Content area
Full Text
America's Forgotten Majority. Why the White Working Class Still Matters, by Ruy Teixeira and Joel Rogers. New York: Basic Books, 2000. 215 pp. $27.00 cloth. ISBN: 0-465-083986. $16.00 paper. ISBN: 0-465-08399-4.
In the 1998 election season, a flurry of media interest highlighted a political swing group dubbed "waitress moms." In contrast to the prosperous soccer moms in their Volvos who had grabbed the headlines two years earlier, these were working-class women, mostly white, with little or no college education, deeply concerned about issues like education, healthcare, and social security. The "waitress mom" term never quite caught on, and is not even mentioned in Teixeira and Rogers' book, but the authors essentially extend the concept to include men with comparable demographic characteristics and similar social concerns in this compelling analysis of contemporary U.S. electoral politics. They point out that about 55 percent of U.S. voters are white workers without college degrees, employed in low-status jobs. Many of them, especially the men, are among the losers of the "new economy," having suffered sharp declines in real incomes over the past generation. The central thesis of this concise, readable, yet data-rich book is that the recent media focus on soccer moms and "wired workers" has led political commentators and strategists to neglect this critical bloc...
