One of Sarah Palin’s strongest assets is that she is able to appeal to white working class voters. The same goes, of course, for John McCain; he too gives these voters the impression he shares their values and views.

Barack Obama, on the other hand, has trouble with these voters because he comes across as rather privileged and, perhaps more important, snobbish.

Republicans know that working class voters will not vote for any elitist person; it is fine to be rich, it is fine to be successful, but to be snobbish is suicide.

This is why Obama has been portrayed as a snob for months now. Whenever the opportunity arises, the son of a single mother and grandson of a Kenyan goatherd, is depicted as out of touch. He, critics claim, does not only have different values than working class Americans, he actually despises them.

Sadly for Obama, he is making it rather easy for Republicans to get away with the above. His attitude is often snobbish and arrogant. His mannerism, his oneliners which often insult people from ‘the heartland,’ all contribute to him giving people the impression he thinks he is intellectually and culturally superior.

McCain may be rich, but it is Obama who comes across as the snob.

Most Republican nominees in the past – those who were successful and less successful – were all successful and rich. They were not members of the working class, yet they were able to connect with working class voters nonetheless.

Democratic nominees, however, and leading politicians in general are of a different breed; they may be rich and successful, but they are somehow incapable of connecting with blue collar voters. They seem to believe they are intellectually and culturally superior, and those voters smell it.

It could be argued, like David Frum does, that one of the reasons for this difference is that for most leading Democrats ‘the decisive event of their lives was the letter admitting them to an elite university or law school — or both.’

Contrast this with Republicans; ‘not one of them owed his wealth and success primarily to his education.’

And so a battle ensues between ‘the scholar and the warrior, the brilliant president of the Harvard Law Review against the gallant prisoner of war.’

A battle nearly always won by the warrior, not the scholar.

The reason for this is that there are, quite simply, a lot more working class voters than highly educated, and liberal, ones in the United States. People tend to vote for someone they recognize, for someone they can identify with. For working class voters this means they support someone who seems to share their background, or at least their views and values. For highly educated voters, this goes as well.

The result; states with a high highly educated statistic vote Democratic, against ‘normal’ states that vote Republican.

And this is where Palin steps in. She comes from a good family, yet clearly has working class values. She is well educated but frowns on elitism. She lives her life in a way most highly educated people – especially women – find silly, and old fashioned. She has five children, struggles between raising them and her job (making ends meet), and, o my, has a 17 year old daughter who is pregnant.

To college-educated women the above sounds silly, possibly scary. ‘In college-educated America, children may get pregnant at 17 — but they do not carry the baby and they do not marry the father. Teen marriage increases the odds of divorce; teen motherhood interferes with education – so educated America frowns on both.’

However, in non-college educated America ‘it’s still the 1970s. The odds of divorce remain as high as ever, and the rate of out-of-wedlock births among white women has jumped past 25 percent – higher than it was among blacks when Daniel Moynihan diagnosed the crisis of the black family in the 1960s. For many in this group, the Palin story will read like the story of their own families.’

In short, with ‘their nomination of Barack Obama, the Democrats have intensified their image as the party of minorities and the upper part of white America. Among whites, Democrats increasingly draw their votes from the educated, from those who have enjoyed success in a destabilizing postmodern culture and global economy.’ Republicans, on the other hand, have, by choosing Sarah Palin, ‘reasserted their identity as the party of white working-class America – of those who worry about cultural and economic threats to their families.’

The result may very well be that Republicans will once again succeed in getting the support from working class America; quite possibly to the great regret of Democrats, who may find it qutie hard to win elections without it.