As you may know from reading my diaries (although, based on my latest diary, not many people read it), I was born and raised in down-state Illinois. Despite the fact that the President claims Illinois as his home state and that he won Illinois in a walk back in '08, the area that I grew up in has never been particularly friendly to Mr. Obama. If I recall correctly, he barely won Morgan County, where I grew up. It was (and is) an area where racism lingered among the older generations, and where jokes based on the color of ones' skin are tolerated, if not embraced.
Imagine my surprise then, when on a visit to my brothers, parents, sisters-in-law, nieces, and nephew in the steamy cauldron of sun-baked angst which is Jacksonville, Illinois last weekend, I had a conversation with my brother about my father's political leanings.
My dad is a good, decent man, who came from not much and did a lot with it. He is nearing retirement, was more or less permanently crippled thirty years ago, but still gets up every morning around 5 AM and does what he is paid to do. He worshiped the ground that Ronald Reagan walked on, and once got up at 2 hours after going to bed (after taking yours truly to a World Series game in St Louis [1982 game 6, St Louis 13; Milwaukee 1 W00T!!]) to cover a press conference that Ronnie was giving in an even smaller town near us to discuss the plight of the Midwestern farmer. He advocated merging our country with Canada so the United States would be bigger than the USSR, and thought that George Bush the elder should run with Ronnie as his VP so that he could resign and Reagan could be president again.
So when I heard Mike describe my father's description of Romney last weekend, over a late night supper of fried catfish, Pringles, and Natural Light, I was stunned.
"Dad says that he is a cube of Jell-O wrapped in hundred-dollar bills."
I have my father to thank for introducing me to the works of Heinlein, Clarke, and other classic sci-fi authors, and I know for a fact that I would never have received the 1981 Silver Jubilee Edition of Ballantine Books' publication of The Lord of The Rings for Christmas without his assurance to my mother that it did NOT promote anti-Christian ideals (I became an atheist without JRRT's help, thank you very much), but he has never turned a phrase as aptly as this one. I actually did a Google search to see if he had heard it somewhere else.
To the best of my knowledge, he hasn't.
If Mitt Romney has lost people like my father, he has lost the election. Small-town, financially conservative, socially moderate, lower-income white males in their sixties should be a group that Romney wins by HUGE margins. And I am fully aware that my father is only one man, and his particular vote in a state that Obama will win by 20+ points doesn't matter for squat. But for my father, supporting Romney shouldn't even be a question. It should be natural, like his beard and his Monty Python jokes.
It isn't.
If Romney thinks he can waltz in to the border states and win the votes of people like my dad simply because of his party, he is sadly mistaken. Reagan was Reagan, and Bush was Reagans's VP, and Bush the Younger at least shared a name and McCain and Dole were legitimate war heroes.
But Romney?
To people like my dad, credibility still means something. To borrow a phrase my father would never use, what kind of street cred does Romney have? A one-term governor from the most conspicuously liberal state in the nation is not going to make them come out in droves. Trust me on this. North Carolina, Virginia, Missouri, Arizona, maybe even Montana. They are all in play. Probably not Indiana. But Romney is going to be playing defense there. And if the Republican nominee is playing defense in flipping Missouri, there is no freaking WAY he is winning this election.