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October 16-22, 2008
editorial@boulderweekly.com
Back to Letters
Rock the racial vote
by Ben Corbett
Before he left us,” Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir told the audience of 16,000 at Monday’s Change Rocks Obama benefit at Penn State University, “Hunter S. Thompson said, ‘If every Deadhead in the state of Florida had voted in the 2000 election, it would be a very different world today.’”
“Think about it,” Weir added, before launching into a rousing encore of “Touch of Grey.” It was an emotional, spontaneous event announced less than a month ago, when the Dead approached the Obama campaign, volunteering a reunion show and leaving the details to the strategists, who decided to double-bill the band with the Allman Brothers and sandwich the show into Obama’s October Pennsylvania/Ohio campaign blitz.
The consensus out here, both with pundits and in the streets, is that whichever candidate wins Pennsylvania and Ohio on November 4, wins the election. That this swing-state power has finally been wrested from the banana republic known as Florida and given back to its rightful Ohioan owners seems almost too good to be true. At least for Obama, who currently has Pennsylvania locked up with a 13-point lead over an increasingly desperate McCain. They call this part of the Ohio River Valley the Tri-State area, and for Obama, the strategy is to hold his Pennsylvania margin while campaigning feverishly in Ohio to shave points from McCain’s Buckeye loyalists, while working overtime (and probably in futility) to nab West Virginia, which would seal the victory. So while the Dead were spinning through practice runs of the songs “St. Stephen” and “Darkstar” in an afternoon rehearsal just north of the Mason-Dixon line, Obama was ticking through the bullets of his point-by-point economic plan, promising jobs and financial relief to Toledo, an area slammed with unemployment and record home foreclosures.
In the end, though, none of this may matter, and the sad reality of the campaign — at least in this region — boils down to race and age. The bible belt of rural Ohio, western Pennsylvania, and all of West Virginia are some one the most racist areas in the nation. Few know, for instance, that Punxatawney, Pa., home of Groundhog Day, is one of the nation’s most northeasterly enclaves of the Ku Klux Klan. Where I was raised, only 20 years ago, a new black professor from the local college decided to move his family to a nearby town with an all-white population of 2,500. The local rednecks began to systematically harass this family, throwing beer bottles at their house and screaming drive-by obscenities until they packed up and fled in terror for their lives. Today, with unemployment soaring in areas like this, as the younger and less racially minded generation moves out seeking work in the west and south, the older and traditional white bread xenophobes hold sway over important voting sectors in these crucial battleground states. One of Obama’s biggest platforms out here is creating jobs, but jobs mean nothing to retired bigots living off their dwindling social security pensions, and whose sons and daughters have already parted for more prosperous climes with their progressive attitudes in tow.
While times have changed, bringing more tolerance to small-town America (thanks to teens with MP3 players loaded with hip hop), the old fears still stir in remote parts of the rural psyche, and the ultimate truth of any given American’s racial leanings will reveal itself when voters step up to the booths in November and all those once-suppressed racial attitudes rush to the surface. Unarguably, if Obama were white, he would probably hold a 40-point lead over McCain and the 2008 election would have gone down as the biggest landslide victory of any president in American history. But the campaign is running tight, and that in itself is very revealing of America’s racial progress.
It’s becoming obvious to everyone that running mate Sarah Palin amounts to nothing more than the McCain campaign’s biggest blunder. Chosen to feed into every white American male’s Barbie doll fantasy, she’s becoming an embarrassment and a damage control risk. Yet at the same time, Palin is his greatest asset. As a vice-presidential nominee, she has the ability to play the race card and evoke the deep-rooted racial fears of American voters where McCain’s hands are tied. Telling Americans that Obama is “different than us” with the subtle implication that his skin color makes him not only inferior, but “dangerous,” Palin, with her projection of innocence, is a shrewd and calculating manipulator who will employ race with much more sophistication as the days wear on. Things are going to get ugly in the next few weeks in ways that we thought we’d grown past long ago. At this point, McCain’s only weapon is the race card. To what degree he’ll play it is another question. But in a state like Ohio, where Obama’s slim lead falls within the margin of error, it’s a tool that can effectively throw the election. It’s all about winning, after all.
Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
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