Overcoming in Ohio...Republican truckers and coal miners are backing Barack Obama.

[babylonsister]

:D Got hope?!


Overcoming in Ohio

In bellwether Perry County, the Ku Klux Klan once thrived. Now, Republican truckers and coal miners are backing Barack Obama.

By Walter Shapiro


Sen. Barack Obama speaks to voters as he canvasses a neighborhood in Holland, Ohio, Oct. 12, 2008.


Nov. 2, 2008 | NEW STRAITSVILLE, Ohio -- The Saturday afternoon scene seemed ripped out of a Republican playbook. A campaign canvasser wearing a black cowboy hat stood on the threshold of a mobile home in a hardscrabble, virtually all-white rural county talking about God's will and the White House with a retiree who once was a fundamentalist Baptist preacher.

"I think God had it all planned out for Barack-o to be our man," said Tom Morris, 73, a lifelong Republican whose career was mostly as a self-employed truck driver and electrician. Eighty-two-year-old retired coal miner Rufus Fultz, one of the most active Obama volunteers in Perry County, chimed in, "I believe it too." Morris and his wife, Ernestine, who also crossed party lines to vote early for Obama, live in a trailer in their backyard because they lack the money to repair their ramshackle house. Morris confessed, "I pray every night that Barack and his wife will be elected to the White House unanimously."

There is nothing unanimous about politics in Perry County, located about 60 miles southeast of Columbus at the point where Midwestern Ohio gives way to Appalachia. With only 15,000 voters in 2004 (New Lexington, its largest town, has fewer than 5,000 residents), Perry County appears to be a fly speck in a swing state where turnout is expected to exceed 6.5 million.

But Perry County has an uncanny knack for being a political soothsayer. In both the 1988 and 2000 presidential elections -- the prior two contests without an incumbent on the ballot -- Perry came closest among Ohio's 88 counties of mirroring the presidential vote. In 2004, Perry County came within 1 percent of matching the George Bush and John Kerry vote margins. The Political Research Center at Suffolk University, which identified the county as a bellwether for its Ohio polls, found that Obama led John McCain by a 45-to-41-percent margin in Perry County in mid-October, relatively close to the survey's statewide result. "There is a chance that the bellwether model will not work this year because of heavy urban registration in Ohio," said David Paleologos, the polling director at Suffolk University. "But it has worked in the past."

Even though the minority population of Perry County is little more than a few guys who checked the "Hispanic" box on the Census form as a joke, Obama appears to be holding his own in a place where the Ku Klux Klan thrived through the 1920s. Typical of today's Obama voters is Rick Barnette, a beefy school bus driver with a goatee, who said, "I can't see myself 10 years ago voting for an African-American like Obama. It was how I was brung up. I've seen the Ku Klux Klan pictures." But now Barnette's major objection to Obama is that he did not choose Hillary Clinton as his running mate.

more...

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/11/02/ohio_obama/

[Voice for Peace]

1. there's a pete seeger song about perry county

Mrs. Clara Sullivan's Letter

Dear Mister Editor, if you choose,
Please send me a copy of the labor news;
I've got a son in the infantry,
And he'd be mighty glad to see
That someone, somewhere, now and then,
Thinks about the lives of the mining men,
In Perry County.

In Perry County and thereabout
We miners simply had to go out.
It was long hours, substandard pay,
Then they took our contract away.
Fourteen months is a mighty long time
To face the goons on the picket line
In Perry County.

I'm twenty-six years a miner's wife,
There's nothing harder than a miner's life,
But there's no better man than a mining man,
Couldn't find better in all this land.
The deal they get is a rotten deal,
Mountain greens and gravy meal,
In Perry County.

We live in barns that the rain comes in
While operators live high as sin,
Ride Cadillac cars and drink like a fool
While our kids lack clothes to go to school
Sheriff Combs he has it fine,
He runs the law and owns a mine
In Perry County.

What operator would go dig coal
For even fifty a day on the mine pay-roll!
Why, after work my man comes in
With his wet clothes frozen to his skin,
Been digging coal so the world can run
And operators can have their fun
In Perry County.

When folks sent money to the Hazard Press
To help the strikers in distress,
They gave that money, yours and mine,
To the scabs who crossed the picket line,
And the state militia and F.B.I.
Just look on while miners die
In Perry County.

I believe the truth will out some day
That we're fighting for jobs at decent pay.
We're just tired of doing without,
And that's what the strike is all about,
And it helps to know that folks like you
Are telling the story straight and true,
About Perry County
< Mrs. Clara Sullivan's Letter Lyrics on http://www.lyricsmania.com/ >