Our rural and suburban neighbors had a conniption fit a few years back when political consultant James Carville, in a now famous quote, called our state “Philadelphia at one end, Pittsburgh at the other end, and Alabama in between”.
Those same non-city dwellers cried foul a couple of months ago, when just before the Pennsylvania primary, Governor Ed Rendell candidly admitted that there were many residents who would not vote for Senator Barack Obama because of his race.
Being from Philadelphia, but having visited every corner of the Commonwealth, it seems to me that while both men were over-generalizing a bit, their assertions were accurate.
At about the same time Rendell inadvertently laid bare the outlying counties’ deep anti-Black sentiments, Scranton was hosting its annual Saint Patrick's Day parade, one of the largest parades in the country. Scranton, seat of Lackawanna County, is the home base of Senator Bob Casey, ardent Obama supporter and current patriarch of one of Pennsylvania’s most respected political families.
Despite Casey’s endorsement, Obama volunteers at the parade say they were heckled mercilessly with racial epithets, and the green Obama signs distributed by staffers were burned along the parade route. Accounts from the volunteers who knocked on doors and distributed flyers on street corners were worse. Doors were slammed in their faces, and the n-word flowed freely from residents who made it clear why they weren’t about to cast their ballots for an African-American.
Two Lackawanna County Commissioners who publicly endorsed Obama found themselves the recipients of racist hate mail. I wonder if the reaction would have been any worse had not Obama been endorsed by the most popular politician in the area.
In the “It Would Be Funny If It Weren’t So Scary” Department: Tunkhannock Borough Mayor Norm Ball wrote in a letter to the editor of his local paper, "Barack Hussein Obama and all of his talk will do nothing for our country. There is so much that people don't know about his upbringing in the Muslim world. His stepfather was a radical Muslim and the ranting of his minister against the white America, you can't convince me that some of that didn't rub off on him. No, I want a president that will salute our flag, and put their hand on the Bible when they take the oath of office."
I love how they repeatedly throw his middle name out there just to scare the bejesus out of slow-witted white folks. As if the very name “Hussein” is enough to send citizens scampering for cover. Look, the people who are dumb enough to let something as trivial as the candidate’s names sway their vote were already lost at “Barack Obama”. Adding Hussein at this juncture is just overkill.
Since the Pennsylvania primary election last month, which Senator Hillary Clinton won by more than 200,000 votes, the Obama campaign has suffered crushing defeats in the other so-called “Appalachian states” to our southwest: West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. The demographic makeup of these states is quite similar to ours in that most minorities live in the cities, where Obama won: Louisville, Memphis, and Nashville. Travel a few miles outside the city, however, and the Carville Axiom holds true.
Witness too the alarming numbers coming out of the exit polls: more than one-third of Clinton supporters say they won’t vote for Obama in the general election against Republican Senator John McCain. That they are happy to abandon the core issues of the Democratic Party: universal health care, the Iraq war, rising gasoline prices and a failing economy; in order to avoid the possibility of an Obama presidency shows the depth of their racial animosity.
This is especially true of white women in this category, who willingly face a rollback of the gender rights for which they’ve fought so valiantly. The next president will pick at least one, but more likely two or even three Supreme Court justices. McCain has already indicated that he will pick judges who are pro-life in an effort to overturn Roe vs. Wade, the bulwark of women’s rights legislation. No matter, they’d still rather have McCain than Obama, who has repeatedly championed women’s rights issues.
I have not spoken to a single Black person who expresses the opposite sentiment. If Hillary Clinton wins the Democratic nomination fair and square, without any sleight-of-hand political shenanigans involving Florida and Michigan, I’m positive that the millions of Obama’s African-American supporters would come out in droves to vote for her.
However, I would also submit that African-Americans might well begin to take a serious look at a political party that demands our loyalty, but doesn’t return the favor.
