Obama Visits Ireland Hoping to Win Blue-Collar Votes in PA, OH

|| President Obama needs to reconnect with a traditional Democratic constituency. ||

Barry O’Bama.

Looking to win votes in blue-collar Ohio and Pennsylvania,

Barack Obama is reaching out to his distant Irish roots.

The President will visit relatives in Ireland on Monday.

When President Barack Obama slips into an Irish pub Monday to hoist a Guinness, he’ll be thousands of miles away from his real audience: the white ethnic voters back in America who abandoned Democrats in November.

Obama’s one-hour jaunt to meet distant Irish relatives in the tiny town of Moneygall could pay big political dividends for a president who only recently muffled lingering questions about his birthplace.

“When you are a president who has been attacked subtly to not-so-subtly, emphasize that you have common roots with a large percentage of Americans,” said Douglas Schoen, a Democratic pollster who worked for former President Bill Clinton.  “This is a way to get in touch with what has traditionally been a core Democratic constituency by hopefully emphasizing that he shares a common heritage with a group that has a metaphorical link, at the very least, with the roots of the party.”

The only thing worse than this sort of blatant pandering,

Is the disheartening fact that some voters will actually fall for it.