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Bar, around the corner from my old house. That, too, was a sort of a
reality check after spending a few days dwelling with Obama's devout
enthusiasts. Eight men sat around the bar, and not one of them
supported Obama.

The cascade down the job ladder =97 with one job not as good as the last
=97 is a particularly working-class syndrome. It is the sort of slide
that makes a person less likely to take a chance and more prone to
cling to the familiar. Marty Clark, whom I knew in high school, worked
at the mill and then as a longshoreman and now has a nonunion job
driving a truck. "I don't know Obama that well," he said as he sat at
the bar at midafternoon on St. Patrick's Day. "It seems to me like
he's got no experience. She'd be the way I'd go."

Steve Woods sat drinking a Coors Light and talking with his buddies. A
Philadelphia Phillies spring-training game was on TV, and he glanced
up at it every time the audio picked up the crack of the bat. I asked
him if the presidential campaign interested him. "Absolutely," he
said. Rapid fire, he told me the issues he cared about: "No. 1, gas
prices. It's killing everybody. No. 2, immigrants. They should go back
to Mexico. Three, guns. Everybody should have the right to bear arms.
In fact, everyone should have a gun in this day and age."

I wondered if he was a Republican. "Are you kidding?" he said. "I'm a
Democrat all the way. I hate Republicans."

Woods, who is 32, said that he had been trained at the local technical
high school as a land surveyor but had been working only sporadically.
He had been picking up "side jobs," a term I heard over and over again
in Levittown. It refers to temporary labor: carpentry, landscaping,
junk hauling.

Woods was for Hillary Clinton, and if Obama was the Democratic
nominee, he said he would vote for the Republican, John McCain, in
November. "Hillary all the way," he said. "We need Hillary. She knows
the game. Obama has no experience. He talks about change, change,
change. Everybody says he's new; he's refreshing; he's charismatic. I
don't think he's got a clue."

Obama's lofty rhetoric did not move these men, but neither did it go
over their heads, exactly. They heard it, and it seemed to have the
opposite of its intended effect. It bothered them. All insisted that
his race had nothing to do with their coolness to him. "The guy does a
lot of talking, but I haven't heard him say anything great yet," said
Dennis Haines, a 38-year-old self-employed electrical contractor and a
Democrat who thought he would vote for Clinton in the primary but
probably for McCain in November.

The real language of Levittown is arithmetic. The hourly wage. The
mortgage payment. How to make ends meet or, better yet, get ahead.
Another of the men in the bar, Brian Foley, was a Teamsters truck
driver. He explained to me the difficult math for a driver who owns
his own rig: "Diesel fuel is up to $4.19 a gallon. Let's say you're
fully loaded at 80,000 pounds. You get four miles a gallon, five max.
You tell me how that works?"

Full: <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/magazine/06race-t.html?ref=3Dmagaz=
ine>