The “I’m Tired of being Called a Racist” Factor in the 2008 Election
by Mary Mostert (11/1/08)
I think John McCain is going to win this election, unless, of course, (1) many voters stay home because they have been convinced by the media that McCain can’t win or (2) there is enough fraudulent voting to pad Obama’s numbers. I keep thinking of the man who was registered to vote 72 times with various addresses. Back in the 1940s that was called ballot-box stuffing and was not uncommon. In fact, it was quite common in political machine politics at the time.
In 1948 I was 19 years old and working in Memphis,in the insurance company owned by E.H. Crump, who was also the political boss of Tennessee. Crump was good at ballot-box stuffing. In fact, he routinely brought hundreds of black people by bus from Mississippi to vote in Memphis elections and often ordered his employees to show up at campaign rallies for those he supported. All the news sources, magazines, newspapers and radio, and the polls were predicting that President Harry S. Truman and the Democrats would lose to Republican Governor Tom Dewey. The Gallup poll and Roper polls at the time were predicting that Dewey would win by 5 to 15 points, about the same figures the polls are now predicting for Obama.
In 1948 Estes Kefauver was running for the US Senate against Judge John A. Mitchell, the candidate supported by the Crump political machine that ran full page ads in the papers ridiculing Kefauver as a “pet coon” (raccoon). Kefauver responded to those ads by appearing in Memphis wearing a coonskin cap and announcing that “while I might be a pet coon I am not E.H. Crump’s pet coon - I’m the people’s pet coon.” Kefauver beat Mitchell handily and that was the beginning of the end to the Crump machine.
I still have, 60 years later, the hand written votes by state that I made throughout the night of the election by listening to the radio returns. My husband had gone to bed early, after telling me I was wasting my time since Dewey would surely win. When he woke up and I told him Truman had won, he didn’t believe me. Not only did Truman win the 1948 election overwhelmingly in spite of a split in the Democratic Party and all the “experts” predicting his defeat, but Estes Kefauver, a conservative Democrat who opposed the House Un-American Activities Committee and favored civil rights, also won in 1948, ending E.H. Crump’s control of the state.
Why did Truman win in spite of the polls? Because there was an unreported feeling, described by one woman in rural Tennessee after the election, that she had walked the 8 miles to her polling place because “Harry Truman needed me.”
Is there something that hasn’t been detected by the pollsters that is taking place in the 2008 election? Based on my observations and reports from many of my readers I think that there is.
This election has been framed in large measure by the claim made by Barack Obama that he is the “black” candidate, even though genetically he is only 6½% black African, and that people who oppose him are “racist.” Obama is 50% Caucasian and 43 ½% Arab. Yet he has kept his white grandmother who raised him out of the limelight and talks about his black “Kenyan grandmother” who is actually no kin to him. She is his grandfather’s fourth polygamous wife.
In fact, if Obama had grown up in my neighborhood in the segregated deep south in the 1930s and 1940s, since he lived with his white mother and white grandparents and his father was no where to be seen and mostly Arab, he would have gone to the white segregated school with me. In fact, I’m actually darker than he is.
What is rather strange in this election is the anger and animosity I have experienced and my readers have experienced from Obama supporters, in spite of the fact that the polls show him to be beating McCain. We are accused of opposing him because he is “black.” Only… he isn’t black. I’ve been accused of being a “racist” because I point out he isn’t actually a black man.
When I point out that I am opposed to Obama because of his lack of experience, his voting record, his methods of campaigning, his socialist agenda and accusing anyone who opposes him of racism, it seems to enrage Obama supporters. As a grandmother myself, I also don’t think much of him for treating his white grandmother who raised him the way he has.
The reaction of pro-Obama supporters, even in my own family, to my reasons for not supporting Obama has been anger and accusations of “racism.” This strikes me as strange behavior for supporters of a candidate that is ahead in the polls. How many of the “undecided” voters, or even “pro-Obama” voters are telling pollsters that because they don’t want any more angry attacks. Many people now tell me they won’t even talk to pollsters or anyone else about how they plan to vote.
Once in the privacy of the voting booth, how WILL these people vote? Are they going to vote for Barack Obama at that point for fear that someone is going to get angry and attack them verbally? It’s a secret ballot. They don’t have to tell anyone how they voted.
In fact, they can come out of the voting booth after voting for McCain and tell pollsters and touchy relatives and friends who support Obama that they voted for him, and no one will ever know they didn’t.
I think there is a very real “I’m tired of being called a racist” factor in this race that could bring a real surprise to the pollsters and the Obama campaign in the 2008 presidential race.
Mary Mostert
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