Senator Clinton has often touted now that she is the candidate who can win in November, that she, not Senator Obama, will be the one to make it a Democrat in the White House, because she is the Democratic candidate who can attract the working, middle-class, white American vote.

It has been the mostly unstated, and sometimes direct, argument from the Clinton campaign that Senator Obama will be unable to carry these same voters in the general election come November.

The New York Times ran an article today that disagrees.

Ruy Teixeira, a Democratic analyst of voting trends, wrote the book on the core issue in the endgame of the party’s nomination fight. Its title is “America’s Forgotten Majority: Why the White Working Class Still Matters.”

One might conclude that Mr. Teixeira is troubled by Senator Barack Obama’s performance in recent primaries against Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton among the voters known by nicknames like Joe Sixpack or Nascar Dad or Waitress Mom.

Actually, he is not.

Interesting, most of the media I’ve seen or heard in the past three months has told me the woes the Obama campaign would face in the fall if it couldn’t prove now that it had the support of the working class.

Apparently Teixeira doesn’t agree.

But Mr. Teixeira, who is not backing either candidate, does not buy that argument. He dismisses intraparty contests as “pretty poor evidence” of whether Mr. Obama, as the Democratic nominee, could attract the blue-collar support he would need against Senator John McCain, the presumed Republican nominee.

No Majority Needed

And how much blue-collar support would Mr. Obama need? Not a majority, said Mr. Teixeira. Though blue-collar Democrats once represented a centerpiece of the New Deal coalition, they have shrunk as a proportion of the information age-economy and as a proportion of the Democratic base.

Head over to The New York Times and read the rest of this interesting piece.