"We're votin' for the n****r!"

[freedomburns]

One of the most interesting stories I have read so far about this campaign.  Kind of funny, and somewhat revealing of current attitudes, I think.


http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/10/on-road-western-pennsylvania.html

On the Road: Western Pennsylvania

So a canvasser goes to a woman's door in Washington, Pennsylvania. Knocks. Woman answers. Knocker asks who she's planning to vote for. She isn't sure, has to ask her husband who she's voting for. Husband is off in another room watching some game. Canvasser hears him yell back, "We're votin' for the n***er!"

Woman turns back to canvasser, and says brightly and matter of factly: "We're voting for the n***er."

In this economy, racism is officially a luxury. How is John McCain going to win if he can't win those voters? John Murtha's "racist" western Pennsylvania district, where this story takes place, is some of the roughest turf in the nation. But Barack Obama is on the ground and making inroads due to unusually strong organizing leadership.

In Washington County, a bellwether in this traditional swing state that John Kerry carried by a mere 552 votes out of over 96,000 cast, the Obama campaign's mood is optimistic but very cautious. The campaign has registered over 4,000 new voters in this county, and enough statewide since the primary season to push the Democratic registration edge to over 1.2 million.

Still, Barack Obama wasn't competitive in the primary, and getting volunteers, knocks and phone calls was tough over the summer. "After the primary many of the Obama supporters were tired and were enjoying their summer," according to longtime resident and Obama Neighborhood Team Leader Greg Roth, whose house was used as a staging location during the primary. "Also, it took some time for some of the Hillary supporters come around."
(more at link)


People worry about the "Bradley Effect", but I think cultural attitudes have changed so much that there may be a "Reverse Bradley Effect".  Some people may be unwilling to admit to friends or pollsters that they would vote for a black man.  But in the privacy of the voting booth, when they start to consider real economic prospects for themselves and their families, they are going to be willing to pull the lever for Obama.  Racism is a luxury we cannot afford at this point.  Hopefully people will realize that.

[MR maverick]

A reverse bradley ahhhh it makes sense.

McCain voter returning from rally:  "Yea I support McCain / Palin not that Muslim Obama"

McCain voter on election night at the booth:  "Damn these last 8 years have been bad and these republicans aren't offering nothing" .. bonk for Obama

Voter then tells the exit pollster  "I voted for McCain"
 

Obama wins 400EVs  MSM didn't see it coming.

All nice but i don't se it happening peoples racial attitude are pretty much set at hate for the other race.

[freedomburns]

And then there is this article on campaigning in West Virginia.  Obama plans to spend $5 million in West Virginia in the final two weeks to flip this state.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1008/14707.html

Polls tighten in W.Va. as race takes back seat

LOGAN, W.Va. — West Virginia's Democratic leaders on Saturday embarked on a winding, eight-county bus tour through the south of the state, and in one small mining town after another, they sold Barack Obama to small crowds of Democrats with remarkable directness.

"He is black" was the first thing Kenny Perdue, the state's AFL-CIO president, said. "The gentleman that's in the White House and John McCain — they're white men. And I'm absolutely ashamed of what George W. Bush has done to this country."

The president of the United Mine Workers, Cecil Roberts, spoke after Perdue in a parking lot set in the flat plateau below the remains of a strip-mined mountain.

"I'd rather have a black friend than a white enemy," he said. State Democratic Party Chairman Nick Casey spoke too. Casey, 57, grew up Irish Catholic in Charleston, and he said the bus was following John F. Kennedy's bus route in the 1960 Democratic primary.

"There's a lot of people out there think you're a bunch of inbred, redneck racists," he told a couple dozen people wearing union hats and jackets. "They say you won't vote for a man who's black."

"The rest of the country thought when Kennedy ran we were a bunch of ignorant, inbred religious bigots," he said. "They were wrong, and we made Kennedy president."

As a local judicial candidate spoke in Logan, two of the politicians wandered off to marvel at the scene taking place behind them. There, a polite, black former Marine, Mitchell Cook, was handing blue Obama bumper stickers and yard signs to drivers pulling into the mall and was even attaching the bumper stickers himself to some of the pickups and battered two-doors.

"Twenty, 30 years ago, if you had a black man stopping cars, handing out signs right here, he would have been shot," said state Auditor Glen Gainer. "Now they're stopping, asking him to put on stickers."

West Virginia isn't exactly a battleground state. After Obama was shellacked here by Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Democratic primary — the southern coal counties voted for her by margins as high as 8-to-1 — both his campaign and John McCain's assumed he'd lose it.

And with good reason: West Virginia represents a cross-section of the voters who have been hardest for Obama to reach. It's among the oldest, whitest and least-educated states in America. It was the place where reporters found white Democrats who freely use the N-word and swore they'd never vote for Obama.

But maybe the campaigns and the press misread the depth of prejudice in West Virginia. Or maybe, since the May primary, something has changed here.

The state is also a historic Democratic stronghold, if one where Democrats sometimes put the words "NRA member" beneath their names on campaign signs. And four recent public polls suggested the race here has closed from a double-digit McCain lead to a slender one.
(much more at link)

[Snowguy716]

This sounds like something my late Grandparents would have said.

They told sooo many jokes where the punch line revolved around "some n*gger".. but in reality they weren't racist.  My grandmother's boss was a black woman and they were very good friends throughout her life and she came and gave a wonderful Eulogy at my grandmother's funeral.

