White Working Class Voters and B. Hussein Obama

TW: This post from Packer is a follow-up from the article he wrote recently in the magazine where he had spent considerable time with working-class voters in Ohio. Here is someone attempting understand the gulfs that separate rural, working-class voters and their urban counterparts. Packer found the working-class voters like most everyone else integrated multiple variables in their ultimate voting decisions. Any effort to move beyond simplistic characterizations of voters (working-class, "elite" or otherwise) is okay with me.

From George Packer at New Yorker:

"...what happened to the white working-class vote this year. It turns out that something very interesting happened. You can read about it in a pair of excellent articles by a white upper-middle-class Times journalist named Michael Sokolove, who returned to his native Levittown, Pennsylvania twice during the campaign.. On his first visit, shortly before the Pennsylvania primary, which Obama lost badly to Clinton, Sokolove encountered a good deal of skepticism toward Obama’s lofty rhetoric; knowing the place intimately, he attributed the resistance to a degree of racism as well.

Last week, he talked to sixty Obama voters in Levittown; exactly zero had voted for Obama in the primary.

“Some said they had come around slowly, and many reported that they had been
open to Mr. McCain,”A lot of people in Levittown
needed the five months between the primary election and Tuesday to get used to a new idea. After Mrs. Clinton’s defeat, followed by a financial crisis that shook Americans to the core, they came to terms. If Mr. Obama’s race had been a factor, they eventually had to weigh it against other concerns.
“For a long time, I couldn’t ignore the fact that he was black, if you know what
I mean,” Mr. Sinitski, the heating and air-conditioning technician, told me.
“I’m not proud of that, but I was raised to think that there aren’t good black
people out there. I could see that he was highly intelligent, and that matters
to me, but my instinct was still to go with the white guy.”

This corresponds to what Stanley Greenberg, Bill Clinton’s pollster, writes in today’s Times about Macomb County, Michigan, the white working-class county he made famous as the birthplace of the Reagan Democrats:

Before the Democratic convention, barely 40 percent of Macomb County voters were “comfortable” with the idea of Mr. Obama as president, far below the number who were comfortable with a nameless Democrat. But on Election Day, nearly 60 percent said they were “comfortable” with Mr. Obama. About the same number said Mr. Obama “shares your values” and “has what it takes to be president.”

Greenberg’s Op-Ed is titled “Goodbye, Reagan Democrats.” And it corresponds to what I heard from Helen Walker, of the Appalachian mining town of Glouster, Ohio late last month: “I think that the residents here in Glouster are getting accustomed to the fact that we will be having a black president. They think it is not a bad idea.” Statewide, Obama won forty-four per cent of the vote of whites without college degrees, compared to McCain’s fifty-four per cent—comparable to the results four years ago. In the southeastern Ohio counties where I went slumming—Athens, Meigs, Morgan, and Washington—Obama did about as well as Kerry had done in 2004, winning Athens and losing the other three, but polling well enough to win the state because of high turnout and new voters elsewhere. The result in southeastern Ohio was by no means a foregone conclusion, and in September it looked highly unlikely. That Obama held his own there is a tribute to the hard work, and even the courage, of local Obama organizers like Latisha Price, of Pomeroy, Ohio, who was chased off her share of front porches.
It’s also a tribute to human complexity. People can hold racist views and still vote against them, because they hold other views, too—they contain multitudes. And people can change. No one should imagine that the country has suddenly lurched in the direction of the Upper West Side. Residents of my neighborhood of Brooklyn have certain beliefs that are incompatible with those of residents of Glouster, Ohio. Obama will be wise to govern in ways that leave those unbridgeable differences alone, and instead direct the power of government to improving people’s lives in both places.

I’m grateful to the 2008 election for reminding us of these things. And I’m grateful to the dying breed of reporters for finding them out"