Spring Break
What Barack Obama and Chicken Contact Lenses Have in Common
By Brian Dutt (OE), Viewpoints Editor
Issue date: 10/14/08 Section: Viewpoints
With the U.S. losing 160,000 jobs in September, suddenly Barack Obama's tax cuts, and health care and education reform are starting to sound a little more important than religion and guns to the working-class
Sometimes it's hard to convey a message about a product to the working class. That product could be chicken contact lens….or it could be… Barack Obama. Working-class whites compose just about half of the electorate, and over the last several decades have typically sided with the Republican party. Given recent shifts in the polls, it seems that Mr. Obama may be trying to write a (B) Case to that story…
In the 1960s, a Harvard elitist "egghead" named Randy Wise had an innovative answer to the poultry industry's burning question: How the hell do we stop chickens from eating each other in the cage and destroying our profit margins? His answer was simple: "We will put red contact lenses on chickens, producing a calming effect on the chickens and preventing them from misbehaving and overeating. That is change we can believe in." It turns out that many working-class grassroots farmers were not ready to listen to some Harvard MBA-type tell them how to change a process that had existed since their ancestors first set foot on American soil.
In 2008, a Harvard egghead named Barack Obama had an innovative answer to the country's burning question: "How do we get ourselves out of the past eight years?" The answer: succinctly put, "Change." To that effect, Obama proposed things like cutting 95% of taxes for the middle class, increasing healthcare coverage in the U.S. by 99% through caps on health care premiums and establishing price controls on drug companies, and setting a hard deadline on what many would describe as a disastrous war in Iraq. Despite a strong campaign message dedicated to the middle/working class, Obama and McCain were even in the polls, and many were wondering how the Democrats weren't running away with the election in the wake of eight years of Bush rule.
Sometimes it's hard to convey a message about a product to the working class. That product could be chicken contact lens….or it could be… Barack Obama. Working-class whites compose just about half of the electorate, and over the last several decades have typically sided with the Republican party. Given recent shifts in the polls, it seems that Mr. Obama may be trying to write a (B) Case to that story…
In the 1960s, a Harvard elitist "egghead" named Randy Wise had an innovative answer to the poultry industry's burning question: How the hell do we stop chickens from eating each other in the cage and destroying our profit margins? His answer was simple: "We will put red contact lenses on chickens, producing a calming effect on the chickens and preventing them from misbehaving and overeating. That is change we can believe in." It turns out that many working-class grassroots farmers were not ready to listen to some Harvard MBA-type tell them how to change a process that had existed since their ancestors first set foot on American soil.
In 2008, a Harvard egghead named Barack Obama had an innovative answer to the country's burning question: "How do we get ourselves out of the past eight years?" The answer: succinctly put, "Change." To that effect, Obama proposed things like cutting 95% of taxes for the middle class, increasing healthcare coverage in the U.S. by 99% through caps on health care premiums and establishing price controls on drug companies, and setting a hard deadline on what many would describe as a disastrous war in Iraq. Despite a strong campaign message dedicated to the middle/working class, Obama and McCain were even in the polls, and many were wondering how the Democrats weren't running away with the election in the wake of eight years of Bush rule.
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