Happenstance has it that as the WaPo’s Alec MacGillis explores Obama’s “age problem” he’s out visiting places I’m intimately familiar with. On Monday he reported from Lancaster, PA., my childhood stomping ground, to illustrate the “resistance from voters over 65.” Those born between 1930 and 1945 are squarely “in McCain’s age cohort.” Obama’s having no luck with them.
The boomers who follow right behind, they’re a different story. MacGillis found some of that in Lancaster — a 52 year-old man whose son joined the marines so now he believes the “younger generation is very volunteer-oriented, very patriotic” — but for more yesterday he turned to Macon, GA.
Macon is the largest city anywhere near me; I shop, eat, and have good friends there. It’s got some strong old families, none-too-far removed from their segregationist forebears, who refuse to change. And a whole lot of others who wish they would.
MacGillis was in Macon a couple weeks ago to report on the daunting challenges Obama faces in his effort to expand the black vote in Georgia. (I looked at his numbers and saw it as tough but doable.) While there he interviewed Macon Mayor Robert Reichert. The mayor met Obama in late January at a Macon church, and endorsed him before Georgia’s primary:
Reichert, who turned 60 this week, said he believed that Obama had a chance to carry Georgia not only because of high black turnout, but because he believed that enough white Georgians his age saw in Obama the “validation” of the changes that they had helped bring about in their own lives. It was his generation, he said, that was most closely linked with the civil rights revolution in the South, that had watched society transform itself over the course of its adolescent and adult life. At the heart of the revolution had been Georgia’s Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., until his assassination in 1968… “My generation went through turbulent times in the 1960s that completely inverted the system we had grown up with. I’m so proud of us I could pop. We have been the generation in which the gate has swung 180 degrees. My generation! And doggone it, I’m proud of what we’ve done.”
He continued: “This shift, this transition, is what [Obama’s] appealing to. The older you are, the more difficult it is to get out of the older school when things are changing that fast. But [for the baby boom generation], all of a sudden you have someone who arrives on the scene who can be a validation of what you’re waiting for, and holy mackerel, I believe Obama is that person. It’s that desire to believe, to have that desire validated…” He trailed off, catching himself in his exuberance.
Not everyone is so exuberant. The conservative Democratic congressman representing Macon, Jim Marshall (targeted by Blue America as a BushDog), has refused to endorse Obama. Reichert shrugs:
Marshall “is very sensitive to not trying to alienate any of his Republican support,” Reichert said. But Reichert did not think that closer association with Obama would hurt Marshall, or anyone else, as much as they fear. The great generational shift, he said, has left in its place a much different Georgia — one that, among other things, is much younger than most other states. “It’s grossly unfair to characterize Georgia as a backwards place locked in the past. We’ve had a huge migration from other parts of the country. We are international, we are progressive, we are cosmopolitan,” he said. Then he paused and smiled. “Which isn’t to say that we don’t have some rednecks. We do — and we love them.”
In April of last year Andrew Sullivan quoted a reader’s email that illustrates how that change is happening:
You can definitely be sure from my e-mail address I’m not an Obama staffer, but I have a similar story to that of your earlier e-mailer. My dad grew up in Macon, Georgia in an all-white school he describes consistently as having gone to hell thanks to integration. He has never been personally racist to anyone of any background in his life, but he really thinks the world went to hell starting about 1960 and that civil rights went too far too fast. His dislike for the Sharptons and Jacksons of the world couldn’t be fiercer. The N-word is pretty much the standard noun many of his family members use to describe black people. His only vote for a Democrat in his lifetime was for Carter, out of Georgia patriotism.
I had the fun experience of watching Obama’s electrifying 2004 convention speech with him. My dad, who hadn’t heard of him, just said “He’s good.” As in, “ok, I liked this guy, but he’s a Democrat, so he must be a huckster. But he’s a talented one.”
Then, late last year, his updated view on Obama: “I think I could vote for him.” I could only turn around and smirk, once I’d picked my jaw up from the floor.
Many of the people I talk to, some Obama supporters some not, believe Georgia will surprise the pollsters and pundits come November.