I think the racism in a lot of people is shallower than we suppose.

[freedomburns]

This sounds like something my late Grandparents would have said.

They told sooo many jokes where the punch line revolved around "some n*gger".. but in reality they weren't racist.  My grandmother's boss was a black woman and they were very good friends throughout her life and she came and gave a wonderful Eulogy at my grandmother's funeral.

I think the racism in a lot of people is shallower than we suppose.

You may be right, Snowguy.  Now we have this new story appearing at Politico.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1008/14691.html

Racists for Obama?
New polling and a trickle of stories from the battleground states suggest that Sen. Barack Obama's coalition includes one unlikely group: white voters with negative views of African-Americans.

Race has become the elephant in the room of the 2008 presidential campaign, with Obama’s prospect of becoming the first black president drawing some Americans closer to him while pushing others away. At times, the contest has slipped into a familiar dynamic of allegations of racism and outraged denial — but it's also challenged some easy assumptions about race, racism and prejudice.

“What you see is it’s perfectly possible to hold a negative view of at least one aspect of African-Americans and yet simultaneously prefer Obama,” said Charles Franklin, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Racial feelings are not as cut and dried — not as black and white — as people often say.”

Franklin explored those contradictions in a large, national survey taken in mid-September, when the Illinois Democratic senator's rival, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), led in many polls and the nation’s economic woes had not yet produced a deep crisis. The poll asked voters whether they agreed with the statement that “African-Americans often use race as an excuse to justify wrongdoing." About a fifth of white voters said they “strongly agreed.” Yet among those who agreed, 23 percent said they’d be supporting Obama.

“This result is reasonable if you believe that race is not as monolithic an effect as we might easily assume,” Franklin said, noting that 22 percent of those who "strongly disagreed" said they'd be supporting McCain.

Anecdotes from across the battlegrounds suggest that there’s a significant minority of prejudiced white voters who will swallow hard and vote for the black man.

“I wouldn’t want a mixed marriage for my daughter, but I’m voting for Obama,” the wife of a retired Virginia coal miner, Sharon Fleming, told the Los Angeles Times recently.

One Obama volunteer told Politico after canvassing the working-class white Philadelphia neighborhood of Fishtown recently, "I was blown away by the outright racism, but these folks are … undecided. They would call him a [racial epithet] and mention how they don't know what to do because of the economy.”
(more at link)


I think this is a real shift in culutural values for this country.  I think people realize that racism is a luxury that this country can ill afford at this moment.  You can go back to being racist after we set the ship back on the right course.

fb

[Zarn]

People really like to read between the lines on this site, don't they? :p

[freedomburns]

People really like to read between the lines on this site, don't they? :p

What the hell is that supposed to mean?  How can you manage to consistently use words in your posts that never really say anything?

[Alaska Thunderfvck]

Thankfully today while I was canvassing I didn't receive answers like this. Though, I did get one particularly rude person who told us when I asked who they considered voting for "that's confidential information...GO AWAY!"

Other that, pretty uneventful

[InsaneTrollLogic]

mmmmmmmmm..... hmmmmmmm....

[Workers' Friend]

If this is true, this is the biggest paradox I have ever seen.

Wow, Bush fas ed the economy in the ass.

[InsaneTrollLogic]

If this is true, this is the biggest paradox I have ever seen.

Wow, Bush fas ed the economy in the ass.

Well, I kinda hope that Bush got his rocks off doing that. It's not Christian to hope otherwise....but its time for him to go to put back on his jammies and go to sleep in the other room like the dog he is. 

[12th Doctor]

Ugh... Washington, PA is the ass end of no where.  They like to keep the gene pool pretty tight down there.

[InsaneTrollLogic]

Ugh... Washington, PA is the ass end of no where.  They like to keep the gene pool pretty tight down there.

I call those places "ARE"- Ass Ramin' Eygpt.

[InsaneTrollLogic]

I voted for the nigger. Did you vote for the nigger?

[Vasall des Midas]

I voted for the nigger. Did you vote for the nigger?

Washington County did not.

[MR maverick]

A reverse bradley ahhhh it makes sense.

McCain voter returning from rally:  "Yea I support McCain / Palin not that Muslim Obama"

McCain voter on election night at the booth:  "Damn these last 8 years have been bad and these republicans aren't offering nothing" .. bonk for Obama

Voter then tells the exit pollster  "I voted for McCain"
 

Obama wins 400EVs  MSM didn't see it coming.

All nice but i don't se it happening peoples racial attitude are pretty much set at hate for the other race.

Good thing this post is still here.


Ahhh I was off  by 30 EV votes.

[I left.]

A reverse bradley ahhhh it makes sense.

McCain voter returning from rally:  "Yea I support McCain / Palin not that Muslim Obama"

McCain voter on election night at the booth:  "Damn these last 8 years have been bad and these republicans aren't offering nothing" .. bonk for Obama

Voter then tells the exit pollster  "I voted for McCain"
 

Obama wins 400EVs  MSM didn't see it coming.

All nice but i don't se it happening peoples racial attitude are pretty much set at hate for the other race.

Good thing this post is still here.


Ahhh I was off  by 30 EV votes.

And simultaneously, you claimed that Obama would lose the election because of racism...which version was one to take serious?