What small-town America is saying about Obama

Just outside of Cranks, Ky., in Harlan County, Mack Middleton is a retired coal miner and a die-hard union man -- a United Mine Workers bumper sticker adorns his Dodge van -- but he is also a swing voter who voted both for Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. This year, Middleton, 62, and his wife, Janice, 57, aren't sure if they are going to vote at all.

"Obama, he's not our kind of people," said Middleton in a gruff, bitten-off speaking style, taking a break from canning green beans at the couple's double-wide mobile home. "He don't believe in the hereafter, and the Lord, the way I look at it ... he's Muslim."

Several people, from Michigan to Alabama, referred to an insidious picture circulating on the Internet of Obama wearing a white head-wrap and a robe next to a photo of Osama bin Laden in similar dress, with the caption, "What's the difference between Osama and Obama? Just a little B.S." According to a survey in July by the Pew Research Center, 12 percent of Americans still believed Obama was a Muslim -- even after the long Democratic primary battle that was covered heavily in the national media. Among rural Americans, 19 percent still believed he was a Muslim.

In Logan, W.Va., abandoned brick storefronts haunt downtown while the Fountain Plaza mall, anchored by a Wal-Mart Supercenter, gleams on the hill above town. Logan County was one of a few counties that voted for John Kerry in 2004 (George W. Bush won West Virginia overall), and, given a struggling economy, would seem primed to swing Democratic again. But Scott, 26, a former trucker currently unemployed, isn't going to vote for Obama. "I know it sounds stupid," he says taking a long drag from his Maverick cigarette, "but Barack Hussein Obama? And if he gets in, somebody'll take him out real quick," he said, referring to potential assassination, which was a surprisingly common theme along rural back roads.

The seemingly endless list of falsehoods about Obama -- that he took his oath of office on the Quran, that he doesn't salute the flag, that he refuses to wear an American flag lapel pin -- could be interpreted as excuses for being uncomfortable with his race.

But class matters too, in regions like Appalachia, where Obama had a particularly tough time winning votes in the Democratic primary against Hillary Clinton.

Inez, Ky., is a town that epitomizes the Democratic Party's decline from its peak of power in the 1960s. President Lyndon Johnson once stood on a porch in the impoverished town in the heart of Appalachia and declared a War on Poverty. Today in Inez, population 600, consumption of pain pills is a popular pastime, and the poverty rate hovers around 37 percent, three times the national average. In April of this year John McCain gave a speech in Inez, detailing the failures of welfare, to a receptive audience. In 2004, Martin County, of which Inez is the seat, voted for George W. Bush by a 2-to-1 ratio. The chairman of the Republican National Committee, Robert Duncan, lives in Inez.

Gary Ball, a former coal miner and editor of the firebrand Mountain Citizen newspaper that is published in Inez, points to an authenticity gap for Obama. "People around here see Obama as being privileged," he said. Never mind McCain -- with his seven houses -- or recent blue blood candidates George W. Bush, John Kerry and Al Gore. "We know Obama's plenty book-smart ... but I liked Harry Truman, the last president to have a simple high school education."

While George W. Bush received the same Harvard benediction as Obama, Bush never identified as an intellectual. Obama's modest, single-mom upbringing does not overcome his evident intellectualism, according to Ball; for rural whites, he says, Obama remains on the losing end of this authenticity test.

Sarah Palin's biography, of course, raises the stakes. Touting her moose-hunting, snowmobile-riding, small-town sensibility, Palin turned a convention of restless delegates into an explosion of camp revival energy, shifting the momentum of the race John McCain's way. It is obvious that rural, working-class whites are more comfortable with the conservative small-town Palin, to whom they can relate.

Beyond the necessity of connecting with rural America, the Obama campaign is hoping to gain ground by winning over suburban independents in battleground states. In Columbus, Ohio, I encountered several white, upper-middle-class swing voters who said they would support Obama. But Terry Daniels, 53, a black man who runs a clothing store in downtown Columbus catering to the city's suburbanites, was skeptical that would happen. "Everyone likes to think they're progressive," Daniels said, "but when it comes down to it, they're not going to vote that way."

Even though the economy purports to be a top issue for voters, the 2008 race has been as much of a contest of personalities as any in recent memory. (Even before Palin entered the picture.) Obama's fate in November may in part depend on his ability to better familiarize the more insular segments of white America with an under-reported but growing post-civil rights demographic: the well-educated black urban middle class. Obama's story is a historic example of this achievement, but it remains to be seen if America is ready to celebrate it by granting him the nation's highest office.