Obama's "Appalachia Problem"

Ahh... nothing like a loaded question to get the ole blood percolating. Do you practice these questions in front of a mirror while whipping out a gun and pointing it at yourself?

... a racial issue. They don't like elites, like Gore, Kerry, Dukakis, they like Bubba types, like Bush, Clinton, Carter, Reagan.

Don't know what they will say tomorrow though.

Were you in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park?

I've been "embedded" down here for ~24 years, and I've found that conservatives are pretty tight lipped, unless you get to know them well, then they start to "come out of the closet" as it were.

Well Democrats use -isms to label and thus cannot engage in -isms, thus when they won't vote for Obama, it isn't racism but "an Appalachia problem."

Racism, or bigotry is reserved exclusively for labeling Republican motivations, intents and actions with which you disagree.

I hope that has been cleared up. Please refer to your Mainstream Media Leftist Talking Points for further clarification.

Isn't the hypothesis just that there are a lot of bigots in appalachia?


You know, one of the interesting things that's come out during this primary is that the more contact whites have with blacks, the more racist they seem to be, rather than the reverse. In the south, where there's more contact between whites and blacks than in any other region of the US, a higher percentage of white Democrats vote for Clinton (and a much larger percentage of whites are Republicans) than in places like Iowa and Oregon, where there aren't any blacks. You can almost perfectly predict the likelihood of a white person voting for Clinton based on how many blacks are in their state: The more blacks, the more likely they are to vote for Clinton.

On the other hand, my sense is that Appalachia has relatively fewer blacks than places in the south like Mississippi, and yet Appalachia displays a pattern like Mississippi. I suppose that's what makes it stand out.

And that's just among the Democrats.

I'm originally from Vermont, and it went for Obama in a big way. In high school, one of my very good friends was black, in fact, their family was the only black family in Burlington at the time.

Heck there was more "racial tension" with those of French Canadian ancestry.

Wait, so if Obama refers to working class whites as "bitter", that's proof of his "elitism", but if the mainstream media goes out of its way to avoid labeling working class whites as "racist", that's proof of their elitism?

Yes, but it's also true that the more blacks there are in a state, the more likely the whites are to be Republicans.

How so? You mean that the lower economic class the whites are, the more likely they are to support Clinton over Obama?

Uhhhh... I'm not so sure about that.

That's a (predictably) loaded way to look at it... just because this country does or does not elect The Big O does not mean this country either is or is no longer racist. Obama is preaching an ideology that voters have already demonstrated that they did not care for in his predecessors.
It is impossible to separate the candidate from their liberalism or race to isolate the variable.

Only if two candidates were espousing the same ideology, and one was black, could you claim this country is one way or another. Actually, under those circumstances, the choice of BHO over HRC would point to this not being a racist nation. It's a sexist one.

Exclusively?

Words do mean something.

I'm pretty sure "racism" is more than just a tool for discrediting Republicans.

That's what the numbers have said in state after state. Among whites, as household income goes up, support for Clinton goes down. Same way with education. Both income and education were pretty good predictors in the primary.

It's not just racial and it's not just southern.

During an election season where THIS kind of shit happens... it may be more than a tool, but is one of the favourite in the DNCC arsenal. You know, keep those minorities scared and voting "D", just like senior citizens.

For years and years, Democrats have hammered over and over and over again the theme of "racism" as a push-back when republicans do not support even further expansion of the government dependency system. Just like I said in the above post, resistance to things like socialism, be that BHO or welfare expansion in the inner city, has everything to do with ideology, not racism, and racism is the usual aspersion cast when necessary.

The Democratic party, and it's allies like Sharpton and Jesse, have royally fucked up many aspects of race relations in this country.

At any rate, I agree with Midwinter that the election will be a window onto the state of race relations in America.

My impression is that the presiding ethos (TV gasbag edition) is that there's something refreshingly candid and regular guy-ish about batting around almost unbelievably sexist and racist notions, with the understanding that they themselves don't necessarily share in these notions but that that's what "America" really thinks and so it's important to sort out if Obama's resemblance to Curious George is going to be a liability.

Given that, I expect the election will bring some pretty serious mainstreaming of overtly racist material, naturally flanked by strenuous protestations that having a problem with that is the kind of political correctness that prevents an "honest" discussion of race.

I mean, like, does Obama have a huge cock an eye for white women? It bears on how he is perceived as a candidate, so it's not out of bounds to ask.

I mean, Hillary's candidacy apparently made it OK to toss around "cunt" like it was a trenchant bit of character analysis, so I fully expect to hear about how it's OK to call Obama a nigger since he objectively is a nigger.

If you read the article you linked to, you'll see the author thinks that Dems using such hardball tactics is notable because it mirrors what the Republicans have been doing for years.

