Working-class voters want to vote for Obama, but don't feel they know him yet. They want to know that he knows them.

E.J. Dionne, Jr. writes in The Washington Post:

Rep. Mike Doyle, who represents Pittsburgh and some of its suburbs, argued that many of his constituents, particularly working-class voters and union loyalists, want to vote for Obama, but don't feel they know him yet. Their discomfort, he insists, is not about Obama's race -- "These are good people," Doyle said of the voters who keep sending him to Congress -- but a more general sense that Obama represents something very new.

Obama's task, says Doyle, is to raise his constituents' comfort level. He won't do this, he adds, with big rallies (yes, McCain's ads have had some success in discrediting the rally as a political art form) but with relentless smaller-scale campaigning in neighborhoods and union halls.

Over in the Philadelphia suburbs, Rep. Joe Sestak agrees that Obama needs to engage in more down-to-earth campaigning -- "a diner in the morning, a hoagie in the afternoon, a bar at night." But Sestak's advice is directed toward a slightly different end. "It's not so much about whether they know him," he says of his constituents and Obama. "They want to know that he knows them."

In other words, empathy, the gift that Bill Clinton kept on giving, is now an Obama imperative. And some of the Democrats' policy mavens see a link between empathy as a personal attribute and the way a candidate discusses policy -- again, something Clinton understood.

What Obama still lacks, they say, is a compelling narrative about how Americans who now feel economically insecure will find their way toward greater confidence. And he needs a few signature policies to drive home to voters so they can remember them, as Clinton did with health care and job training. McCain not knowing how many houses he owns should help Obama in the empathy battle.