This is, essentially, the advice offered to Barack Obama by Richard Whitmire in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer. In a typical Pennsylvania state college, Whitmire argues, boys of all races but--more recently, especially white working class boys--do not fare well. His advice to Obama is to acknowledge and demonstrate empathy for this problem without speculating too much about the causes of it (as Whitmire also does not do in this article). This would be a problem for Hillary, he argues, because the facts here speak against the party line of her feminist-leaning backers. The facts show that girls are thriving in school and graduating college in significantly higher numbers than boys.

We’ve talked about this issue on NLT before: here, here, and here. I think there may be even more posts about this topic, but I didn’t want to spend the whole morning combing the archives.

I don’t think Whitmire’s advice is going to do much to actually help Obama win Pennsylvania, but it’s not bad advice. It’s advice I have a lot more interest in seeing Republican candidates take, however, than Barack Obama. I think Whitmire is right to speculate that such talk will resonate in states like Pennsylvania and Ohio.