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Bet on it.

Poll: Obama Grabs Lead In Deep-Red Georgia

For the first time ever, a new poll has Barack Obama ahead of John McCain in Georgia, on the heels of a recent trend that showed the race tightening here.

The new numbers from InsiderAdvantage: Obama 48%, McCain 47%, within the ±3.8% margin of error.

On the one hand, this poll could be an outlier. But other recent polls have shown McCain ahead by only two to eight points in this deep-red state, and the gap has narrowed from previous larger McCain leads.

From the pollster’s analysis: “While this is a tight race, the problem for McCain is that all but 3 percent of whites have made their decision and approximately 8 percent of black voters have continued to say they are undecided or voting ‘other.’ This will likely move closer to 95 percent for Obama when all said and done. Obama has room to go up.”

The crux of the matter? It’s a New Old South.

Read on for more.

While this is a tight race, the problem for McCain is that all but 3 percent of whites have made their decision and approximately 8 percent of black voters have continued to say they are undecided or voting ‘other.’ This will likely move closer to 95 percent for Obama when all said and done. Obama has room to go up.

I saw this quote liiustrated quite clearly through the hallucinatory fog of overtired long-distance driving about 15 years ago.

I had a fairly complicated set of jobs in the south over a period of a couple of weeks…mostly within driving distance of Atlanta or on the route that would take me back to NYC…and decided to start the trip by driving alone  from New York City to Atlanta (nearly 900 miles) a trip that takes you through the rural backwoods of western Virginia, North Carolina and northeastern Georgia. I knew that I would have to stop and sleep sometime during this trip, but I did not know that when the need for sleep overtook me I would be in some stretch of maybe 100 miles of piney woods forest that offered no visible motels of any kind. I kept on going…I did have a thermos of serious long-distance coffee…until somewhere near the 6AM Georgia border where I found a failed Howard Johnson’s motel/restaurant that had been reopened under another name (red roof and all) and gratefully fell into an exhausted sleep. I had to get up in a few hours hours in order to be able to make my rehearsal/sound check in Atlanta, and I went over to the restaurant to have some breakfast before resuming my trip. It was a rural southern Sunday morning, and apparently this restaurant was the happening place to be on Sunday morning in this neck of the woods. It was packed, and the cafeteria-style buffet that was laid out was just incredible. Real southern cafeteria food, done right. The works…fried chicken, grits, fried catfish, ham, greens, hushpuppies, barbeque…YOU know, if you’ve ever been in the real south.

Now…I was pretty well wasted from too little sleep and too much caffeine-fueled driving so I wasn’t looking around much, but as the first cup of coffee and the good food began to do its work I noticed that almost the entire crowd was Sunday-after-church black families. Including the minister. No problem as far as I was concerned…there was no hostility whatsoever in that restaurant, just a fairly prosperous bunch of rural black families enjoying a beautiful late spring Sunday morning and besides, being a white jazz musician and a New Yorker I am more than used to being one of the few white people in a room.

So there I was, enjoying the fine food, and next to me at the counter where I had taken a stool sat two late-40s white working men. Carpenters, house fixer/handymen/house painters it turns out. The type of guys who 20 or 30 years earlier would not have been seen dead in a black eating place. And they sat down and immediately started talking about what a drag it was that they had to work on a Sunday, about how “things had changed”.

Not in a necessarily negative manner…more like simultaneously accepting and puzzled. Resigned, I guess would be a better word. Somewhere in there.

The gist of their conversation was that the town had turned upside down over the preceding 20 years or so, that now it was a black town where they found themselves in the position of handyman to black families instead the reverse, instead of “the way things were” when they had been kids.

And there it was.

The real social movement in the south post-civil rights era..

Black people coming back from the pre-civil rights northern migration, coming back with some money, coming back home. Other black people who had stayed there collecting their own chickens as they came home to roost…the fruits of their long labors… in a righteous and rightful manner.

The worm had done turned, baby.

At least it had in this particular town.

That process continued, and what we see happening today in Georgia and elsewhere in the south……win, lose or draw… is the direct result of that turn.

Bet on it.

The south DID rise.

Only…’twasn’t ‘zakly the way the crackers had imagined it would.

Nope.

The old south done moved north.

To Northern Appalachia. To Ohio and western Pennsylvania and Maine and Alaska.

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Bet on it. (Let us pray.)

Later…

AG