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21 May 2008 08:08 pm

White Voters

Timothy Egan considers the myopic media coverage on race:

In 2000, George Bush won West Virginia 52 to 46 percent.  Four years later, he’d increased his margin to 56-43. In Kentucky, Bush won 57-41 in 2000, and padded that to 60-40 four years later.

Appalachia, we now know, is Clinton’s heartland – but it does not resemble the Democratic landscape. If these are Democratic states, there’s some strange serum in the local brew at party headquarters.

This quote from Kentucky from George Packer's new piece on American conservatism is helpful context:

“He’s a Muslim, isn’t he?” an aging mine electrician asked. “I won’t vote for a colored man. He’ll put too many coloreds in jobs. Colored are O.K.—they’ve done well, good for them, look where they came from. But radical coloreds, no—like that Farrakhan, or that senator from New York, Rangel. There’d be riots in the streets, like the sixties.”

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