on to oregon

only one more comment on the endless Obama/Clinton battle, I promise.

Exit polls from North Carolina and Indiana show that the demographic fault lines among voters remain the same.  Osama had to apologize for calling small town residents “bitter” , but he is running for President and can’t afford to offend major voting blocs.  I’m not in that situation, so…

Back in the 1970’s I worked in a health clinic on Obama’s home turf, a desperately poor black neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago.  Besides myself, there were only two other white employees, two middle-aged nurses from the neighborhood of Marquette Park.  Marquette Park, where I was born, is the kind of gritty, working class neighborhood that makes HIlary Clinton want to sit down and swig a shot of whiskey.  It’s also home to a lot of ignorance and prejudice.  These two nurses were none too fond of Jews, which I happen to be.  They would ask me questions like “did I have a housekeeper?” , never mind that I was twenty two years old and didn’t own a house, forget someone to keep it. 

BUT AT LEAST I WAS WHITE.  In their calculations, that made me the lesser of two evils, worthy of coffee break conversation and the occasional invitation to lunch.

The time for the clinics annual Christmas party came around and these two nurses were in a frenzy about all the black cultural festivities about to occur.  The food for one–all that fried chicken and pickled pigs feet.  They made plans to bring in potato chips and onion dip.  And most importantly, the music.  All that scary rhythm and blues (this was before the days of gangsta rap).  In desperation, one of the nurses brought in some heavy metal albums, borrowed from her teenage son.  Mind you, she didn’t like heavy metal any more than she liked Jews.  But at least those noxious headbangers were WHITE.

I suspect a lot of Pennsylvania and Indiana voters–and in even greater numbers kentucky and West Virginia voters, judging by the polls–are making similar value judgements.  They don’t really trust HIllary Clinton, and aren’t totally fond of the idea of a woman candidate, but at least she’s WHITE.  How else is one to interpret these Clinton voters who say that “race” is an important factor in their decision?  Cmon, folks, we’re talking skin pigmentation here.  Obama can’t say the dirty word, but we are talking racism, pure and simple. 

Small town people–especially if they are uneducated and poorly traveled–can be the kindest people in the world if you know them personally or fit comfortably into their worldview.  They will smile fondly at your baby in the stroller, and chat with you in the cafe, and hold bake sales and car washes for the family whose house burnt down.  But if you are different than what they know, they tend to be suspicious.  A friend of mine saw a TV report where some small town Pennsylvanians mistrusted Obama not so much because he was black, but because he used to live in Indonesia–you know, one of those foreign countries.  Who knows, maybe they still practice cannibalism over there.  And his middle name–Hussein–like those terrorists.

Voters have some legitimate reasons  to prefer Clinton over Obama but there’s a definite percentage, “bitter” or not, who voted for her because they are small-minded racists.  There, I’ve said it.

On to Oregon, where, miraculously, our vote really counts, and I promise to move on to other topics.