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Last Updated: Oct 7, 2008 - 8:38:50 AM |
You can not make the assumption that because people are suffering
economically, a union official said, that they ll vote Democratic.
Barbie Snodgrass had agreed to meet me at a Kentucky Fried Chicken
outlet, on a strip of fast-food restaurants and auto shops west of
downtown Columbus, Ohio, but she didn’t have much time to talk. Her
shift as a receptionist at a medical clinic, which got her out of the
house at six in the morning, had just ended, at three; the drive home,
to a housing development in a working-class suburb south of the city,
took half an hour. She then had a little more than an hour to eat,
change clothes, let the dog out, check up on her sister’s two teen-age
daughters—Sierra and Ashley, who were under her care—and then drive
back into Columbus, where she worked the evening shift cleaning the
studios of a local television station, and where her day ended, at ten.
She also worked some weekends. She was forty-two, single, overweight,
and suffering from stomach pains.
Snodgrass sat down at my table and refused the offer of a soft drink.
She was wearing a drab ensemble of gray cotton sweatpants and a
loose-fitting pale-yellow knit top, and her brown hair fell in bangs
just above her eyes. I asked for her thoughts about the Presidential
candidates, and she said, “Someone who makes two hundred or three
hundred thousand a year, who eats a regular meal, who doesn’t have to
struggle, who doesn’t worry if the lights are going to be turned out—if
he doesn’t walk in your shoes, he can’t understand.”
In Snodgrass’s shoes, it hardly made sense to draw a paycheck. “You’re
working for what?” she asked. She hadn’t finished college, and the two
jobs that kept her “constantly moving” brought in a little more than
forty thousand dollars a year, but after the mortgage (a thousand a
month), car payments (three hundred and fifty), levies for supplies at
the girls’ public high school, fuel, electricity, stomach medicine, and
a hundred dollars’ worth of groceries each week (down from eight bags
to four at Kroger’s supermarket, because of inflation) there was
basically nothing left to spend. She could cut corners—go out for a
McDonald’s Dollar Meal instead of spending seven dollars on a bag of
potatoes and cooking at home. But that meant the end of any kind of
family life for her nieces.
“These days, you have to struggle,” she said. “As a kid, I used to be
able to go to the movies or to the zoo. Now you can’t take your
children to the zoo or go to the movies, because you’ve got to think
how you’re going to put food on the table.” Snodgrass’s parents had
raised four children on two modest incomes, without the ceaseless
stress that she was enduring. But the two-parent family was now
available only to the “very privileged.” She said that she had ten good
friends; eight of them were childless or, like her, unmarried with
kids. “That’s who’s middle-class now,” she said. “Two parents, two
kids? That’s over. People looked out for me. These kids nowadays don’t
have nobody to look out for them. You’re one week away from (a) losing
your job, or (b) not having a paycheck.”
Snodgrass, who has always voted Democratic, was paying close attention
to the Presidential campaign—she had taped both candidates’ Convention
speeches, and watched them when she had time—but her faith in
politicians was somewhere close to zero. She wanted a leader who would
watch out for people in the “middle class,” people like her who had no
one on their side. “I think McCain is going to be just like Bush the
next eight years,” she said. “I don’t see how it’s going to change.” To
her, Sarah Palin, a working mother close to her own age, felt more like
a token choice than like a kindred spirit. “I think McCain picked her
so women can relate to her, not because she’s the best person for the
job,” Snodgrass said. “She’s more of a show for the American family.”
Hillary Clinton had been better, but even she couldn’t fully apprehend
Barbie Snodgrass’s predicament.
She remained uninspired by Barack Obama. His Convention speech had gone
into detail about his policy proposals on matters like the economy and
health care, which seemed tailored to attract a voter like Snodgrass,
but they filled her with suspicion. His promise to rescind the Bush tax
cuts for wealthier Americans struck her as incredible: “How many people
do you know who make two hundred and fifty thousand dollars? What is
that, five per cent of the United States? That’s a joke! If he starts
at a hundred thousand, I might listen. Two hundred fifty—that’s to me
like people who hit the lottery.” In fact, only two per cent of
Americans make more than a quarter of a million dollars a year, but
that group earns twelve per cent of the national income. Nonetheless,
the circumstances of Snodgrass’s life made it impossible for her to
imagine that there could possibly be enough taxable money in Obama’s
upper-income category—which meant that he was being dishonest, and that
she would eventually be the one to pay. “He’ll keep going down, and
when it’s to people who make forty-five or fifty thousand it’s going to
hit me,” she said. “I’d have to sell my home and live in a
five-hundred-dollar-a-month apartment with gang bangers out in my yard,
and I’d be scared to death to leave my house.”
