What are they thinking?

The conventional wisdom about the presidential race these days is that the McCain/Palin attacks are working and that if Obama wants to have a shot at winning this thing, its time he came out with some punches of his own.

Personally, I think arguments can be made on either side of this question. But today I read something that intrigued me as a deeper look at the appeal of Palin and the possible rejection of Obama. It comes from voters that I don’t often hear from given that I live in an urban setting and get my news from the blogoshpere.

The article is in Salon, is written by Dan Hoyle, and is titled What small-town America is saying about Obama. Here’s the set-up.

For three months during this summer and early fall, I’ve been traveling across America, exploring the nation’s small towns and rural areas and meeting the people there. From Michigan to New Mexico to North Carolina, I’ve conducted dozens of interviews with white working-class voters across 18 states, gauging, among other things, their thoughts and feelings about the first black man to have a serious shot at winning the White House.

 

Hoyle intersperses quotes from various people he interviewed with his own observations and commentary. I thought it might be interesting to first pull the quotes and look at them alone.

He’s just not someone I can personally relate to. Obama just doesn’t feel like someone who knows me.

Obama’s like Jesse Jackson — what does he know except a bunch of cities with lots of blacks?

There’s a difference between racist and prejudiced. A lot of people around here just haven’t spent much time with black people. When they get to know a black person, it’s OK. But they will bring their prejudice in at first.

Obama, he’s not our kind of people. He don’t believe in the hereafter, and the Lord, the way I look at it … he’s Muslim.

I know it sounds stupid, but Barack Hussein Obama? And if he gets in, somebody’ll take him out real quick.

People around here see Obama as being privileged. We know Obama’s plenty book-smart … but I liked Harry Truman, the last president to have a simple high school education.

And now for some of Hoyle’s conclusions.

Beyond Obama’s race, what I found was a more complicated set of concerns — whether accurately informed or not — about his religious faith, values and cultural and educational background. That is, many of these white rural voters expressed a discomfort that may have more to do with unfamiliarity about the type of person Barack Obama is, rather than with direct concerns about his race…

It may be that hesitancy about Obama stems from his being a type of black person that rural Americans are unfamiliar with. White rural Americans tend to identify two types of black Americans. They know local, churchgoing black people who like to hunt and fish, whose lives are similar to their own. On the other hand, they tend to think of urban blacks as a stereotype seen widely in pop culture (bling-wearing gangstas) or as the kind of black people they see on local TV news (often criminal suspects or convicts). Obama fits neither of these tropes, as a highly educated, upper-middle-class, self-made urban black man. (One with lighter skin and of mixed race, to boot.) He’s not foreign because he’s black, he’s foreign because he’s unknown — especially as someone seeking a job held exclusively by white men for more than two centuries.

I find Hoyle’s conclusion that most of this is not about racism to be a denial of the obvious. But with that said, his conclusions are powerful nonetheless. There seems to be too many people in this country who would rather see themselves reflected in their President than to do the hard work of looking at what it takes to do the job. After these 8 long years of complete incompetence leading our country to the brink of the abyss, that old question “Who would you like to have a beer with?” seems to be uppermost on too many people’s mind. And an Obama, no matter how talented he is, is just too different to be trusted.

So if Hoyle’s conclusions are accurate, Obama is not losing ground because he’s not fighting back. He’s losing ground because he’s “different” and Palin is “our kind of gal.” I’m not sure if he can overcome that. I just hope he’s got something up his sleeve.

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  1. that makes me despair for our country. All I can do is hope that people who think like this are in the minority.

  2. Americans aren’t good when it comes to change, for all we say we are.

    I’m not all that comfortable with Hoyt’s conclusions, either.  “Local, churchgoing black people who like to hunt and fish,” yeah … and I would imagine some other characteristics as well.

    Being the “first” in any field is always a hurdle.

    I agree with you … I hope views like this are in the minority.

