Opinion inertia:
Going back to my response posts, I want to stress that I never assume that anyone voting against Obama is a racist, or that Republicans are racists, or that either on the Republican ticket is a racist. I know better.
I’ve lived with serious racists, had racism and sexism used against me and mine (you do know that I’m a Race Traitor for adopting a non-white, right?). I’ve listed to my daughter ask me about swastikas that she saw marked up on her school grounds, and have to explain about people who hate her for her ethnicity. I’ve seen it in action for nearly fifty years, in all of its ugliness. I know better than to apply that badge easily or thoughtlessly. And that racism is something that is everywhere, in every country and racial group.
However, I do think that McCain is an opportunist without honor who has thugs working for him who are willing to pull every trick in the book and use any tool to get him elected, including racist ones to amplify the stuff Hillary first brought out and tried to use against Obama. If McCain had any honor, he’d go out of his way to squelch it all.
The people who support Obama the most, by and large, are the young who are civic-minded and are beyond the ideas of racism or absolute adherence to a party. The people who are the most against him tend to be the older ones who can’t get past the idea of voting for a Democrat (no matter how bad the Republican) or a black (no matter how awful a candidate the white guy is) for President.
And there are people who have very specific issues. If you are totally wrapped around anti-abortion issues, you may well feel that Palin’s basic advocacy of that position trumps anything else. If you are fixed in the idea that taxes are an evil in all situations, and you make over $600,000 a year, you may find McCain’s low tax strategies far more important of an issue than any other.
Much more below the cut.
Both my mom’s dad and my dad’s dad were Klan members in the 1920s, when such things were a whole lot more common than they are now. As a kid in Dayton, Ohio in the 1960s and ’70s, I saw it all. My father was a very casual racist, who had no problem with good n-words that knew their place, but the other ones…and his pals and buddies and most of his relations were even cruder with their thoughts on such matters.
Race was a big deal when I was growing up in Dayton. We had a riot in Dayton in the ghetto in 1967, and the school system authority fought a long, expensive and bitter battle against busing when I was in high school. Many white kids and their parents deeply feared being dumped into a ghetto nightmare a long way from their neighborhood school.
I personally feared the black west-side Dayton ghetto as a tough, rough place, but I saw plenty of tough and rough poor white kids and realized that what the roots of that had little to do with race and everything to do with poverty and ignorance. I couldn’t connect the black people I knew personally with the ugly images my father and his pals went on about. I couldn’t connect the rants of anti-Semites with the Jewish kids I went to first grade with in a private school in the basement of a synagogue on Salem Avenue.
My mom had all sorts of friends - gay, straight, all races and religions. I got to see people as people and not by the labels. People were yotzes and jerks due to other things than their gender or race or religion.
I do think that people who try to push out the idea that Barack Obama is ‘too foreign’ or ‘too exotic’ or suggest that he’s a secret Muslim or ‘uppity’ is going along the same lines of the people who insisted that Jack Kennedy would have a direct line to the Pope, or those who insisted that Lincoln was a fire-breathing radical abolitionist who would take away your property. They’re either promoting their own prejudices or promoting prejudice as a political tool.
Very few will openly say that they can’t vote for Obama because he’s black- but people can come up with terms that approximate what they are thinking instead.
‘Uppity’ is a term use by country folks in the South. it has always referred to some who Did Not Know Their Place And Took On Airs, and it might be possible to use it on a white person, but I have never ever heard it used that way. I have heard it used, in person, more times than I can count, in direct connection to the n-word.
I used to live for years in Findlay, Ohio. This is a story from earlier this year in the Washington Post (which I cited earlier in my journal) that goes into some depth about the mindless racist crap that I saw in Ohio - as a boy and as an adult.
“On the television in his living room, Peterman has watched enough news and campaign advertisements to hear the truth: Sen. Barack Obama, born in Hawaii, is a Christian family man with a track record of public service. But on the Internet, in his grocery store, at his neighbor’s house, at his son’s auto shop, Peterman has also absorbed another version of the Democratic candidate’s background, one that is entirely false: Barack Obama, born in Africa, is a possibly gay Muslim racist who refuses to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.”
“But with their pride came a nasty undercurrent, one that Obama’s candidacy has exacerbated: On College Street, nobody wanted anything to change. As the years passed, Peterman and his neighbors approached one another to share in their skepticism about the unknown. What was the story behind the handful of African Americans who had moved into a town that is 93 percent white? Why were Japanese businessmen coming in to run the local manufacturing plants? Who in the world was this Obama character, running for president with that funny-sounding last name?
