According to liberal foot-soldier Doyle McManus in the LA Times, the Democrats are going to do a special reach-out to white working-class men in 2016. It's easy to see why:

Democrats were once the party of the white working man -- but that was a long time ago.

In the 2012 presidential election, Barack Obama won only one-third of the votes of white working-class men, a modern-day low. Mitt Romney, who didn't seem much like a blue-collar guy, swept the votes of those working stiffs by a huge margin.

In the 2014 congressional election, Democratic candidates did even worse[.]

So McManus reports that Dems are gonna romance the white working class with a bit of Elizabeth Warren populism and CEO-bashing, and “a more serious commitment to both campaign reform and a leaner, more efficient federal government.”

But former Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA) thinks the Dems are missing the point. Says he:

I think that they have kind of unwittingly used this group, white working males, as a whipping post for a lot of their policies. And then when they react, they say they're being racist.

Webb reminds me that this all started with Archie Bunker, hero of Norman Lear's 1970s sitcom All in the Family. When I was dining with a bunch of liberals a few nights ago, I learned that “racist” still meant white working-class Archie Bunker.

It's curious, isn't it, that racist for liberals doesn't necessarily mean Bull Connor and his fire-hoses or Lester Maddox and his axe. No, let's all rag on Archie Bunker, the poor working-class schmuck working on a loading dock in Queens.

What did Archie Bunker do to deserve his spot in the liberal chamber of horrors?

More to the point, why did liberals decide in the years after the civil-rights revolution that a working-class white had to symbolize centuries of white racism and guilt? I thought that the working class was created when a “mass of free proletarians was hurled on the labour market by the breaking-up of the bands of feudal retainers, who, as Sir James Steuart well says, 'everywhere uselessly filled house and castle.'”  How could these victims be racists?

The demonization of the white working-class turned out to be necessary, because the quota politics of the 1970s meant that white ethnics were going to get shafted in favor of politically favored women and minorities. So the white working-class males had to be guilty of something. Liberals wouldn't, couldn't unjustly victimize genuine innocents; it just wasn't in their DNA. So the white working class had to be labeled racists and sexists, and in good time, homophobes as well. Anyway, the working-class whites showed their true colors when they resisted forced busing in South Boston in 1974-76

But there's another, darker, reason why it was so easy for liberals to demonize the white working class for the sins of other peoples' fathers. The white working class had just spent fifty years as the little darlings of the liberals. They didn't have their own leaders; the liberals had done all the leading for them. So when liberals turned on them the white working class was defenseless and leaderless.

Notice the difference in the last year with the Gamergate guys and the Sad Puppies SF guys. They could push back against the SJWs because they had their own self-starting leadership. Here's more pushback. This week there's a flap in London about posters on the London Underground for Protein World, a protein supplement outfit, featuring bikini-clad models asking “Are You Beach Body Ready?” The SJWs staged a Twitter storm but the Protein World guys are fighting back and loving the free publicity.

Meanwhile liberals are disgusted by the GOP candidates all making like they have grease in their fingernails. Scott Walker just loves Kohl's, sneers Paul Waldman, and Rick Perry grew up in a house without running water.

“In the abstract,” writes Waldman, it seems obvious that “someone who had gone through” middle-class struggles “would advocate policies that would be the most help to those ordinary people. But there's no evidence that's actually what happens.”

If that's true then why did the Obamis run those Joe Soptic ads, and why has everyone made such a big deal that Obama beat Romney 80-20 on “cares about people like me?”

I spent the weekend in Santa Rosa, CA, 50 miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge, and it was noticeable how white working-class it was. But what did I expect? The white working class can't afford to live in San Francisco or Marin County or Silicon Valley, and they wouldn't dare live in Oakland.

I wonder how far they have to commute to their jobs. And I wonder if Hillary Clinton cares about that.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also see his American Manifesto and get his Road to the Middle Class.