The silly pose of the posturing pundits

Perhaps the most condescending assumpation that underlies many pundits’ analyses of Barack Obama’s recent comments about “blue collar” voters in Pennsylvania is that these voters are all be of one mind when it comes to the election.  Implicit in the scoffs at Obama from commentators like Maureen Dowd, Chris Matthews, and George Will is that Obama does not understand this group the way they do, as if blue collar workers are a monolith.  Certainly, there are some similar forces at play that affect blue collar workers, but that does not mean they react uniformly, believe uniformly, and vote uniformly, and it also does not mean that they respond in a knee-jerk fashion to the gaffes of a candidate the way the nation’s pundits do.  Asserting they do would be about as silly as asserting that Maureen Dowd, Chris Matthews, and George Will must share the same voting interests because they are all white collar.