Snodgrass reacted with equal skepticism to Obama’s proposal for
expanding health care. “It scares the heck out of me,” she said. “If
the employers are going to cover more, we’re going to get less in our
raises. My raise every year is like a cost-of-living raise. How are
they going to be able to give me more money?” The margin of error in
her life was so slim, she felt, that any attempt to improve lives with
ambitious new programs could only end up harming her. Obama’s
idealistic language left Snodgrass cold. “He’s not saying to me how
he’s going to make my life better,” she said. She wanted to hear
exactly how the next President was going to remove some of the
tremendous financial weight bearing down on her—reduce gas prices, cut
the cost of medicine—not in the distant future but right away. A friend
of hers who worked three jobs refused to support Obama on the theory
that he was a Muslim, but Snodgrass said that it didn’t matter to her
what race or religion the next President was, nor did the ugly tactics
of the campaign have any effect other than to disgust her. What
mattered was “your daily life, your daily day, job, family, what you do
that keeps you from robbing the video store down the street.”
Snodgrass sat talking for much longer than she had initially offered;
by the end, her words tumbled out in a plaintive rush, as if under some
inner pressure. “You want somebody there who’s going to take care of
us,” she said. “I’m very scared about who they put in there, because
it’s either going to get a lot worse than it is or it’s going to keep
going where it is, which is bad.” She almost gasped. “Just give us a
break. There’s no reprieve. No reprieve.”
Until the mid-seventies, the white working class—the heart of the New
Deal coalition—voted largely Democratic. Since the Carter years, the
percentages have declined from sixty to forty, and this shift has
roughly coincided with the long hold of the Republican Party on the
White House. The white working class—a group that often speaks of
itself, and is spoken of, as forgotten, marginalized, even despised—is
the golden key to political power in America, and it voted
overwhelmingly for George W. Bush twice, by seventeen per cent in 2000
and twenty-three per cent in 2004. Thomas Frank’s 2004 book “What’s the
Matter with Kansas?” directed its indignation at the baffling
phenomenon of millions of Americans voting year after year against
their economic self-interest. He concluded that the Republican Party
had tricked working people with a relentless propaganda campaign based
on religion and morality, while Democrats had abandoned these voters to
their economic masters by moving to the soft center of the political
spectrum. Frank’s book remains the leading polemic about the white
reaction—the title alone has, for many liberals, become shorthand for
the conventional wisdom—but it is hobbled by the condescending argument
that tens of millions of Americans have become victims of a “carefully
cultivated derangement,” or are simply stupid.
Last year, four sociologists at the University of Arizona, led by Lane
Kenworthy, released a paper that complicates Frank’s thesis. Their
study followed the voting behavior of the forty-five per cent of white
Americans who identify themselves as working class. Mining electoral
data from the General Social Survey, they found that the decline in
white working-class support for Democrats occurred in one period—from
the mid-seventies until the early nineties, with a brief lull in the
early eighties—and has remained well below fifty per cent ever since.
But they concluded that social issues like abortion, guns, religion,
and even (outside the South) race had little to do with the shift.
Instead, according to their data, it was based on a judgment
that—during years in which industrial jobs went overseas, unions
practically vanished, and working-class incomes stagnated—the
Democratic Party was no longer much help to them. “Beginning in the
mid-to-late 1970s, there was increasing reason for working-class whites
to question whether the Democrats were still better than the
Republicans at promoting their material well-being,” the study’s
authors write. Working-class whites, their fortunes falling, began to
embrace the anti-government, low-tax rhetoric of the conservative
movement. During Clinton’s Presidency, the downward economic spiral of
these Americans was arrested, but by then their identification with the
Democrats had eroded. Having earlier moved to the right for economic
reasons, the Arizona study concluded, the working class stayed there
because of the rising prominence of social issues—Thomas Frank’s
argument. But the Democrats fundamentally lost the white working class
because these voters no longer believed the Party’s central tenet—that
government could restore a sense of economic security.
Such a change in party allegiance across a vast section of the
electorate takes decades to achieve, and to undo. But this year should
mark the beginning of a reverse migration. When will the class war ever
finally drown out the culture war, if not in 2008? Under Republican
rule in Washington, wages have stayed flat while income inequality has
increased; the numbers of uninsured have soared; unemployment recently
passed six per cent, its highest level since the early
nineteen-nineties; gas and heating-oil prices have doubled, while basic
food prices have gone up by fifty per cent; and the country’s financial
system has come closer to collapse than at any moment since 1929. More
profoundly, Republican dogma no longer offers convincing solutions, and
in some cases it doesn’t even acknowledge the problems. (Income
inequality has long been considered a nonissue in conservative
free-market circles.) The question that Ronald Reagan asked voters to
such devastating effect in 1980, when the white working class began
turning away from Democrats—“Are you better off than you were four
years ago?”—should, in theory, produce an equal and opposite effect
this year.
