by Berry Craig

MAYFIELD, Ky. – I passed the old clunker on the way home from school the day before the election.

The 80s-vintage Buick compact was more primer than paint. The driver’s clothes looked bargain basement, not Brooks Brothers.

Yet a “McCain-Palin” sticker clung resolutely to the rust bucket’s rear bumper.

Based on his wheels and his threads, Buick Guy is one of what the Good Book calls “the least among us.”

Yet he was apparently voting for a millionaire who believes that rich people and big corporations – not Buick Guys -- ought to get more tax breaks. John McCain also thinks bosses shouldn’t be bothered by strong unions and by government regulations that protect the safety and health of workers, including Buick Guy, on the job.

I’ve never understood Buick Guys. Kentucky – not one of the wealthiest states – is full of them. While Barack Obama won in a landslide nationally, the Bluegrass State went big for McCain, as it did twice for Bush.

Meanwhile, Buick Guys in Kentucky and elsewhere continue to vote for candidates who aim to make the rich richer and keep Buick Guys driving heaps.

Maybe President-elect Obama’s skin color prevented Buick Guy from voting for him. Like Pap in Huckleberry Finn, Buick Guys don’t get it. Poverty transcends race. “The issue is not black and white – it’s green,” said the Rev. W.G. Harvey, the first African American city commissioner in Paducah, where I teach in the community college.

Buick Guys are really elitists, said David Nickell, who teaches sociology at the same community college. He wasn’t kidding.

“They are the least secure group in society,” Nickell added. “They are right on the edge of the poverty line. They’re a paycheck away from losing everything.”

So Buick Guys look down on people poorer than they are, Nickell said. “And they readily accept the ideology of the real elite.”

Buick Guys oppose most government aid for people who need it, even thought that aid also benefits them. “They see redistributing the wealth as taking from them and giving to those below them. They don’t see it as taking from billionaires and helping them, too.”

Getting people like Buick Guy to vote their own interests is probably tougher in the United States than in any other industrial democracy. Never mind that among these countries, the gap between rich and poor is broadest in the U.S., reports the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Forget that, according to the OECD, the gap rapidly widened during the Bush years. (My guess is Buick Guy voted for Bush, too.)

While income inequality is greatest in the United States, class consciousness is weakest. The U.S. is the only industrial democracy that doesn’t have a significant, working-class-based democratic socialist or social democratic party. As much as Republican rightists disdain Democrats – and call Obama a “socialist,” which he’s not – they hate and fear real socialists more.

Republican conservatives want working people to keep believing that because they happen to own a home, however humble, or a car, even a rattletrap old Buick, their interests are the same as millionaires with mansions and fleets of luxury cars and an executive jet or two.

Millionaires vote their class interests. They get behind candidates like McCain who will do their bidding.

McCain and his soul mates are scared stiff that working class people – who are a lot more numerous than rich people – will unite at the ballot box and vote their interests. So divide-and-conquer is the Republican right’s strategy. They also use social issues like abortion and gay rights and appeals to white racial and ethnic prejudice, however subtle, to split the working class vote.

So when candidates like Obama want to help the working class by supporting unions and by suggesting that we ought to share the wealth with a tax plan under which rich people pay more and working people pay less, candidates like McCain accuse them of waging “class warfare.”

Nickell recalled hearing the first President Bush level the “class warfare” charge against Bill Clinton in 1992. “I saw it on TV,” he said. “Senior Bush was standing on the bow of his yacht at Kennebunkport.”

Nickell suggested that when Republicans cry “class warfare” they are afraid that a bunch of working class voters might not be falling for their old what’s-good-for-rich-people-is-good-for-you-too scam or for the GOP’s social issues and thinly-disguised “white-folks-r-us” hustle. Despite Buick Guy, a lot fewer were suckered this presidential election.

This union-card-carrying, working class teacher is hoping that Barack Obama, the guy I voted for, has resurrected the kind of working class solidarity that helped build Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition and keep it going for so long.

FDR was the first truly pro-union president. That was another reason union-hating Republican conservatives also called him a “socialist.” He wasn’t.

Roosevelt replied to his critics – he called them “economic royalists” -- by paraphrasing the words of another famous president: "The legitimate object of Government is to do for the people what needs to be done but which they cannot by individual effort do at all, or do so well, for themselves.”

The president FDR was talking about used the might of the federal government to save our republic when it was most in peril. "Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital,” that president also declared. “Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”

I suspect the McCain faithful – probably Buick Guy, too – would have dissed him as a “socialist.” He wasn’t a socialist either. He wasn’t even a Democrat.

He was Abraham Lincoln, the savior of the Union, the vanquisher of slavery, a champion of the working class and the first Republican president.