Barack Obama may be too professorial to connect with working-class voters, says an article in yesterday’s Chicago Tribune.

The article made a distinction between “beer-track voters,” people from the working class who tend to care a lot about pocketbook issues, and “wine-track voters,” people with higher incomes and more education who tend to care a lot about global matters.

While those classifications seem as if they could get a bit fuzzy (how should one categorize, say, a high roller who drinks microbrews or a penny pincher with an affection for boxed wine?), the article’s main argument is that Mr. Obama, a Democratic senator from Illinois, just may be too erudite to win the votes he needs.

“Wine-track voters can provide money, votes, and other important resources for a campaign, but it is the beer-track voters who have proved critical for winning the Democratic nomination,” the article says. “Intellectual liberals with outsider messages who fail to connect with this demographic group have often failed.”

Mr. Obama, who was the first black president of the Harvard Law Review and has lectured on constitutional law at the University of Chicago, seems to have become the presidential-wannabe darling of academe. College employees gave him more money than they donated to any other presidential contender in the first half of this year.