This is an unflinching report from the Appalachian heartland. It's where I live and work, both as an Obama activist and a journalist. Last Friday, I accompanied a production team from NHK, Japan's equivalent of PBS, on a tour of a rural West Virginia county on the Virginia border. On Saturday, NHK's news anchor, Goro Taguchi, flew into Dulles for coverage of the election. He met me in the Harrisonburg, VA, Obama campaign headquarters to see the vaunted ground game in operation late in the fourth quarter. His interview with me on the subject of race, WV, and the presidential election was filmed at Clementine, a semi-official "Obama" restuarant in Harrisonburg. Oh...we carried Harrisonburg, too.
Update: Let's understand the complexity of this term's usage in post-Barack America. It's the way a lot of people speak. And the beautiful complexity of this is...a lot of "rednecks," especially in deepest Appalachia are using the most offensive word in the language (when it's used toxically), as a badge of their support for Barack. Read Jim Webb's 'Born Fighting.' They're saying, 'If Barack backs us up, and he has to take it out in the back alley with these sonsabitches. We got his back.' If you read Webb, you'll understand that these are the people Barack wants to have at his back. For damn sure.
I spent election night at the party the Obama campaign threw at the Blue Nile (lovely, upscale Ethiopian restaurant) for volunteers in the amazing Harrisonburg, VA/Paint the Shenandoah Valley Blue campaign. Yep, we carried Harrisonburg, by two thousand votes. Four years ago, Bush carried the town 56-44 over Kerry. We had an army of volunteers, including a couple of damned good ones from the WV side of the border, flooding the neighborhoods and out in the Rockingham County countryside, too, right there in the heart of one of the agricultural/rural strongholds of what once was the GOP’s Solid South.
It ain’t no more. Is Virginia’s transformation the result of suburban explosion in the state's northern tier, and fueled by a Yankee/DC invasion? Yeah, but there’s something else going on, too. A lot of people of in The Valley who grew up Republican but see themselves as well-educated moderates with affinities for some of the finer things in life are now Democrats, and proud of it. They’re proud of Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, and they deeply respect Jim Webb, who is more Staunton or sothwest VA (ie, Scots-Irish) than blueblood Party of Lincoln.
And they view the Senator from Illinois as in the tradition of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. Virginia has embraced Obama as an adopted son.
It was interesting to hear the reaction when WV was called for McCain and by a decisive margin. There was derisive laughter, more than a few boos and a lot of “told you so’s.”
I was with some of the campaign’s top organizers and GOTV volunteers. We wondered if it was irony that WV has now officially joined Dixie (in terms of national politics, not majority party affiliation) at the very moment that Dixie is breaking down. One of them said, “Greenbrier, Pocahontas and Pendleton–that stretch of three border counties–are so sweet. We’d take them back in a heartbeat no matter how they vote there. They have more in common with us than with the rest of West Virginia. The rest of the state can just go fu…”
He paused then, said, “Nah. They’ll be alright over there in 2012. Right?”
I said, “Maybe. WV once was a reliable Democratic state in any year other than a
Republican landslide. All we really know right now is that it’s a reliably conservative Republican state even in a landslide Democratic year.”
On Wednesday back in rural, small-town WV, I was greeted with quite a few, “Well, you elected that n***er sonuvabitch” comments.
But, as I was making my afternoon rounds, which includes stops at several convenience stores where the locals gather to shoot the shit, a whole helluva a lot of regular ol’ workin’ class country West Virginians are hopeful now, especially the non-college-educated women, who have really warmed up to this guy since they started paying attention to him for the first time, which began for some when he gave the convention speech and for others when the markets crashed and the debates began.
(The PPP poll released late on Oct. 30 showed McCain carrying WV by 13 but Barack carrying women in the state 44-39.)
And here’s another example, on election day in a rural place of business, an old acquaintance (the real deal, too, bear hunter, no-bullshit, blue-collar, don’t-tread-on-me-ya-sonuvabitch WV guy) shoots me a hard look and says, “Ya gonna campaign with me for the n***er, Eddie?”
I say, “Well, by gawd I will if ya want me to, Chief.”
He grins, says, “Too late. Done voted for’im. I like the sonuvabitch. We need some damned change.”
I think WV’s gonna be okay in four years. There’s a lot out there to build on right now in WV, and especially so in the state’s reddest and most rural quarters.
But the problem is that the real work and leadership won’t be forthcoming from this state’s official Democratic Party regulars. Not at its top or middle levels, anyway.
Thus, keeping the grassroots Obama organizations alive everywhere is imperative. It's one of the greatest gifts he's given us--a structure for a real and lasting reform movement in America.
Community organizer, indeed.