But What About the Racist Hillbilly Redneck Vote?

I was having a beer and whatever in a little concrete block house in the middle of the Mexican desert, swapping old male bullshit from the 1960s. It was the kind of situation where everyone had their cards on the table, so there were no mind games going on. There was a really bad fourth-rate movie running on the DVD that someone had gotten out of a Mexican video store's reject bin, and the Moody Blues were playing in the background.

To protect the guilty, I was talking to Vinnie from Cleveland, and Leroy from West Virginia. That's not their real names or backgrounds, but the conversation was real. Leroy is a veteran who served upcountry in Vietnam and Laos--in 1961. It seems the Office of Special Investigations had caught him making a profit off of counterfeit $100 bills on his trips back and forth to the states, and he could either stick around for the investigation, or he could volunteer for more hazardous work in more primitive conditions. Leroy is a regular Deer Hunter kind of guy, and you can be sure that he wouldn't last very long if he were engaged in a conversation with your local affirmative action officer.

I asked him who he was supporting for president, and he said, "Hillary Clinton." This should not have been a surprise to me, but it was. As of today, Slate says that Hillary has a 9 percent chance of getting the nomination, and I've thought that that percentage is actually kind of generous. And yet Hillary has been more or less 50-50 with Obama, and she's had a lock on all of the moo-cow precincts, so go figure.

The answer back was, "No way." Leroy said that he would definitely vote for Obama over McCain. His reasoniong was paranoid and profoundly American. The punchline of this story is, that Leroy felt that John McCain is the Manchurian candidate! Only in America can you use profoundly sick and twisted poltiical logic, and still come up with a Jacksonian answer. Read your de Toqueville.

Leroy has deep-seated racial biases, but even he knows that he's getting screwed royally by the economic system we have today, and he thinks that things will get worse in the future. John McCain is a Republican, and the old convservative warhorse ideologies are ready for the stable. If the Leroys of the electorate know the score, then things will not go well either for John McCain or the lesser GOP candidates in November. Leroy thinks that Obama will get the nomination, making Hillary his vice president. Then Obama will get shot, thus making Hillary the president anyway.

The people have spoken, and they said, "Arf! Arf!"