Those mills closed decades ago. Jones & Laughlin wasn’t a Repubican failure. What’s Obama going to do…start a war to crank up demand for steel? Heck, he’ll close down even more with his phony global warming concerns and tax increases.

On the identity issue, Obama’s black (sort of) and McCain’s Irish…what’s the difference?

This is from a weirdly desultory story in the NYT yesterday in which the writer, Michael Powell, does his very best to insinuate that white rural Pennsylvania voters won’t vote for Obama because he’s black.

Note that Powell chose not to write:

Obama is not a sure bet, or

Obama may lose, or

Obama trails in polls, or

Voters say they like McCain more than Obama.

No, he had to lard on layers of qualification and slimey equivocation. “Doesn’t sound like”?? what, in a factual sense, is the writer trying to convey here? This is toxic journalism.

Here’s my translation:

“I was sent to write a story about how Obama’s doing in Pennsylvania. The 35 people I spoked to over the three days I was given to write the thing were all over the map, and none too bright or articulate about why they have no idea what’s going on in America, but are surely unsatsified with their own lives and well, if you really push them, will say they don’t quite trust people with brown skin. I have a deadline, so I reached for the handiest narrative with some emotional pull to it: Obama’s a mystery man to rural Americans who are a bit, sorta, kinda, racist in a semi-honorable way because they’re poorly educated and have no idea what hit them when the steel business went south, killing their region economically.”

Perhaps you can see why readers much prefer the NYT code language.

Interestingly, Powell makes no attempt to develop the theme that these voters have reasons to vote against Obama merely because his skin is brown. Instead, he merely repeats the assertion.

Of course, he finds voters who are turned off by McCain as well, but doesn’t really develop any themes about why that is so, either.

Writing about race will always be extremely difficult, especially given the trumped up “sensitivity” so Americans wield within the broader theme of moral narcissism. But surely the NYT can do better than this.

——————————————————————————–

August 21, 2008
Rural Swath of Big State Tests Obama
By MICHAEL POWELL
RACCOON TOWNSHIP, Pa. — Wander up a gravel road and ask George Timko about Barack Obama and John McCain and he wrinkles his nose. Neither of those guys strikes him as a prize.

Mr. Timko is a burly fellow, with close-cropped white hair and a Fu Manchu mustache, and a gold necklace that rests on his bare chest. “Barack Obama makes me nervous,” said Mr. Timko, a 65-year-old retiree with a garden hose in hand. “Who is he? Where’d he come from? ”

As for Senator McCain? He shook his head. “He keeps talking about being a prisoner of war back in Vietnam. Great. The economy stinks; tell me his plan.”

To roam the rural reaches of western Pennsylvania, through largely white working-class counties, is to understand the breadth of the challenge facing the two presidential candidates. But this economically ravaged region, once so solidly Democratic, poses a particular hurdle for Senator Obama.

From the desolation of Aliquippa — where the Jones & Laughlin steel mill loomed at the foot of the main boulevard — to the fading beauty of Beaver Falls to the neatly tended homes of retired steel workers in Hopewell, one hears much hesitating talk about Mr. Obama, some simply quizzical or skeptically political, and some not-so-subtly racial.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York ran 40 percentage points ahead of Mr. Obama here during the Democratic primary. With its neighborhoods of white working-class laborers and retirees and fraying party loyalties, it has become a most uncertain political terrain and an inviting target for Mr. McCain — and one that could tip the electoral balance in Pennsylvania, a place packed with electoral votes.

Labor operatives line up behind Mr. Obama, and about a third of the 35 white voters who were interviewed leaned toward him. But no one feels confident predicting how many white Clinton voters will transfer their affections to Mr. Obama.

Raccoon Township, with a population just over 3,000, sprawls atop a hill in Beaver County, a 92 percent white and deeply blue-collar province. For a century it formed a stud in the Steel Necklace, a stretch of Pennsylvania and Ohio defined by belching steel mills and robust union wages. But as the mills shuttered, voters tipped Democratic by ever-narrower margins: Al Gore bested George W. Bush by eight percentage points in 2000; John Kerry took Mr. Bush by fewer than three in 2004.

Political scientists tend to paint Pennsylvania in broad swaths: There is Philadelphia and its liberal-to-centrist suburbs; the middle of the state, which is rural, gun-loving and rightward-leaning; and the western third, which, except for Pittsburgh, tends to hold ever-so-tenuously to Democratic loyalties.

The Center for Politics and Public Affairs at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa., in a poll conducted last week, found Mr. Obama piling up big margins in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, but lagging in these western, working-class counties.

