Al Cross, of The Rural Blog of the Institute of Rural Journalism and Community Issues and columnist for the Louisville Courier-Journal:
Journalists from around the world continue to write about Barack Obama's "Appalachian problem," based on his single-digit percentages in some Central Appalachian counties and exit polls showing that more than a fifth of white Democratic voters in Kentucky and West Virginia said race was important to their vote and more than four-fifths of those voters supported Clinton.
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Such stories imply that race was the main reason Obama lost the two main states of Central Appalachia. They ignore the fact that he made only one campaign stop in each of them, that Hillary Clinton's lunch-bucket speeches spoke more to local needs than Obama's high-flown rhetoric, and that the Clintons had strong followings in both states while Obama was not well known. As I said in my fortnightly column in The Courier-Journal yesterday, if Obama asked one of the black mayors of overwhelmingly white towns in Kentucky, "They might tell him that when folks know you, they're willing to vote for you. When you're a silhouette or a cartoon, they're not even listening."
Prof. Andra Gillespie, a political scientist at Emory University, expert on racial politics in
The Guardian:
The difficult truth is that Appalachia is unusual mostly because many people here are willing to openly talk about what some of their fellow citizens are secretly thinking. In exit polls of the recent primaries in Kentucky and West Virginia, one in five Democrats confessed to pollsters that race was a factor in their voting choice. 'West Virginia and Kentucky were just more honest than other parts of the country. A lot of other people know it's not socially acceptable to mention that sort of thing,' said Professor Andra Gillespie, a political scientist at Emory University and expert on racial politics.
Ruy Teixeira, a fellow at the Century Foundation, the Center for American Progress and the Brookings Institution, author of "Why the White Working Class Still Matters" and coauthor of "The Decline of the White Working Class and the Rise of a Mass Upper Middle Class.":
Salon: So what does it mean then, when a white voter tells a pollster that race was "important" in choosing one candidate over another? How many answers are contained in that answer?
Teixeira: I think if we clarify what the question actually was it helps clarify how much it might mean. The question was, was it one of several factors, the most important factor or not a factor, right? The larger group was the people who said it was one of several important factors and basically they lumped the most important factor folks in with the several important factors, so that can be a little deceptive. So what does it mean when somebody says it's one of several factors they considered? Does that mean they otherwise would have voted for Obama but they're racist [and] they voted for Hillary? I think there are a lot more benign interpretations and positive answers to that question. It's certainly the case that whites who responded who said it was one of several factors were likely to favor Hillary over Obama, but I think you have to be careful about the interpretation you make about that relationship.
...a lot of it's cultural overlay on the race issue and in fact, people tend to label anything that's correlated with race about race where it actually could be about lots of other and broader things. And in particular the Democratic Party has a sort of image in certain areas of the country among certain voters, particularly downscale voters, that's somewhat unfavorable. There's a certain cultural distance there, a sense of an elitism in the national party that Obama probably connects to in their minds. And they felt that Hillary connected less clearly to that. So is that race or is it culture or is it both?
Sean Wilentz, Princeton University historian, contributing editor at the New Republic, author of "The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008.":
At some level, this all becomes sheer speculation. We don't have individual voters saying why they voted this way particularly, it's all aggregates, and you have to try to put it together. But I do think that to the extent that the media line about Clinton's racist voter support has tended to be, at least among the pundits that I've read, concentrating on, particularly in the Rust Belt states, and particularly among, there are euphemisms for it, low-information voters, we all know what that means. The data don't support that contention. That's all. And why upper-middle class voters would suddenly be turned to Hillary, I don't know. It could be any number of things, but I think it's sheer speculation to say it's based on Jeremiah Wright or racism or anything else.
...Appalachia is the exception. Because they're voting for lunch-bucket issues. They always have. And to a certain extent for national security but that's not the issue here in this primary. They went for Hillary not for the racial issues, they went for here for the reasons they said they did.