This is particularly true in big, aging, economically battered swing
states like Michigan, where unemployment is nearly nine per cent, and
Ohio, where residents told me that a whole generation of young people
is leaving the state to seek higher education and work elsewhere. A man
in Brown County, along the Ohio River, in the southwestern part of the
state, said that a year ago there was one foreclosure notice in the
local paper each week; now the number is six or eight, and the listings
for the week of September 12th announced fifty-three foreclosure sales
in a county with only fifteen thousand households. In the town of
Wilmington, outside Dayton, a D.H.L. facility with eight thousand
workers—a third of the area’s population—is likely to close. On
September 9th, the day I flew into Cincinnati, a woman named Marla
Bell, attending an Obama rally near Dayton, told National Public Radio,
“It almost feels like it’s a dying state.”
The next day, Governor Ted Strickland, a Democrat who remains popular
in Ohio, announced a budget shortfall that would require painful
spending cuts across the board. The state’s budget director, Pari
Sabety, told me, “There are a lot more part-time jobs, jobs without
benefits, jobs that require a broader social safety net than we
currently have. We are not creating high-value jobs at a rate that can
absorb people who are losing high-value jobs of the old economy.” The
economic crisis, she went on, is so grave that it has created room for
a renewed discussion about the role of government in people’s lives.
“Here’s the opportunity before us. What’s happening is a slow-motion
Katrina to economies like ours. I feel like we are where F.D.R. was.”
Obama has had particular trouble with the prized demographic group that
once delivered the Presidency to Roosevelt and his successors.
Anecdotally, and in polls, unusually large numbers of working-class
voters seem to remain undecided or determined to sit the election out,
as if they couldn’t bring themselves to vote Republican this year but
couldn’t fathom taking a chance on Obama. Roger Catt, a retired farmer
and warehouse worker, who lives in a small town near Eau Claire,
Wisconsin, characterized the choice this way: “McCain is more of the
same, and Obama is the end of life as we know it.”
Gloria Fauss, the longtime political director in Ohio for the Service
Employees International Union, or S.E.I.U., which backs Obama, said,
“I’m very worried. The conventional wisdom is that the economy will
trump this year. I’m not so sure. The economy may override social
issues this year and people still might not vote for Obama.” Fauss has
spent years studying the results of polls and focus groups among Ohio
voters, and she has learned that judgments about character and values
can be decisive even among those who rate jobs and health care as more
important than abortion. “You can’t make the assumption that because
people are suffering economically and the last eight years have been
downhill and things are very bleak for them—you can’t make the
assumption they’ll vote Democratic. There’s just no basis for that.”
Obama understands that he is an imperfect vehicle for an already
difficult message. In April, at the San Francisco fund-raiser where he
damaged himself with working-class whites by delivering a speech
connecting their “bitter” outlook to guns, religion, bigotry, and
xenophobia, Obama also described the situation of voters like Barbie
Snodgrass acutely. “In a lot of these communities in big industrial
states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, people have been beaten down so
long,” he said. “They feel so betrayed by government that when they
hear a pitch that is premised on not being cynical about government,
then a part of them just doesn’t buy it. And when it’s delivered
by—it’s true that when it’s delivered by a forty-six-year-old black man
named Barack Obama, then that adds another layer of skepticism.”
During the first Presidential debate, Obama spoke directly to
“middle-class” economic anxieties several times, and he later attacked
McCain for never even using the word. But Obama’s middle class has no
face, no name, no story. Even as he becomes more specific on policy,
partly in response to criticism, he still has trouble making a human
connection. Bill Clinton could always employ the drawl and roguish
charm of Bubba to let the working class know he was one of them, but
Obama’s life story is based on upward mobility, on transcending his
complex origins. There’s no readily apparent cultural identity he can
fall back on—no folksy or streetwise manner he can assume—that won’t
threaten more white voters than it attracts.
Gabe Kramer, the S.E.I.U.’s chief of staff in Columbus, told me, “You
talk to people about the issues and the issues resonate. But what you
hear people talking about on the street and on TV and radio is the
other things. Is Obama like us? Does Obama share our experience of the
world? Which is not the same thing as racism, but overlaps with it.”
Obama, Kramer added, is “very good at talking to professionals—people
who care about policy—and comes across as judicious, careful,
thoughtful. But he has a harder time talking about them in a way
working-class white Ohioans can relate to.”
