Indiana could be won by the Democrats, but it’s not just about scoring the Hoosier (see * at botom of post for amazing story of the word's origisn) State’s 11 electoral votes for Obama. Turnout is critical for the down-ticket races, to retire four vulnerable Republican Congressmen who deserve it: Buyer, Pence, Souder, Burton, as well as Governor Daniels.
Indiana’s 6 pm poll-closing inhibits Democratic voters, so early voting encouraged by canvassers in the next three weeks will help overcome that big disadvantage. Democratic voters tend to be wage-earners, formerly making it with day-shift jobs, now more challenged as household heads have to scramble with more than one jub. Fewer union blue-collar jobs now: more dog-eat-dog spew on radio, blogs, newspaper letters.
Your door-to-door faith in Obama, in four excellent Democratic congressional candidates: CD03 - Mike Montagano (vs. Mark Souder), CD04 - Nels Ackerson (challenging do-nothing Republican Steve Buyer), CD05 - Mary Etta Ruley (vs. Dan Burton), and CD06 - Barry Welsh (vs. Mike Pence), and in Jill Long Thompson for Governor (vs. Mitch Daniels), can cheer on many Hoosiers hassled by 8 years and more of Republican misrule to take back the state.
Indiana is conservative, because the Republicans (with a lot more money) own most newspapers, which emphasize sports and crime to stifle controversy, as well as Big Pharma (Eli Lilly, Miles), and the agricultural sector (the family farmers have retired to Arizona and Florida, and the land is worked by highly mechanized outfits). There aren't many wealthy liberals, because the state isn't a hub of finance (Chicago, New York), electronics (Silicon Valley), or entertainment (Los Angeles), and it has a lot fewer trial lawyers than North Carolina (where insurance companies are deserving targets for corporate negligence, as well as celebration by John Grisham and emblematic success by John Edwards).
Even so, in the 1960s and 1970s, when unions were much stronger in Indiana, we had liberal Senators Birch Bayh (Terre Haute, 18 years, almost survived 1930 Reagan landslide, lost to Dan Quayle) and the late Vance Hartke. Until the 1990s. we had fine liberal Congressmen like John Brademas (South Bend), Floyd Fithian (Lafayette) succeeded by Jim Jontz (Monticello), Phil Sharp (Muncie), Andy Jacobs (Indianapolis), Frank McCloskey (Bloomington-Evansville), and Lee Hamilton (Columbus).
As a Lafayette native, if I could I would stay with my Indianapolis brother and canvass in nearby Hendricks, Boone, Montgomery, and Johnson counties in the 4th Congressional District for Nels Ackerson www.nels4congress.com, a financially-competitive moderate Democrat, against Republican do-nothing, Bush-loyalist incumbent Steve Buyer.
Liberal and moderate grads of Purdue, Indiana, Indiana State, Ball State, Wabash, Butler, Notre Dame, St. Joseph's, Franklin and DePauw: you owe it to your roots to canvass for Nels Ackerson, Jill Long Thompson for Governor, and Barack Obama/Joe Biden any of the next three lovely fall weekends. Help turn the 4th CD, one of the reddest of Indiana’s 9 districts, blue. Or go to the 3rd CD to help Mike Montagano oust Mark Souder, to the 5th to help Mary Ellen Buley against Dan Burton, or to the 6th to boost Barry Welsh (who commented on an earlier diary today) against Mike Pence.
Buyer, a military prosecutor in the Gulf War, beat Jim Jontz (a great pro-labor pro-environment Congressman) back in 1992 with megabucks from wannabe loggers of old-growth forests. An over-zealous prosecutor at Bill Clinton’s Senate impeachment trial, Buyer is afraid to debate Ackerson, because he’s done very little for Indiana in 16 years.
NOTE ON ORIGINS OF WORD "HOOSIER"
It definitely meant rural and poorly educated, scholars agree. Here is an unnoticed class-conscious example of its usage as a term for squatter, from the journal of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1853, travelling on a rail handcar on the old Louisville, New Albany & Chicago Railroad near Brookston, White County Indiana (quoted in Carl Bode, The Viking Portable Emerson).
But where does the word come from? The first Indiana settlers (about 1800, in Louisville and Cincinnatti areas) were upland Southerners who were very likely influenced by a great circuit-riding Methodist preacher, freed slave Harry Hoosier. See two scholarly articles (available online), which together make a persuasive case that the derogatory use of the word "hoosier" for poor Ohio Valley settlers by Upper South [Episcopalians] instead of "crackers," used to put down Southwestern poor whites, could most likely be explained by the fact our ancestors would actually listen respectfully to an eloquent black preacher:
William D. Piersen, "The Origin of the Word "Hoosier": A New Interpretation," Indiana Magazine of History, June 1995, pp. 189 - 196.
http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/...
Stephen H. Webb, "Introducing Black Harry Hoosier: The History Behind Indiana’s Namesake," Indiana Magazine of History, March 2002, pp. 30 - 41.
http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/...
If you get this far, please try out the poll (whose questions are not meant facetiously).