A Class On Catering To Crackers

By Kleinheider Posted on May 26, 2008 at 12:49 pm

Harold Ford, Jr. gives Barack Obama a lesson in how to reach the white working class in the pages of Newsweek magazine:

Do many rural or working-class people have questions about Obama? Sure. But these are less about race than about culture. Obama has not lived their lives.

That’s OK. In the weeks and months ahead, he just needs to show that he respects them and understands the issues that matter to them—that he can make their lives better. Obama has run a first-rate primary campaign, energizing countless new voters. Now he’s got to get off the big stage more often and meet with people where they work, play and pray. That means getting out to schools and factories, coffee shops, fairgrounds and houses of worship. He needs to earn their trust.

That lesson was driven home for me during my run for Senate in 2006, at a little bar-restaurant called the Lil’ Rebel in Jackson, Tenn. I’d been to church, and during a morning prayer, Pastor Nathaniel Bond held my hands. “There are more Davids than Goliaths, and more answers than there are problems,” he said. Later that day, as I was driving past the Lil’ Rebel for the second time, heading out of town, I decided that I had heard those words for a reason. We turned the car around and pulled in. I wasn’t scared, but my aide—a white guy—was slightly nervous. He told me that “if things don’t go right, we’ll just go.”

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Tags: Appalachia, Barack Obama, Confederate flag, Harold Ford, pickup trucks, rural voters, white working class  

Stations Of The Cross: Obama Goes Fundie In Kentucky

By Kleinheider Posted on May 13, 2008 at 7:49 am

Back during last year’s Yuletide political season, Mike Huckabee took a fair bit of grief for allegedly inserting a subtle appeal to his fundamentalist faith in a television.

Fast-forwarding to the present, we find Barack Obama having essentially clinched the nomination locked in a struggle to prove his electability. How does he choose to go after the Appalachian Kentucky voters whose ethnic brethren have so rejected his candidacy?

Religion.

Doug Forrester has scanned in some very interesting mailers the Obama camp is circulating in Kentucky in hopes of appealing to men and women of faith.

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Tags: Appalachia, Barack Obama, fundamentalism, Mike Huckabee, the cross  

The Appalachian Sensation

By Kleinheider Posted on May 8, 2008 at 2:03 pm

Hillary Clinton has made her strongest electoral showings in the counties and precincts located in the region of the country known as Appalachia. This does not bode well for Barack Obama in Kentucky and West Virginia:

Appalachia didn’t budge. [Clinton] is going to absolutely blow [Obama] out of the water in West VA and KY. Whether that is enough to get her back in the race is another matter altogether.

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Tags: Appalachia, Appalachian Sensation, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Kentucky, West Virginia, white folk