“This is not an easy land for any candidate, and you might say a black one has more trouble than most,” said G. Terry Madonna, the center’s director.

To what extent white voter concern has become a surrogate for racial anxiety is unclear.

Many voters talk of reading a stream of false and shadowy rumors purveyed by e-mail: Mr. Obama does not put his hand on his heart during the national anthem, he is a Muslim, he did not say hello to enlisted men in Afghanistan. Some disregard these rumors; some do not.

Mr. Obama is an Ivy League-educated lawyer campaigning in towns where an eighth-grade education and a sturdy back once purchased a good life. And he talks of soaring hope to people mistrustful of the same.

“People around here want pragmatic, practical language,” said Tina Shannon, the 49-year-old daughter of a steel-mill worker and a liberal activist. “They don’t want high-flown talk.”

This said, Mr. McCain quickens few pulses. Vietnam, where he served in the military and was held captive for more than five years, seems distant. And not all laugh at his commercials poking fun at Mr. Obama’s “celebrity” status.

Fifty yards down the gravel road from Mr. Timko’s home, Brenda Goff, 55, a pharmacy worker who describes herself as a “Hillary girl” but is fine with Mr. Obama. As for Mr. McCain?

“I don’t like his commercials — it’s like he thinks we’re stupid,” Ms. Goff said.

Issues might seem to break toward Mr. Obama. Only 2 of 38 people interviewed — most in random door-knocking — favored remaining in Iraq. (Mr. Obama advocates a 16-month withdrawal timetable; Mr. McCain vows to stay until the war is won but suggests that he would have troops out by 2013.)

Few want a handout, but fewer want government to abandon them. A simmering hurt suffuses their words, a sense that neither hard work nor their unions could save them.

James Stanford, a retired and still heavily muscled steel worker, stood at his door and spoke of a pension that had evaporated. “Obama got one thing right,” he said. “We are bitter here.”

John Sylvester, 76, remembers when you could not find a parking space in Beaver Falls. You danced Saturday night at the Sons of Italy Club and drank with Dutch Town and River Rat neighborhood boys.

Mr. Sylvester labored in a steel mill for 42 years. Then the mill owner declared bankruptcy. Now he was bent over a chipped fire hydrant, putting down a coat of yellow paint for $7 an hour.

His blue eyes were piercing beneath a white sun visor. “I got a little money in the end but nothing to speak of,” he said.

Decades of job losses have created a youthful diaspora — you can knock on many doors without finding anyone under age 45. Declining enrollments forced Raccoon Township to close its elementary and middle schools. Political wisdom holds that such fractures favor the Democrats.

But Mr. Obama does not sound like a sure bet.

“Obama’s very charismatic but if you listen closely, he hasn’t said a whole lot,” Mr. Sylvester said.

In Raccoon, Kelly Dobbins, a middle-aged factory worker, offered the same. “I’m like a duck in the water — I float there but underneath I’m paddling hard as I can go,” Mr. Dobbins said. “What’s pushing me toward McCain is Obama. Who is he? Where does he stand?”

Such questions hint at a cultural disconnect. Mr. Obama would invest tens of billions of dollars in retooling mills and factories to fashion windmills and solar panels. He notes that Denmark and the Netherlands have grown fat off the new energy economy.

But environmentalism holds little attraction in a county where soot-covered stoops and dirty rivers were accepted as an unfortunate trade-off of a prosperous industrial age.

“Until people see a factory transformed, they really don’t put much store by this talk,” said the Rev. Henry Knapp of First Presbyterian Church in Beaver.

Still, two-thirds of Pennsylvanians surveyed in the Franklin & Marshall poll ranked the economy as their No. 1 concern.

Hookstown is surrounded by emerald fields near the West Virginia border. White-haired Art Seckman stepped gingerly off his porch.

Mr. Seckman puts no faith in Mr. McCain. “He looks tired, and he’s gung-ho about war,” Mr. Seckman said. “I was a Hillary guy, but Obama sounds honest and he’s young and he understands the modern economy.”

He paused, and laughed, “Maybe, funny as it sounds, it’s time for a black man to fix this mess.”

For a century, Aliquippa formed the primal heart of Beaver County. There was the mill, the company store and the Italian Renaissance library built by the daughter of the mill founder.

Ethnic communities occupied each hill. Croats, Italians, Irish and blacks worked, fought, and drank together. Now the downtown offers swaybacked homes and boarded storefronts, and rubble. Aliquippa is 35 percent black, the highest percentage in the county. Glenn Kimbrough, 65, with a silver-tipped goatee and a neat Afro, came out of the mills after 37 years.

