I lived in West Virginia for nine years, before I moved to the Southwest. In West Virginia, my children went to a predominantly African-American school, by our choice. After a regrettable racist incident in our town, my wife and I became involved on the ground floor in the creation of a community organization to educate about and combat lingering racism in our community. While racism exists in pockets in WV just as it exists everywhere else, in our community, race relations were nowhere near as polarized as in Dallas (where we had also lived) or as overtly tense as where I grew up in Southeastern Virginia in the late 60′s/early 70′s.
While it is true that *some* WV democratic primary voters may have voted against Obama for racist reasons, to blame his loss primarily on the racism of WV voters is overly simplistic and does a great disservice to the cause of truth and honest debate.
I am a registered democrat. I am voting for John McCain in November. I am not voting for Obama not because he is an African-American, but because his position on the Iraq War is wrong, wrong, wrong. As long as the Democratic Party opposes the rightness of the war against Islamofascism, I will not be voting for their candidates, even though I will stay registered in the party in the hopes that one day, they will come to their senses.
As long as the Party’s leading candidate and his followers look down upon common, everyday democrats and considers themselves morally, ethically, and intellectually superior to fellow democrats with whose cultural values they profoundly disagree, the Party’s candidate is not going to win the votes of the Democrats of places like West Virginia.
West Virginia democrats are probably voting against Obama more because of the Democratic Party’s cultural elitism than because of race, but as long as Obama’s supporters can paint Obama as the victim of stupidity and backwardness of ignorant, good-for-nothing, inbred hillbillies, they’re going to miss the real vulnerabilities of their candidate and campaign come November.
