Red, White, and Blue

“And can we count on your support for Barack Obama for President?”

I’ve spoken those words hundreds of times now, and among the few undecided voters left, the reaction is always the same. First, their eyebrows furrow. Their shoulders shrink imperceptibly. And then a thin-lipped smile settles across their faces like a mask snapping into place. “Still undecided,” they’ll say. Or, “Not sure yet.” Or, when I’m really lucky, they’ll be honest—as honest as they know how to be.

“I’m not voting for no Muslim,” they’ll say. “He’s not really a Muslim, you know,” I’ll begin, but they’ve already closed the screen door in my face.

Welcome to Levittown, Pennsylvania, where every third house proudly bears an American flag, where “people are hurting,” but never so much that their front porches are not aggressively decorated for Halloween at least three weeks in advance, and where a solid majority of registered Democrats could never really support Barack Obama, at least not in public, at least not where the neighbors can hear.

Last weekend, I joined the Harvard College Democrats on their canvassing trip to this relic of Americana. For two days, we knocked the doors of the people that were once Hillary Clinton’s base. They are the new swing vote, for a reason that all but the most jaded political hands should find troubling: many of them, quite simply, are racists.

Rep. John Murtha, a sixteen-term Congressman from Pittsburgh, acknowledged this reality on Wednesday with a bluntness that a less secure incumbent could never have dared. “There is no question that western Pennsylvania is a racist area,” he said. I am afraid that in small towns on the Jersey border, there is no question, either.

The racism that defines these swing voters is not necessarily founded upon stereotype or prejudice. It’s not the kind that claims that black kids are good at basketball, brown kids are good at math, and white kids are good at running the country. In this day and age, most of us have declared those statements unacceptable. And, in this case, they are groundless: I won’t list what stereotypes exist for young black men, but Obama, a law professor and family man, clearly does not fit the mold.

In this election, racism has taken another turn: as bad, and maybe worse. In Europe, it once taught that Jews were not to be trusted. Now, in Levittown, it implies that every Muslim is a terrorist. In its softer form, this racism cautions us to stick with our own—that identity outweighs both class and convictions. One woman I met worried that Obama would leverage the presidency against whites. “It’s the reckoning,” she said simply.

The racism of fear is subtler and more insidious than the kind of our past. It thrives on silence and political correctness—on the avoidance of the race issue at all costs, and on our willingness to pretend it is something else entirely. And it festers, for that reason, among the middle-class voters who have lost almost everything—jobs, savings, homes—and who are loathe to gamble on a candidate whose entire campaign is based on change, when change is destroying them.

Hillary understood Levittown. She pandered to it with duck-shooting faux Rust Belt authenticity, but also with tangible proposals for health care, energy, and job creation. And if she offended us when she argued that “Obama will have trouble appealing to white voters,” she was, unfortunately, exactly right. It has become increasingly clear that John McCain understands this reality, too: with his characterization of Obama as “dangerous,” in Governor Sarah Palin’s comment that he was “pallin’ around with terrorists,” and in the blind and righteous fury of supporters at campaign rallies: “Kill him!”

These are not appeals to sense, but to fear. And to them, the Obama campaign’s strategy of keeping the race issue quiet is, in many ways, exactly wrong. True, he’s leading in all polls; true, enough middle-class whites will swing his way. Some will do it because they prefer his populist economic policies. Others will shrug, close their eyes, and vote the party line.

Pundits will credit his inevitable victory to youth, African-Americans, and urbanites, and they will be right: Working-class whites are no longer the Democratic base, and if population demographics continue to shift, their support may no longer be crucial for victory. But if we are to hope for a “new politics,” isn’t that beyond the point? In other words: is an Obama victory a progressive victory at all if he is shunned by the very middle class he is trying to rescue?

Bigotry does not disappear overnight, and Obama’s best chance to win over middle America will come after his inauguration. If we’re lucky, he will prove himself to be as measured and reasonable a president as he has been a candidate. And perhaps experience will convince the good people of Levittown what I could not: that, despite his skin color and his Harvard education, “the Muslim” understands them, too.



Elise Liu ’11, a Crimson editorial writer, lives in Cabot House. Her column appears on alternate Fridays.