rainbow.jpgIt’s admittedly a stretch, but there is a glass-half-full way to see the racial divide in the Tuesday’s West Virginia primary. When Rev. Jesse Jackson ran his campaign for president in 1988, he got 14 percent of the vote against eventual nominee Michael Dukakis. Not only did Illinois Sen. Barack Obama get almost double the percentage of the vote that Jackson got 20 years earlier, in terms of the raw vote totals he got more than four times the actual votes that Jackson got during his landmark campaign.

That’s progress of a sort — with the huge asterisk, of course, that Barack Obama, for good or ill, is no Jesse Jackson.

Nonetheless, there are undeniably troubling signs that lower-income, working-class voters in states like West Virginia are more repulsed by the idea of Obama’s smiling biracial benevolence in the White House than they are by the dour but undiluted whiteness of John McCain.

There’s only one way to attack that, and it begins with a line that Jackson himself often used as he traveled through electorally unfriendly territory: We may have come to America in different ships, but we’re in the same boat now. And we are all destined to drown if we don’t unite against the forces that are destroying our common dreams.

There is no doubt that Obama gets that message. But if he is to be an effective standard bearer for progressive change over the coming weeks and months, he is going to need to more assertively focus on the corrosive economic forces that are no respecter of race.

The effects are plain to see in "The Stress Test: A State-by-State Assessment of America’s Economic Health and a Prescription for Change," a report released this week by the Campaign for America’s Future, where I work. That report outlines just some of the economic pain being felt by working families.

The numbers are illuminating for a state like West Virginia, where Bush administration economic policies have not its people any favors. Since 2000, the state has seen a 25 percent decline in manufacturing jobs and a 6 percent drop in goods-producing jobs. While the state’s unemployment rate is a bit lower than it was in 2000, the average weekly wage of its workforce has only increased $24, in inflation-adjusted terms, since 2000. Of course, that $24 increase is quickly overwhelmed by such items as a 137 percent increase in the cost of a gallon of gasoline, the increased bite from health care costs (the percentage of people spending a quarter of their income on health care is up 42 percent since 2000) and the skyrocketing cost of college education — up 36 percent since 2000.

The people who have to live with this pain on a day-to-day basis are certainly susceptible to the old conservative blame game — blame Washington, blame "San Francisco liberals," blame illegal immigrants, blame al-Qaida, blame godless homosexuals and their gay pride parades. But they are also susceptible to a well-honed message that focuses their ire on eight years of policies that have favored corporations over people, and shows how conservatives who said they would get government off our backs have actually put government in their pockets, to serve the interests of their political contributors and cronies.

One of the facts that stood out in a recent Brookings Institution report about the relative economic conditions of black and white families was that not only have black men been losing economic ground since 2000 — from almost $30,000 in median personal income in 2000 to under $25,000 in 2005 — but white men are losing ground as well. When it comes to a dysfunctional economy, we are all in this together. The solutions — such as a fair trade policy, real economic stimulus that puts people to work rebuilding our nation’s infrastructure, tax policies that favor families rather than corporations that outsource jobs, and investments in a green energy future — connect to the same needs of voters in central Kentucky as they do to the voters of central Detroit or central Los Angeles.

As disheartening as it has been to see how quickly voters can get caught up in sideshows (such as the mind-meld between Obama and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright that clearly didn’t take) and outright falsehoods (Obama’s "schooling in a madrassa") the good news is that a growing percentage of Americans are seeing through the Bush administration’s happy talk about its policies.

Obama needs to continue to speak directly and forcefully to the economic anxieties of working people and not shy away from offering progressive, populist solutions. It will be difficult, but the rainbow coalition that Jackson’s presidential campaigns envisioned is in reach.

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