Clinton's gutsy approach goes down well

with the working class

Also, her focus on economic problems and solutions,

the clarity of her speeches,

and a personal story of trial and survival

hits home with many voters

suffering financially this year.

Working-Class Voters Buoy Hillary's Candidacy

Hillary Clinton kicked off her North Carolina primary campaign last week at a technical school that bills itself "College for the Real World."

After some pleasantries and a stab at a basketball reference, she began to outline what she called "the problems that we face" as a nation.

"Our American workers work harder and are more productive than anyone," she said. "And yet for too many, here in North Carolina and elsewhere, that hard work doesn't seem to be paying off."

That same morning, Barack Obama hit New York City for a speech on America's housing crisis. He opened with a 300-word history of the Founding Fathers' views on free markets.

"In the more than two centuries since then," he said, "we have struggled to balance the same forces that confronted Hamilton and Jefferson—self-interest and community; markets and democracy; the concentration of wealth and power, and the necessity of transparency and opportunity for each and every citizen."

The difference in those speeches helps explain Clinton's success in fashioning herself as the "Working Class Hero" of the 2008 Democratic presidential race.

On several scales of "readability," which measure the level of education needed to understand a piece of writing, a sample of Clinton's speeches scored on average two grade levels below Obama's.

Typically, he speaks the language of high school seniors or college freshmen. She speaks the language of high-school sophomores or juniors — the language of the least-educated, lowest-earning voters.

Clinton makes for an unlikely modern Rosie the Riveter: a suburban-born corporate lawyer, a former first lady who never worked an assembly line, never picketed her employer.

But across the country, particularly in manufacturing hubs feeling the pains of globalization, blue-collar voters have kept her candidacy alive.

Voters, analysts and political strategists trace that support to lingering affection for Clinton's husband and the economic boom of his presidency — but only in part.

They also say a range of strategies has won Clinton working-class backing: her focus on economic problems and solutions, the clarity of her speeches, and a personal story of trial and survival that, in its own way, hits home with many voters suffering financially this year.

"For blue-collar Democratic voters choosing a candidate, the first question is usually, 'Does he or she understand my life?' " said Mark Kornblau, who advised former Sen. John Edwards in his unsuccessful presidential bid this year.

He said Clinton has improved in that area over the course of the campaign.

"I don't think it's natural, and I don't think it comes from any real life experience ... but she uses language that really describes what's going on in people's lives."

Melissa Dunston and her husband bought a new house two years ago. She lost her job before they made the first payment. They started a trucking company. When fuel prices shot up last year, they lost that too.

Dunston identifies with Clinton's public struggles. "To have been through everything she has, she really is 'I have overcome,' " said Dunston, a public school teacher's assistant.

Clinton's campaign doesn't have all the money it needs to keep pace with Obama, she added, "but they still make it. You think, 'I can relate to that.' "
The blue-collar vote delivered campaign-sustaining victories to Clinton in Ohio and Texas earlier this month.

In both states, exit polls showed her beating Obama by 15 percentage points among voters who lacked a a college degree. She also won solid majorities among those who earn $50,000 a year or less.

Those voters figure to drive primary results in West Virginia, Kentucky, Indiana and North Carolina, which vote May 6; and Pennsylvania, next on the calendar, where polls indicate Clinton leads handily.

They're also a key piece of the Clinton campaign's electability-themed argument to "superdelegates," the Democratic elites who are all but assured of deciding the party's nominee.

The working class "is a critical vote when superdelegates look at who's going to be a stronger candidate" against presumed Republican nominee John McCain, said Mark Penn, Clinton's chief strategist.

"These are voters who in the past have gone either way in the general election."

Three in five Americans worry "a great deal" about the economy, a Gallup poll reported last week.

A similar number of self-described working-class voters told the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press in February that their incomes are falling behind the cost of living.

Clinton and Obama have tried to tap those anxieties with plans to create jobs, help homeowners ward off foreclosure, rewrite free-trade pacts, expand health-care coverage, retrain workers and reduce families' college tuition costs.

Analysts say the candidates' delivery of those plans, more than the details, make the difference for the working class.

Obama talks in broader themes of hope and change, they say. Clinton talks more specifically of problems and solutions.