Glouster, a coal-mining town with a population of fewer than two
thousand (and falling), lies hidden amid the gentle slopes and thick
woods of southeastern Ohio’s Appalachian hills. If the state is dying,
Glouster was long ago left for dead. Over the past few decades, it has
lost its Baptist church, grocery store, railroad depot, parking meters,
four car dealerships, ten of its dozen bars, and—crucially—all but one
of its deep mines. It’s become the kind of town where several
generations of white families live on welfare, and marijuana is the
local cash crop. I was given a tour by Bob Cotter, who is seventy-four,
and Pete Morris, seventy-one, both retired from the post office. We
walked in a warm drizzle along Main Street, which was nearly deserted,
with a few parked cars and no pedestrians. Half the storefronts were
shuttered, although a local citizens’ group had arranged hand-painted
furniture and traditional quilts in the show windows of some of the
vacant stores. It looked as if nothing had been built since the
fifties. In the middle of town stood a prominent three-story brick
building with the words “Sam & Ellen’s Wonder Bar—Home of the
‘Wonder Dog’ ” painted across an exposed side. Morris had once owned
the bar before selling it to his cousin, in 1971; now it was boarded
up. Farther down the street, a hotel, a restaurant, and a two-lane
bowling alley had been demolished, leaving a weed-strewn lot.
Every morning at seven, Cotter and Morris had coffee at Bonnie’s Home
Cooking, on Main Street across from the gas station. The menu was
scrawled in Magic Marker across a whiteboard, and almost nothing cost
more than five dollars. On the morning I visited, a dozen men and women
came in for their coffee and eggs. One of them, a retired union coal
miner, was identified to me as if he were a rare species of bird. Three
people, including Morris, expressed reluctant support for Obama. The
nine or ten others were roughly split between voting McCain or sitting
it out.
Dave Herbert was a stocky, talkative building contractor in an Ohio
State athletic jersey. At thirty-eight, he considerably lowered the
average age in Bonnie’s. “I’m self-employed,” he said. “I can’t afford
to be a Democrat.” Herbert was a devoted viewer of Fox News and talked
in fluent sound bites about McCain’s post-Convention “bounce” and Sarah
Palin’s “executive experience.” At one point, he had doubted that Obama
stood a chance in Glouster. “From Bob and Pete’s generation there are a
lot of racists—not out-and-out, but I thought there was so much racism
here that Obama’d never win.” Then he heard a man who freely used the “
‘n’ word” declare his support for Obama: “That blew my theory out of
the water.”
A maintenance man at the nearby high school, who declined to give his
name, said that he had been undecided until McCain selected Palin to be
his running mate, which swung his support to Obama.
“So you’re a sexist more than a racist,” Herbert joked.
“I just think the guy Obama picked would do better if he got
assassinated than McCain’s if he died of frickin’ old age in office,”
the maintenance man said.
Four women of retirement age were sitting at the next table. All of
them spoke warmly of Palin. “She’d fit right in with us,” Greta Jennice
said. “We should invite her over.” None had a good word to say about
Obama. “I think he’s a radical,” a white-haired woman who wouldn’t give
her name said. “The church he went to, the people he associated with.
You don’t see the media digging into that.”
“I don’t know anyone who’s for Obama,” said Jennice, a Democrat who
supported Hillary Clinton and who won’t vote in November.
“If they are, they don’t say it, because it would be unpopular,” an
elderly former teacher named Marcella said. That had not been true of
Bill Clinton, Al Gore, or John Kerry, she added.
“I think the party-line Democrats are having a hard time with Obama,”
Bobbie Dunham, a retired fourth-grade teacher, told me. When I asked if
Obama’s health-care plan wouldn’t be a good thing for people in
Glouster, she said, “I’ll believe it when I see it. If it’s actually
happening, I’d say that’s good.” But she and the others had far more
complaints about locals freeloading off public assistance than about
the health-insurance industry and corporations. Dunham declared her
intention to write in a vote for either Snoopy or T. Boone Pickens.
“I’m not going to vote for a Republican—they’ve had their chance for
the last eight years and they’ve screwed it up,” she said. “But I
really just don’t trust Obama. He only says half-truths. He calls
himself a Christian, but he only became one to run for office. He calls
himself a black, but he’s two-thirds Arab.”
I asked where she had learned that.
“On the Internet.”
In 2002, John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira published “The Emerging
Democratic Majority,” a prophecy of Democratic political success based
on the growing electoral clout of professionals, minorities, young
people, and women. Although they emphasized that the Democrats couldn’t
ignore the white working class, they were essentially sketching a new
politics that could win without it.
Yet during the long Democratic primary fight it was precisely the white
working class that kept denying Obama a lock on the nomination. The
problem first became manifest in New Hampshire, a state that much of
the media declared in advance to be the end of the road for Clinton.
