Why don't those hillbillies like Obama? [View All]

[canis_lupus]

From Salon:

May 20, 2008 | WHITESBURG, Ky. -- In analyzing the returns from last week's West Virginia Democratic primary, a phalanx of reporters and commentators have explained Hillary Clinton's landslide victory by pointing out that West Virginians are a special set of Democrats, white, low income and undereducated. Some, like Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo and Jonathan Tilove of the Newhouse papers, have linked the lackluster performance of Barack Obama in West Virginia to a larger Appalachian problem. These writers connect the presumptive nominee's defeat in West Virginia, his previous losses in Ohio and Pennsylvania, and an anticipated poor outing in Tuesday's Kentucky primary, to the historical, geographic and cultural imperatives shared by Appalachian mountain people.

The legions of pseudonym-laden online posters who follow in political punditry's wake are less restrained in describing the shortcomings of Sen. Clinton's Appalachian supporters. They suggest it has to do with her voters being racist, toothless, shoeless, and prone to marrying their cousins. In short, they characterize these "special" Democrats in much the same terms they used in quieter times to describe Republicans.

Mountain people have long been considered exotic. The eminent British historian Sir Arnold Toynbee described the residents of Appalachia in 1947 as "the American counterparts of the latter-day white barbarians of the Old World -- Rifis, Albanians, Kurds, Pathans, and Hairy Ainus." They have also served as a sort of Rorschach test for the rest of America. When the country needs iconic war heroes like Alvin York or Jessica Lynch, mountaineers fill the bill. If, periodically, this rich nation needs people to pity, poverty-stricken hillbillies make excellent poster children. And if backers of the Democratic Party's presumptive nominee need to explain why their preferred candidate is not connecting with downscale, rural voters -- a demographic that was once key to Democratic electoral success -- Appalachia can again answer the call. Obama supporters and members of the media can place the blame for his poor fortunes not on the candidate or his message, but on the moral failings of those benighted mountain people.

However, the unnerving truth for the erstwhile party of Jefferson may be that Appalachia, for all its legend and lore, is not that different politically from the rest of the small-town and rural parts of the country where 60 million of us live. And that could mean trouble for the fall.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2008/05/20/appalachia/