“People in Findlay are kind of funny about change,” said Republican Mayor Pete Sehnert, a retired police officer who ran for the office on a whim last year. “They always want things the way they were, and any kind of development is always viewed as making things worse, a bad thing.”
When people on College Street started hearing rumors about Obama - who looked different from other politicians and often talked about change - they easily believed the nasty stories about an outsider.
“I think Obama would be a disaster, and there’s a lot of reasons,” said Pollard, explaining the rumors he had heard about the candidate from friends he goes camping with. “I understand he’s from Africa, and that the first thing he’s going to do if he gets into office is bring his family over here, illegally. He’s got that racist [pastor] who practically raised him, and then there’s the Muslim thing. He’s just not presidential material, if you ask me.”
Said Don LeMaster: “He’s a good speaker, but you’ve got to dig deeper than that for the truth. Politicians tell you anything. You have look beyond the surface, and then there are some real lies.”
Said Jeanette Collins, a 77-year-old who lives across the street: “All I know for sure about Obama is that we’re not ready for him.”
So far, those who have pushed the truth in Findlay have been rewarded with little that resembles progress. Gerri Kish, a 66-year-old born in Hawaii, read both of Obama’s autobiographies. She has close friends, she said, who still refuse to believe her when she swears Obama is Christian. Then she hands them the books, and they refuse to read them. “They just want to believe what they believe,” she said. “Nothing gets through to them.”
The people who first fostered this Not-American image was not John McCain - it was Mark Penn in the Democratic primaries who decided to emphasize personality over issues, and them Obama’s ‘foreignness’ over Hillary, while trying to transform Hillary Clinton, suburban Chicago girl who went to Wellesley and Yale Law School and wrote her poly sci senior class thesis on the REAL radical Chicago neighborhood organizer as a good-ole-boy shot and a beer working class dame.
The real subtext of Penn’s political kabuki about ‘he’s not American enough’, is, of course, ‘Obama can’t be elected because…’
it was not Obama’s waving his blackness around - it was the people like the ones above going OMGWTFBBQ over a black guy running for president. Not to mention that he didn’t act like a standard political ghetto black, he acted much more - well, stiff. A stiff, non-ghettoish black guy with that name? Weird on a stick, Lester.
Josh Marshall goes into good historical detail on this problem as it occurs in Appalachia, and this map (of Clinton versus Obama and patterns of Presidential voting over the last two election shows another side of it - same folks tend to vote Republican for president anyway.
And this year, the people now working for McCain are using anything they can think of and leaning on the ‘not American’ stuff that was raised earlier, and added to it, like that Black Bastard Baby stuff used against McCain in 2000. Their idea is to throw anything at the wall, make anything up, and see what sticks. You like it? Here’s some more.
Even the cleanest Republican candidate of modern times, Barry Goldwater, who went out of his way not to use Walter Jenkins’ mens-room sex bust against Lyndon Johnson, didn’t stop operatives in the South from trying hard to suppress the black vote which presumably would go for Johnson. Goldwater wasn’t about to stop the Southerners from suppressing the vote - that was a local issue, y’know. But he knew and liked Jenkins personally, and wasn’t going to go that route as a personal thing.
And there’s the yellow-dog angle. My father, racist good-old-boy that he was, and a yellow-dog Democrat, voted for Wallace in 1968 and could never tell me who he voted for in 1972. (I guessed Mary Kay Letourneau’s dad, but I have no idea.) My mom, in her waning years, equated ‘conservative’ with ‘conservationist’ and thought Dick Cheney would have made a wonderful conservationist President, being a conservative from Wyoming and all. She couldn’t imagine voting for Democrats at all. Her mind wasn’t open enough to consider the reality behind the party labels and the public pronouncements.
I think the real problem is that people are too tied to simplistic, easy answers on politics and public policy. Bomb the jerks. Cut the taxes. Wave the flag. Give the hippies a haircut. Bomb them back to the stone age. I started realizing this when I was working on a prize-winning essay on Americanism in high school that got me sent by the American Legion to Ohio Boys’ State. And most of these were total frauds. But they work on people who don’t want to worry, want to think that they can get along as well or better than they had before.
Me, I gotta think. I gotta try to leave this world a better place for my kid. I gotta care about a future I may never see, because it’s the right thing to do. I want an honest reformer, and McCain is neither of those things, no matter how much he’d like you to assume he is.