MSNBC has a piece on the bigoted responses Obama campaign volunteers have been encountering in states like Indiana and Pennsylvania. Money quote:
Victoria Switzer, a retired social studies teacher, was on phone-bank duty one night during the Pennsylvania primary campaign. One night was all she could take: "It wasn't pretty." She made 60 calls to prospective voters in Susquehanna County, her home county, which is 98 percent white. The responses were dispiriting. One caller, Switzer remembers, said he couldn't possibly vote for Obama and concluded: "Hang that darky from a tree!"
Wow. But even worse are the people who are quoted as saying, "He's a half-breed and he's a Muslim. How can you trust that?" and "I think if it was somebody other than him, I'd accept it. If Colin Powell had run, I would be willing to accept him."
Can someone explain exactly what the fundamental difference between Obama's "blackness" and Colin Powell's is that makes this voter willing to "accept" one, but not the other? I'm hoping it's more than their names, but that seems like the only possibility.
Having worked on campaigns in the past and endured the inevitable abuse that comes when you knock on the door of someone who supports the other guy, or when you call someone who just really doesn't like your candidate. (A funny anecdote: When I volunteered for the Gore campaign, I once knocked on the door of what turned out to be the home of a supporter of Pat Buchanan. I'm sure you can imagine what came of that.) But never did I have to endure the vitriol that these Obama workers are getting, and my heart goes out to them.
I'm hopeful that if Obama gets elected and the sky doesn't fall afterward, at least some of these people might have a change of heart and realize that a candidate's skin color, middle name, and father's religion have absolutely nothing to do with his or her qualifications to hold our nation's highest office. If that happened, can anyone say that our country wouldn't be better for it?