I think it's a question of perception. I think the perception is that, this is actually holding this Sirota theory intact, you can hold that intact, but you can't then assume that all the whites in Appalachia are Southern racists. Which some people have assumed.
...But I don't think that it's driving it. There's no empirical evidence that it's driving it, that's for sure. Whereas, West Virginia has, going back to the New Deal, probably going back to the Civil War, when it became West Virginia ... This is the least racist part of the South. But it was historically rather poor, when mining got going -- I won't give you a lecture on American history. But this is the part of the South that has been least driven by race among white voters, rather than the most.
Dee Davis, president of the Center for Rural Strategies:
The legions of pseudonym-laden online posters who follow in political punditry's wake are less restrained in describing the shortcomings of Sen. Clinton's Appalachian supporters. They suggest it has to do with her voters being racist, toothless, shoeless, and prone to marrying their cousins. In short, they characterize these "special" Democrats in much the same terms they used in quieter times to describe Republicans.
... When the country needs iconic war heroes like Alvin York or Jessica Lynch, mountaineers fill the bill. If, periodically, this rich nation needs people to pity, poverty-stricken hillbillies make excellent poster children. And if backers of the Democratic Party's presumptive nominee need to explain why their preferred candidate is not connecting with downscale, rural voters -- a demographic that was once key to Democratic electoral success -- Appalachia can again answer the call. Obama supporters and members of the media can place the blame for his poor fortunes not on the candidate or his message, but on the moral failings of those benighted mountain people.
However, the unnerving truth for the erstwhile party of Jefferson may be that Appalachia, for all its legend and lore, is not that different politically from the rest of the small-town and rural parts of the country where 60 million of us live.
...Yet there is plenty in the numbers to give Obama heart, starting with the 9-point deficit that he and Kerry have in common five months out from the general election. When Kerry was down 9 in rural counties, he had a commanding lead nationally....
Surprisingly, Obama has already achieved the same standing in the polls that Kerry enjoyed when things were going well. And for Obama, this comes after weeks of relentless news coverage of his ex-preacher and after the senator's own costly "those people" moment when he was caught at a private fundraiser using broad stereotypes to characterize small-town and rural voters. (They are bitter. They cling.)
What our polling also shows is that rural communities are experiencing measurable economic distress, especially with the out-of-control price of fuel. Rural voters express concern over the mounting cost of healthcare and of the Iraq war. They are also measurably displeased with the country's direction. On the issues, there is clearly prime territory for Obama to seize....
How Obama fares in rural America may, in the end, have to do with whether he shows up. In politics not showing up and losing are kissing cousins. Obama made three visits to West Virginia. In Kentucky, he limited himself to appearances in the state's two biggest cities, Louisville and Lexington. He didn't come to my part of the state, or try to make any friends in rural areas.
Prof. Ron Eller of the University of Kentucky, author of "Miners, Millhands and Mountaineers: The Industrialization of the Appalachian South":
Newhouse News correspondent Jonathan Tilove even suggested that Sen. Barack Obama has an "Appalachian problem" that goes beyond race to the peculiarities of "Appalachia's whites and the Scots-Irish who settled there and forever branded its culture."
Popular stereotypes and misreading of Appalachian history have long provided a convenient excuse to ignore Appalachia or to justify public and private attempts to bring the region into the cultural mainstream. Thus, the argument is offered that Clinton's appeal in Appalachia should not be taken too seriously since mountain voters represent those "other whites" whose heritage has led them to be suspicious, pugnacious and a little less civilized than the Anglo-Puritan whites of the Northeast.
Sen. Barack Obama could not possibly succeed among these highly individualistic, uneducated and unrefined mountain whites whose ancestors resisted slavery and Southern nationalism during the Civil War. This independent spirit, suggest the pundits, will lead the hillbillies to vote for Scotch-Irish Appalachian John McCain, born in Appalachian Mississippi.
