We had to drive up to Hanover from our home in Northern Virginia, to visit friends who have had to close their small business, declare bankruptcy, let the bank foreclose on their home, and are getting ready to move to Utah.
By the end of the day, our count of house signs in Pennsylvania stood at 15 McCain, 10 Obama. Bumper stickers at 1 each. The McCain sticker was actually an "I [heart] Sarah", just above a "Bush/Cheney '04".
One of the Obama houses had 4 signs (counted as one supporter). In several cases coming through the scruffy little blue-collar neighborhoods, where Route 116 slows down to 25 mph and hair salons vie with body shops, biker bars, and thrift stores, and tiny porches with vinyl fences and faux brick facing sport bits of flair -- windmill ducks, American flags, inflated plastic Halloween pumpkins -- McCain and Obama signs faced off across the road or between neighbor yards.
Hanover is the snack capital, the home of Utz chips and pretzels. It's comfortingly typical America in some ways -- in other ways, disturbingly so. Median age higher than the Pennsylvania average, median income lower. The town center has the air of one of those semi-rescued Victorian wrecks, with some nice architecture, a bit of bustle, mixed with struggling storefronts and a rather questionable classic hotel. There's a fantastic model train shop that you would miss if you didn't know it was there, and a world-famous Wiener restaurant.
There are active churches of just about every denomination, relative tolerance of a small, burgeoning GLSB community, lots of motorcycles, and a growing Latino population, evident in a number of Spanish-only bodegas and pop stands.
Outside the center of town, they have their "golden mile", a vast triangle between three main roads containing McAmerica -- a Walmart, a Lowe's AND a Home Depot, every major food chain, etc., etc. Like every place else, you quickly forget anything that might make Hanover distinct or special. But the people are friendly, the population diverse.
As we turned into town, we spotted Democratic/Obama headquarters -- the windows plastered with signs and the door wide open (yeah!). When we mentioned to our friend that the McCain signs were outnumbering Obama's, he said everyone he talks to seems to favor Obama.
He doesn't blame anyone for the failure of his business and the loss of his home. I think it was just a kind of perfect storm -- he was over-leveraged, miscalculated how much work and how little income there was in a sandwich franchise (which he just opened last fall), and certainly he saw the economy slow the past four months.
But there's a precariousness out there. A lot of regular folks, just trying to live their lives, improve their neighborhoods, a lot of them with a bit too much debt, and in a town like Hanover, very little real productive capacity in the local economy -- and too much of it geared to consumption. The real heart of the city has been treading water while America has tried to shop its way to something like prosperity, which we all thought would look something like happiness, and turns out to be just a system for making distant moguls rich and filling landfills with oil-based plastics.
Meanwhile, Hanover will have another vacant home on another weedy street-corner. I was glad to see as much Obama support as I did, expecting it to be more solidly red.