Barack Obama doesn’t have to win over most progressives — a lot of them are already supporting him or will over McCain. What he has to win are folks like the people in our local Democratic group — the people we rely on here in WV to make those GOTV calls, organize rides to the polls and strong-arm their buddies at the VFW and the union hall and the workplace and at church to vote for Obama over McCain.

They are comfortable with John McCain. They know him well from all his years of public service. They may not like all of his policies, but they at least think they know what they are getting with him. It was the same for them with Hillary Clinton — who they knew quite well from all of her time as First Lady and in the public spotlight since then.

They don’t feel comfortable with Obama just yet — he has not closed the deal with them. Not just with women, but also with a lot of men here and in PA, OH, FL, MI, and any number of other states. And, last I checked, we needed a number of those states on the electoral college count unless the entire mathematics of elections has changed outright. We may be able to pick up some Western states — and that would be fantastic — but what if we don’t? What if we come down to Ohio again — which is also iffy on a number of levels, including GOP dirty tricks problems in a LOT of counties.

I did a post a while back on "Crossing the Archie Bunker Divide, " and I wanted to revisit it in light of some things that have cropped up. Pam Spaulding had a post on the juxtaposition of a story about Rush Limbaugh belittling Obama and the flying of a ginormous Confederate flag by some yahoo in Florida. If anyone thinks that racial politics is not alive and well, just take a peek at that — and at Dave’s piece on dog whistle memes throughout the primary, then at this piece on a recent radio show digging into the deep-seated racial questions lurking below some of the surface. (And, while I’m thinking of it, what in the hell is Howard Kurtz doing with a headline that refers to Hillary Clinton as "Ho." Jeebus, does the name "Don Imus" ring a frigging bell? Talk about offensive. And his non-apology after being forced to change it is even more insulting.)

Then do yourself an enormous favor and read this post from Rick Perlstein on how far we have come to even get to a point where Barack Obama could be the Democratic nominee:

…When I learned that the papers of Senator Paul Douglas were at the Chicago Historical Society (as it was known then; now it’s cursed with the decidedly more prosaic name the Chicago History Museum), I decided to make Douglas’s 1966 loss to Republican Charles Percy a key case study for my hypothesis. Douglas was a popular liberal lion first elected in 1948 and a civil rights champion, whose wife Emily Taft Douglas (a one-term congresswoman herself) had strode proudly across Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965 arm in arm with Martin Luther King. He was also, as an economist, one of the architects of many of the New Deal ideas and programs that created the world’s first mass middle class.

In the summer of 1966, as debate over open housing raged in Congress, King marched not in Alabama but in Chicago, to implore the city to enforce its own open housing ordinance, passed in 1963—which, if Chicago did, would be a first. It was the most segregated city in the north. As I put it in NIXONLAND (drawing on this classic study):

You could draw a map of the boundary within which the city’s seven hundred thousand Negroes were allowed to live by marking an X wherever a white mob attacked a Negro. Move beyond it, and a family had to face down a mob of one thousand, five thousand, or even (in the Englewood riot of 1949, when the presence of blacks at a union meeting sparked a rumor the house was to be "sold to niggers") ten thousand bloody-minded whites. In the late 1940s, when the postwar housing shortage was at its peak, you could find ten black families living in a basement, sharing a single stove but not a single flush toilet, in "apartments" subdivided by cardboard. One racial bombing or arson happened every three weeks…. In neighborhoods where they were allowed to "buy" houses, they couldn’t actually buy them at all: banks would not write them mortgages, so unscrupulous businessmen sold them contracts that gave them no equity or title to the property, from which they could be evicted the first time they were late with a payment.

And in 1966, a teenager answering a job ad walked over the border from Chicago into the all-white city of Cicero, and for that sin and no other was beaten to death. That was what Martin Luther King came to fight in Chicago.

At the Chicago History Museum, the Douglas collection covers seven hundred "linear feet"—archivists’ metric for how big a collection would be if you stacked the papers one atop another. And somehow, somewhere, I stumbled upon Box 722, which contained all the letters Senator Paul Douglas received about open housing and Martin Luther King’s presence in Chicago. I quote many of them in a section of NIXONLAND of which I’m most proud, the one with the most original research and historical insights: the one on how "open housing" opened up the conservative backlash that inaugurated the Republican dominance of the politics of our own generation. I’ve always wanted to do a post printing, for the historical record, all the letters I put down in my research notes.

That’s what I’m about to do. They comprise an unmatched emotional history on how the white middle class built by the New Deal learned to vote Republican. And an unmatched marker of how far this nation has come, now that this same city has given us our first African American presidential nominee.

My heart wants to believe that problems for Obama in introducing himself simply have to do with making inroads in areas where he is less well known, in redefining McCain as a flip-flopping, Bush wannabe, and making himself a real, multi-dimensional person who cares about the day-to-day economic and social needs of blue collar folks around the country. But the part of me that has lived too long in the cynical real world worries that, as Rick details, we may have some serious difficulty pushing past the still-festering racial wounds, especially once the Wurlitzer gears up its nasty sideshow.

Sometimes it seems to me that in our echo chamber of progressive blogs we forget altogether that there are a helluva lot more Democrats out there who are not progressive, a lot of whom have been running a lot of local party apparatus since before many of us were born. They are cautious, they need to be wooed — and they aren’t yet feeling the love from the Obama folks. They simply aren’t.

And that is a HUGE problem for all of us if we want to beat McCain in November. Because those people vote — every election — and we may lose them and their efforts. I hear rumors that is about to change, and that Team Obama will be rolling out a lot of outreach to these folks who were, by and large, Clinton supporters, and that Clinton staffers and allies are already helping with this. If this is true, it cannot come soon enough.

Maybe it’s because I live in the heart of the blue collar rust belt and mining belt territory — or that our local Dem organization is fairly old and settled in their ways — but it’s a big problem here and among any number of family members and friends with whom I have spoken who have been staunch Democrats and who just don’t feel comfortable yet that they even know Obama. He needs an intro to these folks — Obama’s recent appearance in Appalachia is a great start. Especially if he keeps coming back the way John Edwards did in the primary and Bobby Kennedy did in 1968. And they need to know he cares about what’s in their hearts, and what isn’t in their wallets after 8 years of George Bush failures. His just announced "Change That Works For You" events are a great start on that economic conversation.

But the honest truth is that he hasn’t sold these folks on a vote for him. And he needs to do so — fast — before McCain’s cronies start their slime machine up and do worse than the already smarmy SPAM e-mails have done. We all know it is coming — it’s a short window of intro honeymoon in the press for Obama, if he gets one at all from the fickle pack. And we do not help him or his campaign by only looking at things through rose-colored glasses of best-case scenario.

Obama’s campaign staff is to be congratulated for running a lean, effective campaign — and for speeches like the one in the YouTube above which rose above the din of idiocy to talk about gut-level issues we all need to hear about and talk about more often. But the general election campaign is a whole new level of calculus. If we don’t have this conversation now, when are we ever going to have it? Would love to know your thoughts on how we move forward from here…together.


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