Two days after her victory, Andrew Kohut, of the Pew Research Center,
published an Op-Ed in the Times about the failure of polls to predict
the outcome. He had a theory: undetected racism among working-class
whites. Clinton, he noted, beat Obama among whites with family incomes
under fifty thousand dollars and also among those who hadn’t attended
college. “Poorer, less well-educated white people refuse surveys more
often than affluent, better-educated whites,” Kohut wrote. “Polls
generally adjust their samples for this tendency. But here’s the
problem: these whites who do not respond to surveys tend to have more
unfavorable views of blacks than respondents who do the interviews.”
This statistical glitch is different from the Bradley Effect, named for
the black mayor of Los Angeles, Tom Bradley, who lost the California
governorship in 1982 despite polls that had showed him in the lead,
apparently because a small percentage of respondents would rather lie
to a pollster than admit to opposing a candidate on the ground of his
race. Still, the Bradley Effect and the Kohut Lacuna produce the same
conclusion: a black candidate is likely to fare worse than preëlection
polls would suggest.
By the spring, after Ohio, Texas, and Pennsylvania, polls showed Obama
getting trounced two-to-one or more among less-educated, lower-income
whites. The numbers were so stark that they inspired Clinton—whom
conservative pundits had long condemned as a symbol of everything
hateful to red-state America—to make herself over into a
shot-and-a-beer gal. Even when Obama’s eventual victory seemed certain,
he was crushed by forty-one and thirty-five percentage points in West
Virginia and Kentucky—unheard-of margins for the party front-runner
late in the primaries. By then, his campaign had begun to change its
tactics, making the candidate’s oratory less lofty and putting him
among smaller groups, in bowling alleys and veterans’ halls.
Yet the resistance remained. In April, I travelled to Inez, a town in
eastern Kentucky, where McCain was scheduled to speak at the county
courthouse. Afterward, I noticed a group of Clinton supporters holding
signs across the tiny town’s main road, next to the Straight Talk
Express. I approached a man wearing a button that said “Hillary: Smart
Choice.” He was a retired state employee named J. K. Patrick.
“East of Lexington, she’ll carry seventy per cent of the primary vote,”
Patrick said. “She could win the general election in Kentucky. Obama
couldn’t win.” Why not? “Race. I’ve talked to people—a woman who helped
run county elections last year. She said she wouldn’t vote for a black
man.” He added, “There’s a lot of white people that just wouldn’t vote
for a colored person. Especially older people.” Indeed, no one among
the two dozen people I talked to in Inez would even consider voting for
Obama. His name often evoked a sharp racial hostility that was
expressed without hesitation or apology.
These were not views that many Americans had been willing to reveal to
reporters. For obvious reasons, neither Obama nor McCain wants to
address the conjunction of race and class in this election. The
national press corps—which more and more confines its political
coverage to politicians, campaign officials, strategists, and
itself—has often discussed the role of race in the campaign, but the
conversation is inevitably softened by euphemism. Americans accustomed
to discussing race politely, or not at all, might follow the campaign
without a real sense of the potency of skin color.
Patrick himself feared that Obama’s race would threaten his own
security and well-being. He said that it would be only natural for a
black President to avenge the historical wrongs that his people had
suffered at the hands of whites. “I really don’t want an
African-American as President,” he said. “I think he would put too many
minorities in positions over the white race. That’s my opinion.”
Trade unionists in the Obama campaign know better than anyone that
their candidate is not an easy sell with the working class, including
some of their own members. This summer, the Wisconsin A.F.L.-C.I.O.
sent out a brochure offering “Straight Answers to Real Questions . . .
About Barack Obama”: Is he a Christian? Was he sworn in on the Bible?
Was he born in America? Does he place his hand over his heart when he
says the pledge? The S.E.I.U., whose membership includes prison
workers, put out a flyer in Ohio that insisted, “Barack Obama Won’t
Take Away Your Gun . . . but John McCain Will Take Away Your Union.”
Lisa Hetrick, a registered nurse and the secretary-treasurer at the
S.E.I.U.’s regional headquarters in Columbus, fumed that her son was
supporting McCain because of national security, and that her husband
was wobbling because of firearms. Like everyone else at the office,
Hetrick had a story about a racist colleague, relative, or friend. “Oh
God, it’s terrible,” she said. “I don’t know what we’re going to do!
They’re rednecks.” She mentioned a prison worker and union member down
in Chillicothe who, four years ago, had berated her for not enlisting
him and his colleagues to volunteer for Kerry; when she made sure to
call him this time, he told her that he wouldn’t work for Obama, and
she understood the reason to be race.
