Al Landsberg, 66, approached the counter of the voter registration office at 4 p.m., an hour before deadline. Hefty, with a hint of sweat on his white mustache, he looked as drained as the employees behind the counter who rested their heads in their hands. Voting exhausted him. Ever since he cast a ballot for Ronald Reagan, Landsberg has always felt as though he was trying to choose the lesser of two evils.
For this election, though, he decided he had no choice but to vote. A lifelong Republican, he planned to switch his party affiliation so he could vote in the Democratic primary. That Hillary Clinton wasn't great, he said, but she was just as good as presumptive GOP nominee John McCain and a heck of a lot better than that other guy, "you know, uh, Embowa. He'd take this country right down the tubes."
Landsberg's wife, Evelyn, collects porcelain dolls, and her co-collectors send the Landsbergs frequent political e-mails, most of them critical of Obama. "From what I can tell, if he becomes president he will refuse to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance and we will leave Iraq unprepared," Landsberg said. "I'm not going to sit at home and let that happen."
The above excerpt is from today's Washington Post by Eli Saslow. It's part of an interesting article about the recent surge in Democratic voter registration in NC. It includes this short profile of Mr. Landsberg, a typical angry, white, southern, nominally Republican voter re-registering as a Democrat in order to vote against Obama.
This is what we're dealing with, this is what I was once afraid would prevent Obama from being elected. However, I don't believe that anymore. My faith in the country's electorate has grown with Obama's candidicy, with his viability as a potential President-elect.
Racism, latent and blatent, is still prevalent throughout the US. Obama needs to overcome this blight to win election as POTUS. Recently, he's been dealing with primary elections in the heartland of American racism, Appalachia.
Mr. Landsberg represents the people in this country who need to be marginalized, and I think they are a small enough minority that the election of an African-American President is a strong possibility. Still, anyone who thinks Obama has gained some kind of political advantage because he is black is fooling themselves. Racism is out there, in the open in some places and in the privacy of the voting booth in others, and it can't be ignored.
A friend of mine once told me that there's no difference between ignorance and evil because they both produce the same result. Perhaps Mr. Landsberg isn't a racist, who can really know what's in his heart, but his type of ignorance is bound to produce the same result in the end. The only hope for this country is for the enlightened, educated, open-minded faction to participate in our democracy. Get out and vote, and defeat the ignorance and racism that surrounds us.