Wednesday, October 01, 2008

Swimming upstream

For those voters out there who are still in the "undecided" category with regards to the upcoming presidential election, cartoonist Stuart Carlson has really spelled out the choice in clear terms for you:

Carlson


Even so, what looks to be a no-brainer is no guarantee Barak Obama will win this horse race on Nov. 4. Yes, there are some die-hard Republicans who'd vote for teh embalmed corpse of Richard Milhouse Nixon were he on the ballot this year, but other folks who aren't so die-hard are still waffling on Obama despite every indication this should be a runaway election for the Democrat. Lots of reasons/excuses are offered, but personally I believe it comes down to closet racism. That's the elephant in the room nobody really wants to acknowledge in 21st century America, but it's there all the same.

A case in point that hits close to home: My own 90-year-old grandmother (who I love dearly), who will curse Reagan and Bushes 1 & 2 at the merest hint of political discourse and has never, ever voted Republican in her life... well, she's talking about voting for McCain. Seriously. This woman despises Republicans with a passion, is a great fan of Jimmy Carter and will defend Bill Clinton's honor with surprising passion. But if the subject of Obama comes up, her immediate reaction is a derisive, "Oh him!"

Why doesn't she like Obama? He is, of course a close ally of the Kennedys and as close to the second coming of JFK as there's ever going to be (JFK being a demigod to my family somewhere between the pope and Jesus Christ in terms of reverence). Joe Biden, his running mate, is Catholic, which normally be all the reason anyone in my family would need to vote for that ticket. Her answer: "If he gets in, them blacks are going to be everywhere!"

My family's ancestry isn't one of affluent stock. Descended from poor Polish and German immigrants, my maternal grandparents never had much money even in the best of times and struggled through the Great Depression, picking cotton for many, many years in fields shoulder to shoulder with black and Mexican workers under the blistering Texas sun. As individuals, they got along, but as a group... well, one time tested way of boosting tattered self-esteem is to diminish others around you. Remember, this is way back before Jim Crow even went by that name, so it's not surprising that racial epithets became part of the fiber of their language, not to mention world view. One charismatic politician isn't going to overcome 90 years of ingrained thinking, even if she might come to like Obama as an individual were she ever to sit down and have a conversation with him. She's had a number of minorities as friends over the years that she speaks highly of, but these people are always exceptions, you see, somehow different or superior to the undesirable group from which they came.

I'm convinced there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of voters like my grandmother out there. People who may be ambivalent to, like or even love everything about Obama except for his skin color. That when the time comes in the voting booth, they simply cannot vote for a black candidate. The so-called Bradley Effect writ large. I don't know if these people will vote for McCain or simply stay home. I don't know if their votes will impact the election in any meaningful way. I've long assumed that my cynical generation--Generation X--along with the Millennials behind us and the Boomers who'd raised us had moved beyond the point where simple skin color could hold such sway over far more pressing issues. I hope that optimism plays out, but the cynic in me believes otherwise.

Now Playing: Talking Heads More Songs About Buildings & Food

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