Race and the race, cont.

Here's some more excerpts from that same George Packer article on Ohio swing voters:

“I think the party-line Democrats are having a hard time with Obama,” Bobbie Dunham, a retired fourth-grade teacher, told me. ...[S]he and the others had far more complaints about locals freeloading off public assistance than about the health-insurance industry and corporations..."I really just don’t trust Obama. He only says half-truths. He calls himself a Christian, but he only became one to run for office. He calls himself a black, but he’s two-thirds Arab.”

I asked where she had learned that.

“On the Internet.”

...

during the long Democratic primary fight it was precisely the white working class that kept denying Obama a lock on the nomination. The problem first became manifest in New Hampshire, a state that much of the media declared in advance to be the end of the road for Clinton. Two days after her victory, Andrew Kohut, of the Pew Research Center, published an Op-Ed in the Times about the failure of polls to predict the outcome. He had a theory: undetected racism among working-class whites. Clinton, he noted, beat Obama among whites with family incomes under fifty thousand dollars and also among those who hadn’t attended college. “Poorer, less well-educated white people refuse surveys more often than affluent, better-educated whites,” Kohut wrote. “Polls generally adjust their samples for this tendency. But here’s the problem: these whites who do not respond to surveys tend to have more unfavorable views of blacks than respondents who do the interviews.” This statistical glitch is different from the Bradley Effect, named for the black mayor of Los Angeles, Tom Bradley, who lost the California governorship in 1982 despite polls that had showed him in the lead, apparently because a small percentage of respondents would rather lie to a pollster than admit to opposing a candidate on the ground of his race. Still, the Bradley Effect and the Kohut Lacuna produce the same conclusion: a black candidate is likely to fare worse than preëlection polls would suggest.

...

I approached a man wearing a button that said “Hillary: Smart Choice.” He was a retired state employee named J. K. Patrick.

“East of Lexington, she’ll carry seventy per cent of the primary vote,” Patrick said. “She could win the general election in Kentucky. Obama couldn’t win.” Why not? “Race. I’ve talked to people—a woman who helped run county elections last year. She said she wouldn’t vote for a black man.” He added, “There’s a lot of white people that just wouldn’t vote for a colored person. Especially older people.” Indeed, no one among the two dozen people I talked to in Inez would even consider voting for Obama. His name often evoked a sharp racial hostility that was expressed without hesitation or apology...

Patrick himself feared that Obama’s race would threaten his own security and well-being. He said that it would be only natural for a black President to avenge the historical wrongs that his people had suffered at the hands of whites. “I really don’t want an African-American as President,” he said. “I think he would put too many minorities in positions over the white race. That’s my opinion.”

...

Like everyone else at the office, Hetrick had a story about a racist colleague, relative, or friend. “Oh God, it’s terrible,” she said. “I don’t know what we’re going to do! They’re rednecks.” She mentioned a prison worker and union member down in Chillicothe who, four years ago, had berated her for not enlisting him and his colleagues to volunteer for Kerry; when she made sure to call him this time, he told her that he wouldn’t work for Obama, and she understood the reason to be race.

...

“Barack’s father was from where? Kenya?” a seventy-one-year-old woman named Karla Cominsky suddenly asked. “Would that be any part of the world that was part of slavery?”

Gwinn explained that Obama had grown up mainly in Hawaii.

“My great-great-grandfather and grandmother came here from Morgan County,” Cominsky continued. “And guess who they brought with them? A little slave girl named Dinah. She was buried in the family plot. They felt she was one of the family.”

A campaign intern from Ohio University, in the nearby town of Athens, explained, “Most slaves came from western Africa, where the ships could just take them and go. Kenya’s from the eastern part.”

There was an awkward silence: the point of the woman’s story had not been immediately clear. Afterward, it occurred to me that this was how people in towns like Glouster were accustoming themselves to the thought of a black President.

This backs up my notion that the only thing that can save McCain is the color of Obama's skin. Die-hard "redneck racism" is only part of the equation. The fear of outsiders is strong, stronger if you're struggling...and to many small-town and suburban white Americans, a half-Kenyan who grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia is the consummate outsider. And there's also the suspicion of America's black political machine, the Al Sharptons and Jesse Jacksons who seem to focus on using government for race-based wealth redistribution. That's the only kind of black politician most of these working-class whites have ever seen.

So how can McCain's campaign not exploit this sense of uneasiness? The fear of Outsider Obama is all they've got. If they use that fear and lose the election, they may come out looking like villains. But if they do the "honorable" thing and let Obama appear as the guy-next-door that he actually is, they're pretty much certain to lose, and a chance of winning ugly is better than no chance of winning clean. Hence all the stuff about "palling around with terrorists," the tolerance of racism at the Palin rallies.

Yes, it's about race. But race is part of a bigger issue: who's the scary unknown and who's the known commodity. You don't have to be a Klansman to urge people to vote for the devil they know.

Of course, there are hopeful signs that the economy is so bad that working-class whites are prepared to go with the devil they don't know. (In a way, a really bad economy might be a good thing for the long-term future of American race relations, as people are forced to work with the folks next door even if those folks are from Mexico, Korea, or Lebanon.) In fact, here's the most hopeful quote from the Packer article:

Herbert was a devoted viewer of Fox News and talked in fluent sound bites about McCain’s post-Convention “bounce” and Sarah Palin’s “executive experience.” At one point, he had doubted that Obama stood a chance in Glouster. “From Bob and Pete’s generation there are a lot of racists—not out-and-out, but I thought there was so much racism here that Obama’d never win.” Then he heard a man who freely used the “ ‘n’ word” declare his support for Obama: “That blew my theory out of the water.”