Sen. Jim Webb thinks that Barack Obama can get the Appalachians Vote; it isn't Race so much..... [View All]

[FrenchieCat]

He was on KO for an interview. Said he wrote about this quite a few years ago in an article about the history of the Scotch-Irish and their migration to the Appalachians.

It appears that the Democratic party in general has a problem with these voters who either don't vote at all or vote for Republicans. Although Hillary Clinton famously touts that Bill Clinton won West Virginia in 1992 and 1996, she conveniently leaves out that the margin of Bill's win was much smaller than Ross Perot's win. In other words, without Perot, Clinton would have lost West Virginia.

Sen. Webb believes that if Obama goes to the voters in that area and spends time listening to the problems of these folks and tells them what he will do to alleviate their plight, that race would not stop them from voting for him.

In addition, MSNBC has had quite a bit of conversation today (finally) about the meme, that the media is building; that Hard Working Whites won't vote for a Black Man. On both Hardball and KO, they discussed that this sort of analysis is short sighted and dangerous. That they, the media, in fact, are perpetuating a notion that really is not based on reality as much as selective sampling and attributing cause and effect with a racist rationale without evidence but a sampling that is questionnable at best. They were talking about how Obama had been doing fine with the "White working" vote in many of the states contested thus far, and that it was possible that those who chose Sen. Clinton did so because they prefered her more than they disliked Sen. Obama.

So although I realize that there are racists everywhere, I still don't believe that their numbers are as inflated as Hillary Clinton, her campaign, and the media would like for us to believe.

And I do believe that this meme is bad for this country, and those who try to promote it are not patriots and are in fact traitors that are harmful to this country. That they are the worse of all, as they are pushing racial prejudice simply because it is helpful for one particular candidate.

(the term Appalachians Mountains is often used more restrictively to refer to regions in the central and southern Appalachian Mountains, usually including areas in the states of Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, Maryland, West Virginia, and North Carolina, and sometimes extending as far south as northern Georgia and western South Carolina, as far north as Pennsylvania, and as far west as southern Ohio.)