Hetrick put me in touch with Tom Guyer, Jr., a parole officer in
Lorain, on Lake Erie. A Democrat with “Republican views” about some
issues and a fondness for Bill O’Reilly, Guyer confessed to being
undecided. He had no enthusiasm for McCain or Palin, but, he said, “The
more I hear about Obama and some of his—I don’t know if character is
the right way to describe it, but maybe he’s not ready to lead.” This
idea had been the theme of McCain’s August campaign ads. Guyer brought
up something that he had just heard on the radio. Three days earlier,
on September 7th, in an interview with George Stephanopoulos on the ABC
program “This Week,” Obama had said, “You’re absolutely right that John
McCain has not talked about my Muslim faith.” From the context, it was
clear that Obama was simply compressing “the idea that my faith is
Muslim” into fewer words, but for anyone already harboring doubts the
phrase was suspect, and Guyer wondered why Obama would say such a thing.
One evening, in the basement of S.E.I.U. headquarters, I met a group of
members—nursing-home workers, janitors, hospital staff—who had just
returned from canvassing unionists door to door in mixed-race Columbus
neighborhoods. Their score had been encouraging: out of a hundred and
six contacts that day, sixty-nine had been solidly for Obama and only
seven solidly against. They told me that race hardly ever came up, but
other sensitive matters that might stand in for race sometimes did.
Jacynth Stewart, a Caribbean-born woman who had come from New York,
where she is a food-service worker at Beth Israel Medical Center, to
help the Ohio campaign, encountered one woman who believed that Obama
was Muslim. “Didn’t you see ‘Obama Revealed’ on CNN Sunday night?”
Stewart asked, and then she explained Obama’s life story—the Kenyan
father he hardly knew, the white mother from Kansas. After ten minutes,
the woman at the door declared that she would vote for Obama. Another
woman had read in a mass e-mail that Obama wouldn’t allow the American
flag to be displayed on the tail of Air Force One. She was harder to
win over.
In the static-filled bedlam of viral e-mails, cable-news square-offs,
mangled media clips, fake-news Web sites, political ads, and malicious
rumors, with a new lie popping up somewhere every hour, the Obama
campaign faces the nearly impossible task of putting out stories before
they spread across a political landscape that is often dry tinder for
them. In Eau Claire, Tom Giffey, the editorial-page editor at the
Leader-Telegram, described the profusion of cut-and-paste e-mails that
his page has received during the campaign. “In the old days, there were
Republican or Democratic newspapers, but there was more of a level
playing field and both sides had to argue from the same facts,” Giffey
said. “Now we’re in an age when you can simply reinforce your own
viewpoints. And it’s hard to have a discussion of the facts when you’re
dealing with two separate sets of facts—two sets of talking points that
came down from on high. With the Internet, all of us were going to be
content producers, but it’s become an echo chamber.”
As Dave Herbert, the building contractor at Bonnie’s Home Cooking, put
it, “Partisanship has crept into every crease in this country.” In
2008, a customer at a breakfast spot in Appalachia, or a worker at a
union office in Columbus, is able to repeat the latest dubious campaign
sound bites within days, if not hours. Everyone hates the media, and
everyone sounds like a talking head.
One night in Glouster, sixteen people gathered in the modest living
room of an elderly woman named Helen Walker, whom everyone called Babe.
Walker had invited her friends and neighbors over to meet the Obama
organizer in the area—a young woman from Arizona named Kristin Gwinn.
It was clear that not all of the guests were wholeheartedly committed
to the cause. Pete Morris was there because Bob Cotter had asked him to
come, and Bob Cotter was there because Babe Walker had asked him to
explain to the organizer why he wouldn’t vote in November.
“I think the Democratic Party has kind of walked away from me,” Cotter
said. The issue that had alienated him from his party was its refusal
to take a strong stand against illegal immigration. “It is not just
Obama,” he went on. “The élite of the Democratic Party, the Kennedys,
the Clintons, they’re pushing this thing.” Cotter had contacted
everyone from Howard Dean, the Democratic Party chairman, to the Athens
County Democratic Party about the cost of illegal immigration to the
country, without satisfaction: “Hell, nobody cares.”
Gwinn, the organizer, responded earnestly, “The fact that there are two
hundred staffers like me out here having this conversation with you
means somebody cares. And I’ll have this conversation with you every
day, if you want.”
Cotter said that abstaining in November still felt like his most potent
option. “How are we going to get them to pay attention to us, if we
don’t send a message?” he asked.
Travis Post, a gangly twenty-two-year-old, mentioned that he had worked
with immigrants on a landscaping crew. “These are human beings you’re
talking about,” he said. “They come here and work hard seeking a better
life just like our ancestors did. For us just to send them back?
That’ll never work.”
“There are a lot of other things affecting your friends and neighbors
here in Glouster,” the organizer told Cotter. “If people who typically
vote Democratic don’t vote at all, we’re handing this election to John
McCain.”