For working-class voters in Ohio and Texas, "Hillary Clinton was acting like the fighter they wanted in the face of desperation," said Drew Westen, an Emory University psychology professor, political strategist and author of "The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation."

At Wake Technical Community College in Raleigh, Clinton offered a long list of proposals to soothe financially ailing Americans.

"I was impressed," said Lisa Rosen, who is undecided. "She seemed more real than I expected."

Bare-Knuckle Politics

Why is Clinton fighting so hard? Because history shows it works

At any time other than in the midst of a heated electoral battle, it's hard to imagine that Nancy Pelosi would attract much controversy by opining that the Democratic Party's nominee for president should be the candidate who wins the most votes.

The House speaker has done just that, last week drawing an angry backlash from wealthy supporters of Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Most Americans -- presumably including the 26 million who have participated with unprecedented enthusiasm in the Democratic primaries and caucuses -- still view this country as a representative democracy.

Take a look at history, though, and the power of the popular vote in determining the next occupant of the White House starts to look a lot less absolute.

The last time the Democrats had a truly competitive fight on their hands, in 1968, the man who eventually won the nomination, Hubert H. Humphrey, garnered just 2.2% of the popular vote in the primaries.

He relied instead on the 37 states that still allocated their nominating delegates by backroom fiat instead of the ballot box -- a strategy that may well have clinched his nomination even if Bobby Kennedy had not been assassinated.

The lack of serious intraparty competition in the intervening 40 years -- despite the central role now accorded to primary/caucus voting -- has been largely the result of a playing field tilted to favor establishment candidates such as Walter Mondale in 1984 and Al Gore in 2000.

Iowa and New Hampshire -- both predominantly white, conservative states averse to maverick candidates like Jesse Jackson or even Howard Dean -- set the tone.

The pile-up of states on Super Tuesday, requiring lavish funding and a high public profile, usually knocks out what is left of the competition.

And, as an insurance policy, the party leaves any really close races in the hands of non-elected superdelegates, the issue central to the Hillary Clinton-Barack Obama showdown now.

The will of the people has been even more compromised when it comes to general elections for the presidency.

In fact, on every occasion in American history when the race for the White House has been close enough to be contested, the candidate with fewer votes has prevailed.

It happened in 1800 -- admittedly, an age before mass suffrage rights -- when Thomas Jefferson managed to tie Aaron Burr in the electoral college.

Jefferson eventually won the election in the House of Representatives, thanks to the distorting effect of the "federal ratio" -- the rule that gave Southern slave owners an additional 3/5ths vote for each adult they enslaved.

It happened in 1824, when the House threw the race to John Quincy Adams even though Andrew Jackson won more votes and more electoral college delegates.

It happened in 1876, when carpetbagger Republican administrations in Louisiana, Florida and South Carolina refused to recognize the victory of the Democrat Samuel Tilden and essentially threw the election to his Republican rival, Rutherford B. Hayes.

And, of course, it happened in 2000, when the two major parties, the authorities in Florida and the Supreme Court all, in their own ways, prevented a full recount of the votes in the Sunshine State.

And thus the keys to the White House went to George W. Bush, the candidate lagging half a million votes behind in the national vote tally.

Given this long history of dogged, dirty, win-at-any-cost electioneering, Clinton's determination to keep fighting in the face of seemingly insurmountable electoral arithmetic makes a lot more sense.

When her surrogates argue that carrying big states such as California and Ohio is more important than being ahead in the overall popular vote, or when they argue that pledged delegates are not really pledged at all, they are following a well-worn playbook compiled by both parties down through the years -- which is to say and do anything that might push your candidate ahead.

In the end, the key to winning is not the number of votes but the efficacy of a candidate's political campaign.

If the Clinton camp can create the perception that voters from the early primaries are now suffering buyers' remorse, and that the party's grass-roots supporters want her after all, she still has a chance.

Conversely, if she comes off as a sore loser willing to risk her party's chances in November to further her personal ambition -- a perception already dragging down her approval ratings -- her gambit will most likely fail.

It shouldn't be this way, of course. Democracy should be about the will of the people, pure and simple, as Pelosi has pointed out.

American politicians are generally very good at the rhetoric of deferring to that popular will. When their careers and their futures are on the line, however, it's a whole different story, and always has been.