In the heartland

It was very disheartening to return to my farm outside Washington DC and only see John McCain/Sarah Palin signs in front of houses. Well, this always had been Republican territory.

When I bought there 25 years ago, my 30ha farm was the smallest in the area and the others were stalwarts of the Grand Old Party.

Then the demographics changed and Rednecks came in, good old boys who eat pork ribs by the ton and hate you-know-what, even as the rest of the country desegregated. They built tacky little houses on half hectare lots.

Yup, they were bitter and own guns. So my Filipino partner and I resigned ourselves to living among the enemy.

Then we noted a Barack Obama sign in a small trailer-like house very close by. Maybe an African-American, but the owner came out, a paunchy 50-ish very red-neck man, repairing his diagnostically correct lawn mower. I asked him how he survived among the Obama haters.

"You got it wrong, man," he said. "Most of us here are voting for Barack. But we just can’t get the banners. There are so many of us that the Obama headquarters has run out of stickers and banners! There are a hell of a lot more of us than them around here."

Well, the sound of music! I asked if I could ask something personal. "Is the race issue relevant?"

"Oh, that’s so 1970s," this very white guy said. "No longer an issue."

Well, this morning CNN reported that Virginia, which has voted Republican since 1964, is giving Obama a ten point lead. That’s well beyond the margin of error.

Things of course can still change. The seas can dry up, Palin can gain dignity, the Queen of England can lose hers, and the French can start liking the English. The economic crisis may go away in 24 hours.

More realistically, Osama bin Laden has every reason to want a McCain victory on the sound Leninist principle, ‘the worse (in the USA) the better’. He may have elected Bush last time with his last minute pronouncement.

There’s a lot more at stake this time and he may try a strike on Washington. But there are Democrats, lots of them, in the government, watching for just precisely this. The days left for an ‘October surprise’ are running out — and everyone’s well aware of McCain’s desperation.

Literally nothing has worked. Palin is now a huge negative, overall. Women polled in Florida were ten to one against her. "I’m angry," McCain screamed in his debate, but no one is sure at what. His smear tactics have led voters to turn away from him even more.

The presidential Obama even resisted the temptation, when speaking of his concern for the home owner who might lose his property, to remind the audience that McCain can’t even remember how many houses he owns (11, it turns out).

Culpeper County, where our farm is, often is ranked as one of the most desirable locations in America for the middle class — mountains, rivers, and near enough a big city. But it’s not part of (more Democratic) northern Virginia and doesn’t want to be counted there.

The best poll I’ve seen of Culpeper turned up this morning in the local paper, which polled 7-Elevens. If you wanted McCain you bought a red cup of coffee, Obama a blue one. And even there, in the red red territory of apple orchard Virginia, Obama is winning by coffee count, 55 to 45.

So we went into some 7-Elevens and asked coffee drinkers why they liked Obama. "McCain is just avoiding the issues." "He’s desperate, he hasn’t said anything meaningful about the economy," another said.

"Obama is a steady guy," another said. "I’ve never voted democrat," still another said, "but this guy Barack, he’s steady. He’s presidential. We don’t need a president who flails away pandering to us. We want to know if he’s serious about us, or just desperate to get elected."

Folks, for an Obama supporter who began his own tirades, as you know, two years ago, even one who worked for Ronald Reagan in a sub-cabinet job and has been Republican for a long time indeed, the news just doesn’t get any better than this.

PROF W SCOTT THOMPSON is a national security expert who served four American Presidents and is a professor emeritus at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. He is the author or editor of 13 books on world political issues and resides in Washington, Bali and Manila.