Politico: Obama will have no mandate because he will lose white men!

[Indy Texas]

Well who cares about rural white men anyway?

Obama and the Democrats owe them nothing. They've done nothing for this country but stoke race and class resentment at home and serve as cannon fodder for unnecessary wars abroad. They hate minorities, gays, pretty much anyone who isn't like them.

Romney and the Republicans don't owe them anything either. Guys like Romney would just as soon replace them with robots. Or if you can't get a robot, get some little Chinaman to do the same job for a tenth the cost. Cap their SSI benefits. Make it impossible for them to afford to retire and next to impossible for their kids to go to college. They'll still vote for the "working man's" party (even if most of them are laid off).

And they'll go on living in their alternate reality where they think the rest of us are mooching off them and that they're always being cheated and put upon. They always point their pitchforks at the wrong people. Schoolteachers. Black single moms. Do they really think they're to blame for the fact that a high school education doesn't get you into the middle class anymore? They ought to pick on somebody their own size for a change. Like their fellow white men - the ones who laid them off, for example.

[Indy Texas]

Come on, that post was only like 60% serious. I don't know who I'm more unsettled by - the people who don't understand satire and think I'm a monster or the people who don't understand satire and seem to agree with it wholeheartedly.

[Indy Texas]

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Betrayed about what? Please explain to me how these people have been betrayed (and by whom).

I guess what boggles my mind, living in and having grown up in a large, multicultural, polyglot city, is that while being low-income is certainly not easy or pleasant, it's not somehow harder to be a low-income white person than a low-income non-white. If anything, it ought to be slightly easier because low-income whites don't have to deal with the subconscious kinds of racism that are projected onto minority groups. (A blue-collar white guy can walk past a woman on the street without her instinctively grabbing hold of her purse; a black man will often face this. White people, rich or poor, never have to deal with being perceived as "foreign" or possibly "illegal" in the way that Hispanics and Asians do even if they were born in this country).

Yes, income inequality has widened over the past thirty years. Yes, wages for unskilled jobs have been depressed. But part of the reason the archetypal good ole boy could go from high school to the factory floor and support a stay-at-home wife and three kids on his salary is because the prevailing system denied blacks and immigrants and women the opportunities for those jobs. It's kind of hard to deny that the relative prosperity that working-class whites enjoyed in the mid-20th century was had at the expense of a minority underclass. In that sense, it was arguably "undeserved."

I live in a minority-majority city in a minority-majority state. And part of the reason there is such a flurry of activity here is that there are so many minorities and immigrants who, while relatively poor, are optimistic about their future and are trying to pursue opportunities as they come. They feel like after decades of discrimination, the playing field - while certainly not level - is more level than it has been before. I look at the underemployed white Joe the Plumbers of the hinterlands and it's hard for me not to view them as bitter that they can't tilt the playing field in their favor the way their fathers and grandfathers did.

[Indy Texas]

Is the low-educated truck driver who listens to Glenn Beck and screams at the government really a threat to the poor, or to gay people, or to immigrants, or to women? Or is this merely an unfortunate symptom of a society that has abandoned said truck driver, and others like him,, a society that literally does not need him, does not give a sh*t about him?

At least the Republican Party tells him he's special.

Yes, he is. I come from a pretty bourgeois background. I know well-to-do Democrats and well-to-do Republicans. And the "country club Republicans" that were my parents' friends and my friends' parents have no problem with letting gays get married (who do you think does their hair and redecorates their vacation house?) and giving amnesty to illegal aliens ("I could never let them deport Rosa. She's like family to us!").

In contrast, when I was going to college in a podunk Texas town, who do you think vandalized the car of one of my classmates who was gay? A couple of Skoal-dipping local boys. And at the college in question, everyone knew that when bar-hopping there were certain venues that we needed to avoid if there were non-white people in our group, lest they be jeered at by "the natives." Oh, but yes, they're the ones whose "values are under attack." Mitt Romney was right when he said there is a segment of this country who insist on making themselves out to be victims.

The Democratic Party has done more than enough to try to help these people. They want job-training and affordable education. They support extending unemployment benefits at a time when even people who genuinely want a job often can't find them. We all want them to have better jobs and for their children to have better opportunities. But if you tell these people that they might have to, God forbid, actually open a book or take a technical certification class, they pitch a fit and run crying to Rick Santorum and he tells them they're right and that we're "snobs" for expecting them to actually try to better themselves.

So I'd say there's really not a whole lot else that the President, me, you or anyone else can or should do for them. If Obama wins tomorrow, he will have proved you don't need the white working class to win elections anymore. And he shouldn't: fifty years ago the overwhelming majority of Americans were white people who didn't go to college; that America doesn't exist anymore. So even if these people keep trying in vain to "take their country back" eventually they'll become a demographic asterisk. And, to paraphrase Mitt, it won't be our job to have to worry about them.