Note on Appalachia & Obama

When I said a few days ago that I know the Appalachian region all too well, as I lived my first 20 years there, I spoke about the racism that I know played into Obama's significant electoral losses in the region. Boy, I wish I'd known that the Daily Show video had come out the night before on this exact issue.

For those of you who can't/won't watch the video, Jon Stewart basically cuts through the "white working voters" bullshit to get to the heart of it -- race and ignorance. Voters were interviewed who repeated the nonsense about Obama being a Muslim and simultaneously (with no hint of irony or detection of illogic) an atheist.

As much as the Bible Belt section of Appalachia sucks, and as I've pointed to every conceivable fact to support that statement, I wanted to point out something of a little more substance: the NPR interview that exposed a lot of this racist nonsense and its closing statement in particular.

Exit polls from Tuesday show that 22% of voters admitted that race was a factor in their decision. For 8% of voters, race was the most important factor. And almost all those voters went for Clinton. Sometimes, voters say that they aren’t racist – but their friends and neighbors are. Here’s Anna Sale again talking to Brian Blankenship, a Logan County barber.

Blankenship: Well they’re saying Hillary, and if Hillary don’t, they’re saying McCain.
Sale : So they don’t like Obama
Blankenship: No
Sale : And what are the reasons
Blankenship: I’d say because he’s black, most of them.

Finn: And sometimes, voters have no problem saying it themselves.

Cooper: You know I didn’t vote for no colored.
Sale: Who did you vote for?
Cooper: What’s her name?
Sale : Clinton.
Cooper: Clinton, yeah.

Finn: That’s Morris Cooper, an 80-year-old man from Lincoln County. In all these cases, the voters weren’t asked about race – they brought it up themselves.

None of this surprises William Turner. He grew up in Harlan County, Kentucky, and is now chair of Appalachian Studies at Berea College. He says there’s no one single factor that explains Obama’s trouble with voters in Appalachia. It’s his race, it’s his name, it’s his upbringing in far-off Indonesia and Hawaii. And Obama’s message of change, which is so popular elsewhere, doesn’t resonate in a region that resists change.

Turner: How often I heard it said, Nobody likes change but a baby with a dirty diaper. So this kind of change is maybe just a little too much for people to absorb.

Finn: Some people think Obama can turn these attitudes around if he spends more time in West Virginia. In 1960, John F. Kennedy crisscrossed the state for three weeks, and even went down into a coal mine. It paid off – the mostly Protestant state helped select the nation’s first Catholic president. But Turner says Obama has a much tougher job than Kennedy.

Turner: I don’t think Barack could have in the short time he had change these long-standing stereotypes of black people or Appalachia. So what we need is just more education, more interaction, people getting to know each other better. And if he did nothing else but held up a mirror so we see ourselves better than we did last week, that’s good that he did that.

Finn: West Virginians, and other people in Appalachia, complain a lot about unfair stereotypes. But in this case, Turner says we have no one but ourselves to blame.

Indeed. Every hick they interviewed said the same ignorant things. It's enough to make me angry as hell and physically repulsed at the same time. All I can hope for is that more sunlight will work as a disinfectant; that the more people look at these sorts of attitudes, the more those holding them will be recognized for what they are and shunned. Education and liberal values are not going to work on the uneducated and staunch racists in Appalachia.

The same exact thing applies to eastern KY (where all of my dad's family is from and all still live) and there's a great video at Kos on it...also OH, PA, and to a lesser extent TN.

It will be so easy to beat McBush on issues of foreign policy, domestic policy and political ethics that I really think the only thing that can defeat Obama is the demographic he's struggled with for a a long time -- Southern or Appalachian whites & uneducated whites.