By DAVID MARTIN
Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt made two mistakes when he condemned the comments of the St. Louis University political scientist who said rednecks swung the state for John McCain.
Blunt issued a statement two days after the election in which he attempted to repudiate Professor Ken Warren's "assertion that Missourians who supported John McCain are racists."
Warren, in fact, did not call McCain supporters racist. He was simply trying to explain how Obama could lose Missouri in a year when three white Democrats (Jay Nixon, Robin Carnahan and Chris Koster) won statewide office. "There was a redneck vote in the rural areas," Warren said. He added: "It's not like it's unexpected that people who are outside the metropolitan areas, where there is almost no black population, are uncomfortable with people they are not familiar with."
Atop his high horse, Blunt said Warren's comments were incorrect as well as detestable. Blunt cited election stories in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times that said race was a relatively minor factor in the presidential election.
But the Times today published a story supporting Warren's contention that a significant number of Bubbas couldn't get past Obama's skin color.
Breaking with the rest of the country, a band stretching from Texas to Kentucky voted more heavily Republican in the 2008 presidential election than in 2004. The Times said these Southern counties "tended to be poorer, less educated and whiter." In a word, rednecks.
Ten Missouri counties voted less Democratic in the 2008 presidential election. Obama, for instance, received just 39 percent of the vote in Schulyer County, which borders Iowa. John Kerry won 43 percent of the vote there in 2004.
According to the 2000 census, Schulyer County has just two African-American residents.
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I've seen it time and time and time again. Especially you see it in bars among the drunks screaming and yelling pathetically ignorant racist garbage about a President that has more intelligence alone than their whole family added together. Crazy racist loosers in the farm country in Missouri are a surprize to someone? Especially as you get 60 miles south of St. Louis, culturally it's more like Alabama than it is like Iowa. Some towns even brag to be "Where the South Begins." They still haven't figured out that the Civil War is over. They lost.
Well,if I visited the Ozarks,could this handsome black lad date a buxom blonde farmer's daughter without the farmer's(or his
Bubba buddies')attempting to lynch me?Just asking,folks.(FYI:Missouri was a slave state,
and for years had segregation laws like every other Southern state,but since the end of U.S
apartheid[I'm African-Canadian,incidentally],
it somehow has managed to become identified as
a Mid-Western state.So what are "Show Me Sta-
ters";Southerners or Mid-Westerners?)
Alas, David, if you could now only realize that you only took a small portion of the original story, and wildly extrapolated Warren's wild extrapolations, the progress would truly matter.
Warren's racist voter nonsense would necessarily HAVE to be confined to Missouri. At most, it can only be applied to red states. The big issue with this is all of the blue states, chocked with rural honkys, would have also had to stay red for Warren's theory to hold.
I realize you would love to sit on your high horse and brand those in rural America (or at least Missouri) racist as an explanation as to why the guy you and your brethren shamelessly promoted within your media. But, if all you need to come to that conclusion is that weak ass argument from Warren, and a mostly unrelated Times piece, then your credibility is seriously suspect.
Why is it that you whack jobs are so quick to buy into wildly concocted conspiracy, using your freedom of speech and press to so adamantly go against and frankly ignore the "innocent until proven guilty" freedoms?
Progress! Contradicting his earlier post, Trevor now acknowledges that Warren did not brand all McCain supporters as racist.
As to Trevor's second point, I don't see what confines Warren's racist-voter theory to Missouri. I linked to the Times piece because it describes a band of the country that did what Schulyer Co. did. Like Warren, observers the Times interviewed think a segment of the white vote in these areas got stuck on Obama's race.
As a whole group, he does not brand McC supporters as racist, but indirectly alleging that a substantial subgroup is racist is nonsense. Especially because to believe his argument, you must also believe that racism is completely confined into the single state of Missouri, which is complete bullshit.
Thus, it is not off the mark to blast an ill-informed hate monger like Professor Explanation.
Warren did not insinuate that everyone who voted against Obama is a racist, Trevor. In his view, racism explains the difference between Obama getting 49 percent of the vote and Nixon, Carnahan and Koster getting no less than 52 percent.
You may disagree with Warren on the role prejudice played in the election results. But for you and Gov. Blunt to complain that the professor attacked McCain supporters as a group is off the mark.
yea, trevor... obama won a higher per centage of white people than any democrat since carter and he still had 12 per cent less than what Big Mac Dingle Berry and Neiman Marcos Sugar Tits got. its like timothy noah said in Slate this week "It's Democrats who most whites dislike, not black people."
Yes, guz, that is true. But, insinuating that everyone that voted against Obama is a racist is fucking insane.
come on trevor, we all know racist whites who couldnt vote for obama. Don't act like racism is some kind of partisan issue. pretending their arent white racists is totally naive. honestly if you're from around here and you're white, you know some racists.
Look, you city folk are in a red state. That doesn�t make the rest of the state anymore racist than you are elitists. So, quit trying to affect the right of the people to express their opinion, accept you�re red, quit crying, and move the fuck on.
Perhaps you should worry about how your new guy is going to handle the �worst economic crisis since [insert favorite reference here].� Professor Explanation is going to be just as unemployed as Joe Journalist if both don�t quit focusing on the shit that doesn�t matter.
Easy choice here. I agree with Matt Blunt 100%. Ken Warren's remarks were abhorrent, ignorant, and reckless. The liberals in the media are beside themselves that Obama lost MO and now they are looking for someone to blame. So I guess the "racist vote" just has to be the scapegoat here. Give me a break. I hope rural Missourians never forget what the elites in St. Louis and Kansas City are saying about them - way to castigate an entire region, "Professor" Warren. I hope he gets canned; Lord knows I wouldn't want my kids to hear this ignorant drivel in the classroom.
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