Brian Beutler points to one problem with David Brooks’ column on Obama versus Clinton as consumer items. Brooks writes:

Why do you bother me with simple problems? Listen, the essential competition in many consumer sectors is between commodity providers and experience providers, the companies that just deliver product and the companies that deliver a sensation, too. There’s Safeway, and then there is Whole Foods. There’s the PC, and then there’s the Mac. There are Holiday Inns, and there are W Hotels. There’s Walgreens, and there’s The Body Shop.

Hillary Clinton is a classic commodity provider. She caters to the less-educated, less-pretentious consumer.

As Brian says, this would just imply straightforwardly that Obama will lose. And, indeed, that was the point of the original Ron Brownstein “wine track” / “beer track” analysis. But at the moment, more people have voted for Obama and Obama has more pledged delegates. Meanwhile, in the real world relatively few people use Macs and shop at Whole Foods. So Obama’s appeal is a good deal wider than this, extending to, for example, working class African-Americans, people in sparsely populated plains states, and younger people from all kinds of backgrounds. But there is an important class dynamic to the Democratic race, and Brooks does a good job of spelling out the broader diverge than the split over which candidate to pick reflects:

The consumer marketplace has been bifurcating for years! It’s happening because the educated and uneducated lead different sorts of lives. Educated people are not only growing richer than less-educated people, but their lifestyles are diverging as well. A generation ago, educated families and less-educated families looked the same, but now high school graduates divorce at twice the rate of college graduates. High school grads are much more likely to have kids out of wedlock. High school grads are much more likely to be obese. They’re much more likely to smoke and to die younger.

Their attitudes are different. High school grads are much less optimistic than college grads. They express less social trust. They feel less safe in public. They report having fewer friends and lower aspirations. The less educated speak the dialect of struggle; the more educated, the dialect of self-fulfillment.

It’s definitely true that this struggle-versus-fulfillment dichotomy plays out in the difference between the candidates’ rhetoric. But what’s fascinating given their rather different bases of support is that this really doesn’t wind up leading to any major policy disagreements. Given the different educational status of their electoral bases, you might expect Clinton and Obama to have major policy differences over climate change, trade, and immigration but in fact their differences on these topics are small and oftentimes seem trumped up. You see something similar on the GOP side where Mike Huckabee often talks as if his policy agenda is more favorable to the interests of his more downscale constituency, but there’s actually very little evidence that it is. And yet, as Brooks points out the divergence in living conditions between college graduates and people who don’t go to college is very much a real thing with concrete, tactile effects in the real world. One way or another, the political system ought to be responding to that divergence and not just reflecting it.

The Washington Post reports:

President Bush drew great applause during his State of the Union address last month when he called on Congress to allow U.S. troops to transfer their unused education benefits to family members. “Our military families serve our nation, they inspire our nation, and tonight our nation honors them,” he said.

A week later, however, when Bush submitted his $3.1 trillion federal budget to Congress, he included no funding for such an initiative, which government analysts calculate could cost $1 billion to $2 billion annually.

Steve Benen and Nicole Belle have more.

UPDATE: More false promises from Bush’s State of the Union here and here.

Vice President Cheney signed on to a brief filed by a majority of Congress yesterday that urged the Supreme Court to declare Washington D.C.’s handgun ban is unconstitutional, “breaking with his own administration’s official position.” The administration has called for the Supreme Court to return the case to lower courts for further review:

In order to make his dramatic break with the administration, Cheney invoked his rarely used status as part of Congress, joining the brief as “President of the United States Senate, Richard B. Cheney.” It is a position he has used at times to make the point that he is sometimes part of the legislative branch and sometimes part of the executive.

“Lawyers with long experience at the court could not recall another case in which a vice president took a position different from that of his own administration.” To my knowledge, I don’t recollect it ever happening before,” said Richard Lazarus, co-director of the Supreme Court Institute at Georgetown Law Center.

Last week, Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite (R-FL) issued a press release attacking the proposed economic stimulus bill in the House. She complained that it would send “hundreds of millions of dollars” to “foreign citizens,” including “residents of Puerto Rico and territories like Guam.” Residents of Guam were declared American citizens in 1900 while Puerto Ricans were granted citizenship in 1917.

Brown-Waite’s spokesman, Charlie Keller, “acknowledged the false characterization” late last week, saying that the congresswoman should have used the word “territorial” instead:

Brown-Waite spokesman Charlie Keller said Thursday the congresswoman knows that they are U.S. citizens, and acknowledged the false characterization.

“The wording foreign was really a way to designate” those who don’t pay federal income taxes, Keller said in an interview. “Territorial would have been a better word.”

Brown-Waite’s comments infuriated the Puerto Rican and Guamanian communities, resulting in the Puerto Rican House of Representatives and lawmakers from Guam publicly calling for a apology from the congresswoman. But she is refusing, calling the “case closed” because she “already issued a clarification.”

In her response to the criticism, however, Brown-Waite “fueled the controversy” by getting more facts wrong about Puerto Rico and the stimulus plan:

In her rebuttal, Brown-Waite fueled the controversy by incorrectly stating that it would be the Puerto Rican government — not its constituents — that would get the $1 billion stimulus package.

However, the stimulus package approved by Congress calls on the Puerto Rico Treasury Department to design a disbursement plan for the island residents, said Eduardo Bhatia, who runs the Washington office of Puerto Rico’s governor, Anibal Acevedo-Vila.

Angered that Florida Democrats have joined the calls for her to apologize, Brown-Waite is now attacking her critics, accusing them of “race baiting politics.”