“I sent three letters to Howard Dean,” Cotter said. They had gone
unanswered. “The Party wants my money and my vote. After that, they
don’t care. I think the Democrats are walking away from us people
here.” Illegal immigrants were rare in southeast Ohio, a sort of
phantom menace; Cotter’s awareness of the issue had mainly come through
the media. Cotter, a mild, self-deprecating man, said with a chuckle,
“I’m going to vote for Lou Dobbs, that’s who I’m going to vote for.
Anyway, that’s my view. Maybe I’m just a turd in the punch bowl
tonight.”
Later, Cotter told me that he was a lifelong Democrat. “I do have
liberal views,” he said. “I think one of these days health care is
going to have to be covered by the government. None of us want to see
somebody lying out on the curb dying. Hillary was ahead of her time.”
He had grown up on stories of how the New Deal had saved his family,
who were miners. “I can remember the hard times, I can remember the
things the Democrats have done for the working people. I can remember
when rent was ten dollars a month and my parents lay awake in bed
wondering how we were going to pay for it. Where do people like me go?
I don’t think anybody cares what we think. I just wish our party would
pay more attention to people down here in the grass roots.”
As the guests drank sodas and ate pigs in a blanket in Babe Walker’s
living room, Gwinn asked for volunteers to make phone calls and go door
to door. There were not many takers. “Local validators are very
important,” she said, with urgency. “A lot of people are secretly for
Barack, but they’re afraid to go public. You know everyone in this
town. So if there’s anybody out there with misinformation, you have to
find them and say, ‘It’s not true. He’s not a Muslim.’ ” Seeing an
Obama sign in a neighbor’s yard could make a huge difference in a place
like Glouster, she said.
As I drove around southern Ohio, I saw only half a dozen Obama yard
signs. Some people told me that the campaign’s state headquarters had
been slow to get them out to the far-flung counties; it was as if they
were afraid that the signs would be torn down or defaced.
Babe Walker agreed to make phone calls, as long as she didn’t have to
say “ratty things” about McCain.
“Barack’s father was from where? Kenya?” a seventy-one-year-old woman
named Karla Cominsky suddenly asked. “Would that be any part of the
world that was part of slavery?”
Gwinn explained that Obama had grown up mainly in Hawaii.
“My great-great-grandfather and grandmother came here from Morgan
County,” Cominsky continued. “And guess who they brought with them? A
little slave girl named Dinah. She was buried in the family plot. They
felt she was one of the family.”
A campaign intern from Ohio University, in the nearby town of Athens,
explained, “Most slaves came from western Africa, where the ships could
just take them and go. Kenya’s from the eastern part.”
There was an awkward silence: the point of the woman’s story had not
been immediately clear. Afterward, it occurred to me that this was how
people in towns like Glouster were accustoming themselves to the
thought of a black President.
With the media coverage a cacophonous standoff, and organizations like
unions vanishing year by year, the Democratic skeptics in Ohio needed
someone they knew and trusted to vouch for Obama. At S.E.I.U.
headquarters, I spoke with Donna Steele, a home health aide working on
the Obama campaign, about how she would make the case to Barbie
Snodgrass. She said, “I’ve been where she is. I know exactly what it’s
like.” A few years ago, Steele had been working in the homes of two
separate clients, sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, sometimes
past midnight. “I didn’t know what day it was. I was numb. I fell
asleep at traffic lights on my way home—woke up when someone honked.”
Steele, who had soft, startled pale-blue eyes and a frizzy
reddish-blond perm, described the “weird spiral” into which she
descended: “You’re afraid of change, you just keep doing what you’ve
been doing. You’re afraid if you do anything different, things will get
worse. You get so negative that you don’t want anything to change—you
think everything would be worse than this. You don’t want anything to
rock the boat. One false move and you’re down.” Eventually, she said,
this mentality would make Snodgrass physically sick.
Steele went on, “I’d tell her she doesn’t have to be alone. There’s
other people who’ve been down the same road. She just needs to look at
the issues and it’s real simple. ‘What do you got to lose? What are you
doing now? Voting for Obama and pulling that lever isn’t going to make
you any less tired than you was before.’ ” With McCain, health benefits
would be taxed and oil prices would go up, whereas with Obama, “I think
gas prices are going to miraculously go down because of his policies.”
Steele used almost mystical terms to describe the process by which
Obama could transform Snodgrass’s life. Her language was not so
different from that of conservative Christians, except that Steele’s
community of believers was organized around class, not religion. “If
she doesn’t have some infrastructure”—like a union—“that can touch her,
she doesn’t have a chance,” Steele said. “She’s afraid of change, but
if she doesn’t demand change she’s not going to make it. When something
good happens, faith has a positive effect, the aura of it. It’s called
hope, faith, and it’s change, and you get enough people together and
it’s massive change.”