Mr. Kimbrough is an Obama supporter but he would not hazard a guess as to how his white buddies will vote. He said economic disaster had exacerbated racial tensions. With the mills closed, the work force is resegregating.

Carl Davidson, a white friend and an Obama supporter, sat in Mr. Kimbrough’s living room. “My father voted for Edwards in the primary and now he wants McCain,” said Mr. Davidson, whose father and grandfather labored in the mills. “Without realizing it, he’s wrapped up in white-identity politics.”

Sorting out white-voter discomfort with Mr. Obama is tricky business. Most speak of unease with his newness. But one in five primary voters surveyed in the Edison/Mitofsky exit poll in Pennsylvania said race was a factor.

Ivan Stickles, a carpenter, worked on his motorcycle in his driveway in Hopewell. Mr. Stickles, 57, is not taking what he sees as a gamble on Obama.

“There’s this e-mail that he didn’t shake hands with the troops,” Mr. Stickles said of a rumor that is false. “I don’t have the time to check out if it’s true, but if it is, it’s very offensive.”

In Hookstown, Kristine Lakovich, 48, works the counter at Kiner’s Superette. She likes Mr. Obama, a preference she keeps to herself. “If you ask people around here, he’s not exactly the right answer,” Ms. Lakovich said. “People are split between their politics and their prejudice.”

Nationally, the Obama campaign shies from talk of race, preferring to argue that the poor economy will dominate this election. Such delicacy holds no purchase here. An organizer with the United Steelworkers met with 30 workers in Beaver. He could not have been blunter. Mr. Obama, he told them, stands for national health care, strong unions and preserving Social Security.

“Some of you won’t vote for him because he’s black,” the organizer concluded. “Well, he’s a Democrat. Get over it.”

Nisha Thompson
Sunlight Foundation
Online Organizer
nthompson(at)sunlightfoundation(dot)com

Woody>What kind of question is
>that? You would have to go back to that
>time period, understand the original
>intent of the amendment, and apply
>it within that context.

Woody, I mean if the 14th Amendment did not exist and was proposed today, with its citizenship and equal protection clauses.

The Democratic history left off how Brown was murdered and that Bill Clinton laughed at his funeral.

- – -

On civil rights votes, Johnson was pretty good at strong-arming, blackmailing, and giving political gifts to his party’s representatives. Many, if not most, didn’t vote on conviction. But, the Civil Rights Act would not have passed without Republican support.

For the Republicans who didn’t support it, you automatically and falsely assume that racism was behind it, which is not the case. Same with the Voting Rights Act, which keeps getting extended and applied to just a few states–all symbolically. There are legitimate disputes that extend beyond race.

But one good thing about the Voting Rights Act is that it has forced the Democrats to cut back on its gerrymandering and has resulted in more black districts and more black representation–thanks to Republican efforts.

I notice that this once-over-lightly history includes a quote from the late (black) Ron Brown, mentioning how the U.S. was built by immigrants and slaves. You have to wonder why that isn’t enough.

I suppose the corresponding GOP history is going to feature the following record of votes on Johnson’s civil rights act:

Original House version:

Southern Democrats: 7% in favor
Southern Republicans: 0% in favor

Northern Democrats: 7% opposed
Northern Republicans: 15% opposed

Senate Version:

Southern Democrats: 5% in favor
Southern Republicans: 0% in favor

Northern Democrats: 2% opposed
Northern Republicans: 16% opposed.

Just in case anyone is wondering why the GOP never captured the black vote — and in particular, the southern black vote — from that horrible, racist, historical revisionist Democratic Party. If you were black in the Jim Crow south, you had to get good at distinguishing the racist from the even more racist, the better to avoid the latter. And, it seems, white GOP politicians had to become similarly attuned, the better to attract the latter’s vote.

http://www.alternet.org/story/95649/the_right%27s_five_most_hilariously_boneheaded_anti-obama_smears/

The Right’s Five Most Hilariously Boneheaded Obama Smears

As for the “hidden history” of the Democratic party, who is hiding anything? From the time of the 13th-15th amendments to 1932, freed slaves and their descendants supported the Party of Emancipation, the Republicans. Democrats were sometimes populist/progressive, and sometimes not, but the party was not popular with black voters until the Depression and Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. Even after 1932, there was a racist, states-rights wing of the party that hung on into the 1970s, at which time its legions were enticed by the more cunning, elegant politics of racial resentment and division promoted by Nixon and then Reagan and now the whole Rove-ing pack.