To which I say: about time.

Yes, white women of lower education or income seem to vote overwhelmingly for Clinton, at least that's what the MSM seems to think from exit polls (I thought that Norah O'Donnell on MSNBC tonight summed it up rather well).

yep, hardball. Even if you have to lie and use the most vile of contemporary slurs, "racist." Yep, that Dem party under Obama is going to "unite the country." Yep.

COUNT.

Last night during her speech someone in the background was holding a sign and all you could see at times was the first letter or the last three letters.

Actually, I would think the most vile of contemporary slurs is "liberal", and the deployment of racist tactics by the modern Republican Party is a stone fact. Or did you think "the Southern strategy" was a football play?

You know... these things do not happen in a vacuum.

Imagine this... a presidential candidate mocks those voters who are part of the "southern strategy."
Maybe saying they are "bitter" or using your snotty drawl to "get me a huntin license". Half of the so-called "Southern Strategy" is accompished by the Dem Prez candidates in 04 and now in 08. It's convenient to whisper, or yell, RACISM! in a crowded electorate... but as long as the Dem's continue to belittle the things that these voters value... guns, religion, etc, the same result will remain. But that will not be called as it is, we'll put it in the "racist white folks" category and move on.

... race isn't an issue?

Yeah, I think that's generally true, I'm just wondering if that's what midwinter was talking about.

So the openly articulated Republican strategy of fanning the flames of southern white racial anxiety isn't really racist at all, because Democrats are elitists.

You know, this drives me crazy. Democrats bend over backwards trying to make nice to rural and southern people. In fact, all recent Democratic presidents have been southerners. But when something slips out that can be interpreted as insulting, it's a huge deal. And yet a major part of the overt politicking by Republicans involves regional and class division.

A constant line is to criticize liberal elites on the coasts.

Part of George Bush's stump speech, which he gave almost every day for several weeks in 2004, directly mocked Massachusetts and Kerry for having Massachusetts values. It was explicit regional division.

There's an ad out right now depicting a Missouri Democrat as having "San Francisco values," showing an interracial group dancing to crazy music. It's explicit regional division.

There's nothing that Democratic politicians do - in reverse - that even comes close to this.

The difference being, of course, that the right has so completely internalized their narrative regarding who and who is not a "real American", they can never see the relentless belittling of broad swaths of the country as anything remarkable.

For the right, any passing slight against rural, white working class voters is an outrageous insult against normal, decent, upright bedrock citizens, whereas the status of "liberals" as degenerate libertines is simply an objective fact.

Which brings us back to Obama's "Appalachian problem". A lynchpin of the Southern strategy was and is to exacerbate lower class white anxieties about loss of status and economic opportunity via federally mandated "black empowerment." Code name: "states rights."

This is the party, remember, that started a whisper campaign about McCain's "illegitimate black baby", so look for a lot of "back channel" talk about Obama's plans to shove his darkie buddies down our throats. And no, unfortunately, the fact that McCain was actually the target of this stuff doesn't mean it doesn't get used on his behalf.

For relatively affluent, educated whites, or for lower class whites where the threat of "them" taking over seems distant due to population patterns, such talk is not likely to make much of an impression.

But in economically distressed areas with lower class whites in the vicinity of larger black populations, not to mention a local culture within which overt racism was the norm until fairly recently (hmmmmm, where's that map of Appalachia, again?), the specter of some kind of massive affirmative action smack down will probably work pretty well.

And yes, Hillary has been at least tacitly pulling from this playbook, which makes her an asshole.

Still, the Republican party seems to be in danger of consigning itself to regional party status-- Appalachia, again, plus some of the sparsely populated plains states-- a development I would find deeply satisfying, in a karmic justice sort of way.

Um, claiming that someone is a member of the KKK? For political benefit?

Nothing close? What?

Hey, cool, we're back to "I can't tell the difference between a specific attack on a specific politician and routinely portraying big chunks of the country as the kind of people that probably should be shot on sight."

I thought this was DMZ's territory? Or maybe it's a Texan thing?

Now wait. I'm not saying Dems can't do a nasty campaign, and calling someone a KKK member (if they're not) is obviously nasty. What I'm referring to here though is your post about belittling conservative country or southern folks for being backward. The exact opposite seems to me to be true: Republicans constantly and overtly criticize liberal coastal elites, whereas Democrats constantly suck up to conservative country and southern people.

Reagan and Bush both have had ranches, Reagan played a cowboy at least a few times in movies, I believe. Bush wearing his cowboy boots and huggantgous belt buckle.


[CENTER]
Bush or Reagan?[/CENTER]

I just wanted to add that the Democratic Primary season and the subsequent national election, will probably be the most written about as far as elections go. Political Science, sociologists, and demographers types.