Prometheus 6

I think many of these defenders of the Appalachian way of life sense that Obama is going to win both the nomination and the general election and instead of jumping on board they want to negotiate, again and again, the terms of their separate peace. The Obama campaign can win the White House without them and, more importantly, the campaign knows that it can. These folks need to get real.

Waste of six minutes.  There's no point to the essay.  Evan Thomas simply babbles on about how earthshakingly important race is to Appalachian Whites, and Obama has do everything to placate them.  But there's maddeningly little to go on.  "Throw a barbeque, but don't try to be all down-home."  "Beg forgiveness for being ultrasuccessful." And my all-time favorite: "Yes, you've succeeded at running an amazing campaign and you've created an historically unprecedented coalition and a paradigm-changing way of raising money from normal Americans, so you're probably all arrogant now.  So you're probably not going to take my six minutes worth of useless bromides and distortions seriously, because you're all arrogant and uppity now.  Oh, yeah, and because I have nothing really useful to say, but I'm White and therefore I'm really in a position to dispense position to any colored person who has ten thousand times more expertise on the subject than I do."

Remember how hard Pres. Clinton worked at placating conservative Republican members of Congress?  How did that go? 

I think it was Mark Kleiman who said that this was the first time in all the years he'd followed campaigns in which he understood that if he felt the candidate should do x, and the candidate did y, it was almost certainly the case that y was the correct course of action. I think if Sen. Obama can win (without defying the laws of physics), then he knows better than anyone how.

And Evans is a concern troll. 

"Beg forgiveness for being ultrasuccessful."

Beg forgiveness from who and why? The burdens these folks and their so-called explainers want to impose on people of color is intolerable. There is nothing that Obama can do to change the color of his skin and there is nothing that he can gain by kowtowing to their foolishness. Apologizing for being successful? That's a hoot! 

Beg forgiveness from who and why?

[The following is for clarification only] 

Well, that subset of White Appalachian voters who are racist and who still resent the fact that African Americans are citizens.  Like that'll actually work--Evan Thomas apparently doesn't understand what racism is and how it works.  To a racist person, nothing you do will ever be good enough because he doesn't even recognize you're a distinct individual.

As for "why," this is why Usonian politics is so dysfunctional: those who are wrong are never punished and those who are right are never forgiven.  Thomas evidently grasps this, but he thinks that All the King's Men is the last word on how Huey Long or any other political leader won over the lumpen. No, strike that: Thomas doesn't even have the sense and the self-awareness to comprehend what Robert Penn Warren was trying to say (let alone whether RPW was right), viz., Long's appeal to resentment.  

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Anyway, you (Ptcruiser) have been saying this all along, so I just thought I'd quote it in this particular thread: the Democrats have been hoisted for seventy years on the petard of an alliance between the old Southern Democrats (who used to represent the extractive & farming sectors) and their Northern Democratic allies (who represented a counterweight to the GOP's championing of industrial interests).  The Democrats kept trying to keep the conservative Southern (now, rural/Appalachian) wing inside, so as to win elections and congressional majorities, but they would so compromise their ideological objectives that they failed to win any support for them.  Now, another big hunk of hyperconservative paleo-Democrats are calving off into Republican waters, and Obama has to pick up new members of his coalition.  And I daresay he has.

I'll stand by that, because it makes the Suburban Independents feel good. An extensive tour?No. Don't waste more than 10 days on it.

Live, and I do mean LIVE, in the Upper Midwest, The Rocky Mountain West, and Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, Florida, Missouri. I think he can take every last one of these states.

I don't think Obama should do a tour given the rampant racism in these areas. He should drop in and tour these states as he criss-crosses the country during his campaign. Pandering to these people and their so-called cultural interpreters only gives them an opportunity to embarrass him and his supporters. Obama does not need any advice from me but the most that he should give these folks is the old smile and wave move. A concentrated tour would be a tactical error. Get these people on and off-stage one day at a time at two to three week intervals.

I think this year the blue collar constituency is likely to split. One group could go with McCain; another group may buy in to Obama's promise of change to an agenda that favors lower income citizens; and still another group, frustrated by the choices, is likely to stay home. This means that while the split in their votes may be a threat to the Democratic base it could be neutralized by the dynamism created by the Obama campaign.

There is the distinct possibility that a great deal of the loss of blue collar whites could be made up by the new coalition that Obama promises to bring into the fall election. Estimates by the Associated Press are that the new voters Democrats have attracted in the primaries thus far amount to 3.5 to 4 million.

If this proportion holds up in the fall elections, one would have to triple the number of new voters to about 10 to 12 million. This substantial number of change voters should be the focus of the campaign rather than lavishing resources on voters in the conservative heartland of the nation that will most likely not vote for Barack Obama in any case.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/newsandviews/2008/05/ron_walters_an_open_letter_to.html

The same way that the GOP has ignored African- Americans for the past 40 years, I say why talk to a brick wall. Obama should just place an ad touting his polices and make a speech in some of these states no .....

 1. drinking beer

 2. playing horseshoes

 3. kowtowing to their agendas

if he does he will never be President.

He's going to have to pay SOME attention to these folks. Doesn't have to be a lot. But, he'll have do to it. I've said it before - his reachout to Appalachia isn't for those voters; it's for the Suburban Independents who COULD vote for him over McCain.

Yes, he will have to pay some attention to these voters, We all agree. He needs to do it on his terms, however, not their terms. I agree with newsoulus. Skip the barbecues and beer drinking.