Btw, nice to see that you are now getting your American history from Eric Foner, a highly-respected commie historian.

The Obama campaign has at long last lifted the veil of mystery that has surrounded the Democratic presidential candidate’s tax increase plans. Mr. Obama’s two economic advisers, Jason Furman and Austan Goolsbee, have an op-ed piece in today’s Wall Street Journal, and it isn’t pretty.

…(The plan) amounts to a declaration of war on two-income families, a marriage penalty of punitive proportions. If those two single persons with income just under $200,000 get married, Mr. Obama is going to hammer them with a huge tax increase. If the second earner, who in many cases is the woman, is going to have to give 54% of what she earns to the government, she might as well stay home with the children.

Mr. Obama may be able to get away with symbolic slights to women, such as not picking Senator Clinton as vice president. But punishing them with confiscatory taxes for participating in the workforce at a high income level moves the slight into the realm of substance.

Don’t forget. Bush bombed the levees around New Orleans to get rid of the blacks.

What kind of question is that? You would have to go back to that time period, understand the original intent of the amendment, and apply it within that context.

Today, I suspect that liberals would want to twist it to mean something never intended. That would create a new debate.

I’m with reg on this and then some. Woody’s move is here, as almost always, to voluntarily secede from the rhetorical community by just ignoring “the rules.”

I don’t think anyone denies the shameful history of the Democrats here, but this partisan shot from the WSJ of all places is laughably selective. In the specific charge he leveled that the Dems didn’t put this on their cite, well, OK, technically guilty. But what is the standard for inclusion on a breezy history on a web site? This schmuck, formerly of the Reagan administration, sets himself up as judge. I guarantee that if the Dems were to meet this demand, there would just be another. And this would go on ad nauseum, with the Democrats expected to offer one mea culpa after another, which is precisely the point. This is a bit of cheap politics, not an honest effort at accountability.

To even respond to it, is to give it undeserved merit. It’s as crude as a child’s drawing. I’ll give the Republican hit squad credit–they’re good street fighters since they like to hit first and hit dirty.

Also, note the hypocrisy. The Republicans generally like to laugh and sneer at national apologies, but now that it suits their needs, this Republican thinks it’s a swell idea. It’s only a good idea because he can use the notion to demean someone.

Note one more bit of subtle hypocrisy. The Dems could stage no such apology this year anyway, and this clever Reaganaut knows it. He’s trying to create a double-bind. If, Obama, being black, offers up said apology, then he’ll be eviscerated for secretly wanting to advance a “black”agenda. He’ll be the scary black man who wants to give special treatment to the blacks. If no apology is offered, then our writer gets to wear the self-righteous (but thoroughly corrupt and dishonest), mantle of correcting injustice.

This is how the Republicans play with race. They don’t roll out the Klan, or any such crudity. They talk about fictional welfare queens, and paroled prisoners, and denounce rap artists, and demand apologies from candidates, all of whom happen to be black. Isn’t that funny?

One final thought. reg’s point is understated if anything. Johnson absolutely knew that he was tearing apart the party when he moved to promote civil rights. He went ahead and destroyed part of the party to do what was right. Maybe the Dems should proudly include their shameful history and the noble effort to change it. I certainly wouldn’t expect our WSJ writer to include that chapter–it doesn’t fit his narrative and so can be safely discarded.

Interesting that at GOP.com’s history pages there is absolutely NOTHING mentioned regarding the Republican party’s history since 1919. That’s one way to keep from being embarrassed.

But oh my! The sins of the past! Well thank you for the naval gazing column by Jeffery Lord, Woody. That African-Americans have faithly supported Democrats by hugh %’s since FDR tells the relavant tale. Why can’t the GOP earn their votes? That’s the better question?

This kind of plea to history by Lord is simply a distraction from looking at the last 8 years of the Republican Party.

If you’re so proud of the Democratic Party, then you should be waving its entire history for all to see and stop trying to shift their disgrace onto the Republicans.

In the 1960′s, when the Republicans were trying to become a force in the South, they ran as moderates against the radical racist Democrats like Bull Connor. I was there working to kick the Democrats out for a more progressive (in a good sense) city and state. Any moderation made by southern Democrats were only in response to seeing that citizens were voting in Republicans to rid themselves of the embarrassing, racist Democratic politicians.

Democratic phony support of civil rights today is simply pandering for popular causes and buying votes by throwing out money for social programs that never pay off. Democrats don’t have to make major strides for civil rights, because they have the black vote in their hip pocket. One day, people will wake up and that will change.