Such characterizations of Appalachia not only obscure the historical diversity of the region and project a static view of human culture but also ignore most of the recent scholarship on Appalachia that contradicts the idea of Appalachian "otherness" and attributes its history and economic problems to political struggles that have shaped the rest of the nation.
Far from being the repository of Scotch-Irish culture, ignorance born of geographic isolation or backwardness nurtured by anti-modernism, contemporary Appalachia is a much more diverse and historically complex place....
For blue-collar voters in Appalachia, economic concerns, not Appalachian identity, shaped their decisions at the polls. Job insecurity, rising food and gas prices, and uncertain access to health care and education turned Appalachian voters toward the more working-class message of Hillary Clinton, especially among women who occupy the center of the modern mountain economy. Perhaps because of the race issue, Obama conceded West Virginia to Clinton, who was able to use the local Democratic political machinery to her advantage.
Jeff Biggers, of Huffington Post:
How the media loves its hillbillies.
Makes me wanna holler: The hand-wringing aftermath of the recent presidential primaries in Appalachia -- from western Pennsylvania, North Carolina, West Virginia and Kentucky -- says more about the media's prejudice and misperception of the Mountain South than any insights into the voting ranks and their racism or religious narrowness....
Take hillbillies, on the other hand. Dating back to the 1850s, when George W. Harris created the character of Sut Lovingood, the "durn'd fool" with his "brains onhook'd" from eastern Tennessee for a New York newspaper, the media has obsessed over hillbillies, as if they have cornered the market on provincialism or racism in America. From bloggers on the liberal Daily Kos to untold television interviews, this same obsession has reared its ugly head in one commentary after another, blinding the writers from any historical truths about Appalachia.
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In West Virginia (and Kentucky), on the other hand, disregarding the fact that the Clintons have had a several decades-long relationship with southern Democrats in West Virginia, that Bill Clinton's folksy southern accent still goes down among the aging electorate like molasses, that Sen. Barack Obama ran a poor operation and did very little campaigning in the state and mainly invoked his Illinois coal state credentials in an anachronistic pitch for votes, the media preferred to dwell on the region's perceived legacy of backwardness. In truth, Obama blew it in Appalachia; Hillary reaped the rewards of the Clinton legacy.
Still, most reporters, exclusively interviewing older voters, went out of their way to find the most outrageous examples to confirm their hillbilly-biased pronouncements.
Del Ali, pollster, Research 2000:
Obama should listen to that point of view, rather than accept the conventional wisdom that he'll never get support in rural, white America, said professional pollster Del Ali of Research 2000 in Maryland. "It would be smart of him to visit, to go to Appalachia and say, 'What I'm offering is closer to your interests ... you've got nothing in common with trickle-down economics or oil companies; I care about you,'" Ali said. "I'm surprised he didn't do more of that before the primary."
Gov. Joe Manchin:
MANCHIN: Well, you hear this, and I have heard this from West Virginia and Kentucky and these types states which we call Appalachia, but, you know, which we had a story in the paper today, which was this really something that a young African-American female staffer of Obama's was working in West Virginia and she was concerned because she didn't know, just what she'd heard. And her car broke down, and ... not only that help her fix the car, the family lent their car for her to continue on her campaigning. They got to know each other.
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HEMMER: You know, as you talk about that, if Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee, can he win in your state in November, governor?
MANCHIN: I truly believe he can. I can tell you, the people in West Virginia are totally committed to change. We have to change the direction of this country for this -
HEMMER: What does it mean when Hillary Clinton wipes him out by 41 points two weeks ago?
MANCHIN: Well, I mean, listen, first of all, Bill Clinton is a very, very popular ex-president in West Virginia, who is still beloved as she is very popular, and she - the whole family worked extremely hard here. It's just campaigning that paid off, it was pressing the flesh, you know, and face to face.
... He spent quite a bit of money, but they enjoyed the time and also the relationship they've had with the Clintons. It had nothing to do with race. And people keep talking about that. It's just so wrong. |
