Democrat of Pennsylvania, introduced the candidate as an “underdog fighter for an underdog state.”

Mr. Obama, a quicksilver political student, picked up that cue. He often mentions his background as a community organizer but in passing, a parenthetical. Not this time. “I got into public service as an organizer,” Mr. Obama told these 1,200 mostly white Pennsylvanians in a local high school gymnasium. “There were a group of churches, mostly Catholic parishes, and they hired me for $12,000 plus car fare.”

That detail drew knowing chuckles in a town where the median income hovers at just over $20,000. “So I got myself believing that the most important thing is not to be an elected official but to hold them accountable.”

Then, echoing Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s focus on bread-and-butter concerns, Mr. Obama went on to talk about the price of gas and to offer the precise amount of his health care premium and to explain exactly what he would do about the foreclosure rate and Big Oil and Big Energy and how he would stop companies from moving to China.

On Monday, he added a dollop of denunciation of corporate salaries at Countrywide, a company at the center of the subprime loan implosion. “So they get a $19 million bonus while other folks are losing their homes,” he said in Lancaster. “What’s wrong with this picture?”

Mr. Obama’s effort to master a plain-spoken and blunt language that extends back centuries in Pennsylvania is accompanied by no small stakes. Voters here, as in neighboring Ohio, where Mr. Obama lost the white and aging blue-collar vote, tend to elect politicians whose language rarely soars and whose policy prescriptions come studded with detail.