  3. … it’s not just a sentiment you’ll find only in rural America.  I’ve heard the exact same thing here in New York by some well off folks who are as far from provincial as you could imagine.

    I dunno, the quotes are interesting.  Hoyt’s analysis?  Not so impressed.  I’m glad you separated the two.

    • Edger on September 14, 2008 at 00:05

    He does. Someone who knows a hell of a lot more about America and about how to actually do politics than Dan Hoyle does…

    September 14, 2008

    Bill Clinton is to ride to Barack Obama’s rescue in the coming weeks by holding joint events with the Democratic presidential candidate.

    The Obama team hopes the “Bubba factor” – Clinton’s appeal to white, working-class voters – will revitalise its campaign and staunch defections to Sarah Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee.

    A source close to the Obama campaign said: “Bill Clinton is on board. He’s making all the right moves and he and Barack Obama are going to campaign together.”

    The former president met Obama over lunch at his New York office last Thursday on the seventh anniversary of the September 11 attacks. Clinton predicted that “Senator Obama will win and win handily” and offered to do “whatever I’m asked to help out”.

    Obama needs the populist touch that Clinton can provide, senior Democrats believe. “People are tapping into Sarah Palin in the same way that they did to Bill Clinton,” an Obama official said.

    A public display of unity could rally Democrats and bring some buzz back to Obama in the same way that big-name endorsements from Senator Edward Kennedy and John Kerry, the 2004 candidate, helped to relaunch Obama after he lost key primaries to Hillary Clinton.

  4. is still a deeply prejudiced country. Quite frankly I don’t see that changing ever. There will always be those who hate in our country and in our world.

    This reminds me of something that Melvin Carter (St. Paul City Council Member for those outside the state) did at my Camp Wellstone. He asked us all to close our eyes and imagine the world as it should be, he called it our “progressive happy place.” Then he asked us to open our eyes and see the world as it is.

    We don’t live in that progressive happy place and we might never live there. But what we can do is fight every day to get us closer to that happy place.

    It may sound silly but that’s what I fight for every day.

    What does Barack Obama have up his sleeve?

    Us.

    Join your local Team Obama and get involved. I have. We’re having action events 3 days a week to start off and data days three more days of the week. We’ve got our area to work on, we’ve got our goals. And we are going to meet and beat those goals.

    We’re fired up. We’re ready to go.

    We’re going to win this thing. And we’re going to win this thing by working very, very hard.

    The Obama campaigns unofficial slogan is no bullshit.

    I agree. We’ve got too much work to do to worry.

    Let’s do this.

    Respect. Empower. Include.

    ¡Sí, Se Puede!

  5. two page article?

    I think I counted 9 interviewees and I know I counted a lot of “summations” from the author.  

    I’m not inclined to worry too much about this piece.

    I did like the post and the thread though.  Thanks !

  6. Frank Rich nails this issue in his column today.

    The game is always to pit the good, patriotic real Americans against those subversive, probably gay “cosmopolitan” urbanites (as the sometime cross-dresser Rudy Giuliani has it) who threaten to take away everything that small-town folk hold dear.

    The racial component to this brand of politics was undisguised in St. Paul. Americans saw a virtually all-white audience yuk it up when Giuliani ridiculed Barack Obama’s “only in America” success as an affirmative-action fairy tale – and when he and Palin mocked Obama’s history as a community organizer in Chicago. Neither party has had so few black delegates (1.5 percent) in the 40 years since the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies started keeping a record.

    But race is just one manifestation of the emotion that defined the Palin rollout. That dominant emotion is fear – an abject fear of change. Fear of a demographical revolution that will put whites in the American minority by 2042. Fear of the technological revolution and globalization that have gutted those small towns and factories Palin apotheosized.

    And, last but hardly least, fear of illegal immigrants who do the low-paying jobs that Americans don’t want to do and of legal immigrants who do the high-paying jobs that poorly educated Americans are not qualified to do.

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