One day in Athens, I met Latisha Price. She was a big-boned blonde of
thirty-seven, with a raw complexion, an Appalachian twang, and a
forthright, vulnerable manner. “I come from a very bad background,” she
said within minutes of meeting me. Her mother had been an alcoholic,
and Price had grown up in a series of foster homes, attending fourteen
different schools. From the age of fifteen, she had been on her own,
falling in with a series of abusive men, about whom she didn’t want to
say much. At twenty, she got a job in a nursing home; she still works
there, as a cook and a nursing assistant.
“I noticed the union people would stand up for themselves,” she
recalled of her early days on the job. “And they seemed to be like a
small family, a voice. I never had that. That’s how I got active, and
got so gutsy and eager to always jump in—I learned that from the union.
When I first started, I was like a little mouse in the corner because I
had so much drama in my life. I was too caught up in staying alive.”
Price, who now lives on a farm with her boyfriend, thirty guns, and
every kind of domestic animal except pigs, runs the S.E.I.U.’s Obama
office in Athens, with two graduates of Smith College working for her.
Price and I drove down Route 33 from Athens, into Meigs County and a
town called Pomeroy, which once had been a loading dock for coal barges
and now lay prostrate and blighted along the Ohio River. Across the
river was West Virginia. Inasmuch as Price had a home town, Pomeroy was
it.
“Meigs County is one of the worst,” Price said as we drove. “We’re
going to a racist area—I won’t lie to you. I have heard, pardon my
French, ‘Get the fuck off my porch, I’m not voting for no nigger.’ ” A
few days earlier, she had twice been chased away by dogs. Price
canvassed for Obama alone day after day, with a can of Mace in the car.
She had learned not to wear an Obama T-shirt. People didn’t react
well—they seemed to take it as someone telling them whom to vote for.
She parked on a street that ran along the foot of the rock face looming
over Pomeroy. It was early afternoon. There was no sign of life on the
street except for two boxers in a yard, unleashed and barking at us.
Price told me that their collars would register a shock if the dogs
crossed a buried wire.
“I’m not scared of my home town,” Price said. “I’m a pretty tough girl.
Gotta be.”
She had a list of voters—Republicans, Democrats, and Independents—and
we began to go door to door. Some of the residences were boarded shut,
some were trailers with appliances lying out front. One or two were
large, lavishly decaying houses with overgrown gardens. A front porch
was sealed off by fallen branches.
A middle-aged woman in a nightdress peered out of a screen door. Price
began her pitch.
“If the election was held today, have you decided who you’ll vote for?”
The woman hesitated, then turned away to speak to someone inside. A
man’s voice called out, “We’re not voting this year.”
Price noted this on her sheet and thanked the woman.
She didn’t leave the sidewalk to speak to the owner of the two snarling
dogs. He said that he would probably vote for McCain, because he was a
veteran. A shirtless young man in his underwear, who seemed to have
just woken up, said that he was an Obama supporter and knew a few
others. There was an AIDS ribbon tattooed on his right shoulder. “The
ignorant ones that don’t vote, they say Obama’s a nigger and he’s going
to be assassinated,” the young man said. “That is classic Meigs
County.” Farther down the street, two women and a little girl—three
generations of a family—were getting out of a car. The grandmother said
that she was undecided. She thought that McCain was wrong on the war,
but she wasn’t sure about Obama. Price left her with some literature
and her phone number.
At the door of a trailer, Price knocked, then knocked again. Finally,
the screen door opened a few inches. A white-haired, white-skinned
ghost of an old woman identified herself as Betty.
“If the election was held today, have you decided who you’ll vote for?”
“ ’bama.”
Recently, people in Ohio have told me that voters there have started to
shift toward Obama. Gabe Kramer, of the S.E.I.U., said that, after the
first Presidential debate and amid the financial crisis, union members
seemed to find Obama’s ideas and manner more persuasive than before.
But even if Obama wins he will still have to overcome the deep
skepticism of struggling Americans. For Barbie Snodgrass, who has a
modest amount of stock in a retirement plan, the meltdown has turned
this election into a make-or-break one, tipping her away from McCain
without convincing her that she can trust Obama. “I’m going to have to
pray to the holy gods that whoever I vote for is going to be honest and
try to get us out of this mess,” she said.
In Pomeroy, it had been a relatively good afternoon. As we drove back
to Athens, Price said, “This job is a challenge, and I like that, but
it’s also sad and depressing. You see all these poor people that don’t
have anything, but they’re still supporting the wrong party that’s the
reason they don’t have anything. I’ve canvassed single mothers with
three kids, and they still don’t see what’s wrong with the Republican
Party.” She thought for a moment. “Obama’s one of us,” she said. “He
comes from a blue-collar family. But people don’t really see that.”
Source:Ocnus.net 2008
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