Coffee primary

I've seen this mentioned in an off-hand way before but today the Boston Globe devotes an entire article to the "coffee primary." I'll let them explain,

...coffee and class have merged into political shorthand as commentators, campaign operatives, and bloggers alike try to make sense of this highly caffeinated campaign season. In several primaries and caucuses, Obama has shown strength among white-collar professionals with a college degree - the so-called "Starbucks Demo crats" - while Clinton has won support from blue-collar workers with a high school degree, dubbed "Dunkin' Donuts Democrats."

Hmmm. I have an advanced degree, am a white-collar professional. I won't go near a Starbucks. It's pure swill. We do however get a pound of Dunkin' Donuts delivered to our apartment once a month. So much for gross over-simplifications of complex demographics.

In all seriousness, this is just more of the Red State/Blue State nonsense we heard so much about in 2000 and 2004. Only this time it's an analysis within the Democratic party. East Coast journalists (I'm looking at you David Brooks and David Broder) seize on cultural stereotypes of "average Americans" (whatever that means) and craft their predetermined narrative around that. It proves that they're not fabulously wealthy elite snobs, they're regular folks - just like you and me. Except they're not and that's fine.

Paul Waldman wrote a piece on Tim Russert last fall and he spends some time discussing the Russert's Buffalo/Blue collar persona,

As much as any politician, Russert has constructed a persona for the benefit of the public, an identity meant to give him the authority that his actual work might not. Like most well-designed personas, it has a basis in truth but has been polished and honed to a fine sheen.

The core -- if not the entirety -- of this persona can be summed up in the word Russert invokes at every opportunity, wielded like a talisman of authenticity: Buffalo. Buffalo, where the salt of the Earth trudge home from their exhausting blue-collar jobs, where the cheap beer is guzzled in corner bars, where the grime sits heavy on the walls of crumbling buildings, and the mills have all left town. Buffalo, where the young Russert got to know the real Americans on whose behalf he now speaks. Buffalo, which can bestow working-class credibility, even on a man who makes a reported $5 million a year and spends his summers among the decidedly elite at his second home on Nantucket. Although Buffalo is not technically in the "heartland," for Russert it functions the same way as the country's middle does for Republicans, as a shorthand of virtue, a geographical location out of which springs the values of modesty, piety, industriousness, and, most of all, the lack of privilege.