John McGuirk

Gary Younge’s report in the Guardian is a hell of a read. One has to commend Mr. Younge on his bravery, and the lengths he’s willing to go to pursue a story. Our intrepid reporter takes his life in his own hands and ventures into Appalachia, hunting for answers to a question that seems to boggle the minds of European media types: Why do these Americans seem not to share our unconditional love of President Obama?

First, he encounters poverty:

“More than a quarter of the families in Prestonsburg live in poverty; half of the children in Floyd County, where it is situated, are on food stamps….. Is there a direct correlation [between Obama's victory and the region's bad times]? I don’t know. But I do know a lot of people are hurting.”

Straightforward enough. But hold on – maybe these people never quite got into the spirit of the Obama election in the first place! Maybe that’s why they’re not happy!

“…The official narrative of Obama’s inauguration – the fairytale most of the US media told itself and that the international community wanted to believe – was that after a rancourous campaign a divided country came together to celebrate the historic election of its first African-American president. The reality was always quite different. The editor of the Grayson County News Gazette in Leitchfield, a small town 230 miles west of Prestonsburg, recalls that the day after the election much of the area wore sombre faces. The week he was elected gun sales across the country leapt about 50%….”

This is sinister. Did you hear that? Firearm sales went up right at the start of hunting season after Obama’s election. The fact that Deer come into season in Appalachia in mid November had everything nothing to do with it.

But, wait. Wait, wait, wait. There’s something else to consider here:

“Truth be told they never really liked Obama much in Floyd County. He won only 5% of the vote against Hillary Clinton’s 94% in the primaries. But until recently they did love Democrats. In the 2004 election John Kerry won the county with a 25-point margin. In 2008, John McCain took it by 2 points – the first time a Republican had won Floyd in living memory”

Oh my. Where could this be going?

Ah:

“Back at the Feed My Sheep food pantry Cindy Hernandez has just picked up her groceries and is rifling through the secondhand clothes. She has no doubts about why Obama struggled in a county that is 98% white.

“That’s because Obama was black. Let’s get real,” she says with a laugh.”

Of course. How did we not see this?? That’s why he did badly.

Oh, hang on a second.

Isn’t this is what we heard earlier, from the exact same article?:

“Lt Governor Daniel Mongiardo, the Democratic frontrunner in Kentucky’s senatorial race later this year, says he would not want Obama to come and stump for him on the campaign trail, particularly because of his environmental policies. “With some of the positions he has taken, especially on coal, no. He certainly can’t come into eastern or western Kentucky and help. Nor would I want him to.”

Hang on. You mean there’s another explanation? Mentioned earlier, in the exact same article? Which explains the localised opposition to President Obama? NO! This is not what Gary Younge came to write about!

“To ask where racism ends and politics begins in all of this is to set up a false dichotomy – America’s politics has always been steeped in race and racism is a political force. The psychic scars of centuries are not removed in one election or as a result of one person. Indeed they may be deepened and made even more raw as a result of them…..

….The movement that has emerged to oppose him is almost exclusively white”

There. See? Racists. The lot of them. That’s why they don’t like him.

Indeed:

“The doubts they have cast about his Christianity and his birthplace (some claim Obama wasn’t born in America) are really proxies for race – a bid to cast him as the ultimate “other”…..His rightwing dissenters may be eccentric and racially exclusive but they have also proved highly effective”.

And it goes on from there, finishing with the claim that headlines the article – that these people would vote for serial killer Charles Manson ahead of President Obama in 2012.

Now, let’s leave aside the logic and value of going to a place that did not vote for Obama in the first place in order to write an article about how he is losing support. Instead, let’s ask ourselves a more interesting question: Was Gary Younge surprised to find all this alleged “racism” in Appalachia? Did it come as a shock? Or did he, perhaps, go looking for it?

And by the way, did he find it? Sure, he found a hispanic lady willing to allege that her townsfolk were racists. And he gets one person to say that he voted “for the old, white guy”, which is more a description of John McCain than an explanation of why he got the vote. What always shocks me in these articles is the lack of racism that our intrepid reporter tends to find. Indeed, he finds other explanations, like energy policy – from Democrats – but still manages to declare racism a key reason for the discontent.

Of course, returning to something I left aside earlier, Gary Younge doesn’t want the real answer to the question his article poses. He seeks to explain why Obama has a lower approval rating than any President at this stage of his term since Dwight D. Eisenhower, and he goes to the one part of the country that rejected him more soundly than any other? There was no argument for going to Virginia? Or North Carolina? States that he won but now has low rating in? Nah.

This article isn’t supposed to be about analysis. It’s supposed to be about explaining away something that Guardian readers dislike (Obama’s ratings falling) with something that appeals to their prejudices (America is full of racist rednecks). It doesn’t even do it well. But there you go. Gary Younge probably feels better, now he’s slandered an entire population.