Plyer believes the priority for the entire region lies in restoring the higher-paid blue-collar and middle-class jobs that for decades have disappeared from the city.

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While Obama has been solidifying his base of younger, college-educated, higher-paid voters, he has steadily been chipping away Clinton's base of blue-collar, older, working-class voters.

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Gold has denuded the play of any semblance of Englishness and class, an issue that should be central to the argument between the bullying, blue-collar Jimmy Porter (Matthew Rhys) and his browbeaten middle-class wife, Alison (Sarah Goldberg).

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MySpace users tend to be "in middle-class, blue-collar neighborhoods, " said Mike Mancini, vice president of data product management for Nielsen, which used an online panel of more than 200, 000 social media users in the United States in August.

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But unlike members of the Kennedy clan, Capuano who is of Irish-Italian lineage brings to the House a pragmatic, blue-collar progressivism, a byproduct of his long mayoral tenure in working-class Somerville.

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The other thing that unions did, particularly in the manufacturing sector, was it gave a base for blue-collar workers to get a middle-class wage, which meant that essentially the guys working at the Ford plant could afford to buy a Ford.

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Indolent blue-collar imbecile Homer may not be a model citizen or a working-class hero, but you have to look next door, at his squarely middle-class, born-again neighbor Ned Flanders to find where the slap invariably sticks.

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Those mid-wage jobs were often a ticket to the middle class for someone without a college degree, blue and pink collar alike.

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