The citizens in my hometown cast their first ballots for
Abraham Lincoln and since then have seen no reason to switch party alliances.
Factory hands and middle management executives, they live in the Ohio River Valley. Overlooking us from the top of
the hill, the Mellons and the Scaifes supervised the lending institutions and
the steel mills. They would send the cook and the chauffer to the ‘village’ to
pick up supplies. Their sons stopped by the drug store to buy candy bars
charged to the family’s account.

In 1968 my kinfolk saw the Democratic Party disintegrate on
the altar of Civil Rights. They enjoyed the destruction of the Labor Unions by
outsourcing. The best minds of my generation enlisted in the drive for faulty
investment schemes. My town remains McCain country.

They are poised to leap upon the foreclosed homes that dot
the area.

Fear versus Poetry

Gary Kamiya, Salon.com

[excerpt]
Call it the Dumbshit Factor, the Nobody Home Problem, the Absentee Ballots
from Mars Issue. Whatever you call it, it's the Republicans' built-in advantage
this fall. If you're not in the "reality-based community" infamously
derided by a senior Bush official, then you won't care if Iraq is a quagmire and the Middle
East is a powder keg and the country is falling apart and the
economy is on the verge of a depression and gas is $4.30 a gallon. You won't
care because you won't know, or if you know you'll blame it all on liberals,
feminazis, evil bureaucrats and gays. As you watch Fox News from your
Barcalounger orbiting somewhere beyond the confines of space, time and logic,
you will vote for the old white guy with the Anglo-Saxon name, not a Muslim
terrorist sympathizer who helped his cousin attack America.
But the outer-space contingent only represents about a quarter of voters, a
figure easily balanced out by yellow-dog Democrats, whose numbers have been
swollen by hordes of young Obama fans. The real fight, as everyone knows, is
over the remaining voters in crucial states like Ohio
and Florida
-- the independents, the swing voters, the blue-collar Catholics, the
less-educated working class, the older women, the NASCAR dads, the suburban
moms. The people that Clinton, who has been courting them so assiduously she is
in danger of growing a sympathetic beer belly, notoriously called
"hardworking Americans, white Americans."