A reporter for Al Jazeera travelled to rural Kentucky and found voters are not ready to vote for a black candidate, in the primaries or in the fall. The downtrodden people of the region fear competition with a fellow economic underclass plus retribution for historical wrongs.
As one honest Kentuckyan in the video says:
The white people has put the negroes in the back of the bus for years, and if we’re not careful we’re gonna be in the back of the bus and they’re gonna be in the front.
It’s probably not possible to reach these voters with a candidate like Obama, but if there’s any message at all that may resonate it’s one of economic populism:
- improve job creation
- penalize the export of jobs
- emphasize the sanctity of Social Security
- advance tax policies that promote economic equality over increasing the incomes of those already at the top of the heap
- increase the minimum wage
- provide health care for all
- improve public education
- remove economic barriers to advanced education
- provide better funding for public infrastructure and transportation development
- support the right to unionize
- crack down on corporations that exploit undocumented immigrant labor in a race to the bottom of wages benefits and worker protections.
That would be for a start. Maybe a running mate like Jim Webb might not hurt either.
hat tip Lawyers Guns and Money