Dissing Michigan

Out here in Michigan, we’re getting kind of lonely. The phone never rings; there are no rallies or breathless announcements from our local anchorpersons that Obama or Bush or McCain is coming. We’re enjoying the silence of a backwater whose vote has already been decided – and we’re not worth the nickels it costs to visit.
You’d think we were Nevada, North Dakota or Rhode Island—not a great big bundle of sixteen electoral votes. (Relax friends, as the auto industry collapses and more people start running for the exits, we’ll have fewer electoral college votes in four years. Will we even rate an occasional TV spot then?)
They’re fighting over Virginia. Ohio is a “battleground state”. McCain just loves New Hampshire, he says today; and everybody wants a piece of Florida. Pennsylvania looks iffy; Missouri might go this way or that. Obama goes to Hawaii to visit grandma. Poor, ignored Michigan.
Obama has raised so much money this year that he can and is outspending McCain about four to one. ABC News reports that Obama outspends McCain eight to one on TV ads. (Remember the good, old days when Republicans were supposed to have the campaign money – and the favor of the old Press Lords?) He is reported to be surging everywhere.
Yet poll after poll shows McCain hanging in at close range, sometimes down by as little as a statistically insignificant one or two percent. Both candidates are campaigning hard in a race that they obviously feel isn’t quite over yet. Obama enjoys the enthusiasm, but somebody must love McCain.
The question is validly raised is this stubborn Republican support indicative of an endemic racism? There may well be instances of people saying they’re not racist and then acting out in way that suggests they lied. But McCain support certainly isn’t all racism.
I, personally, am torn on this issue. For well over forty years I’ve looked for the day when a black American could prove himself fully equal at the highest level. If that were the only issue in this race, I’d pull the lever for Obama myself. But there truly are other issues that sway me more.
I am against gay marriage. I go with the historic Christian point of view that marriage is very much for the propagation of children. (I have no objection to a civil union that confers legal rights.) I am viscerally against granting homosexual unions marital status. I am scarcely alone in this.
I am also against unrestricted abortion, late term (nearly live) abortion , and the right of legal infants (persons under eighteen or twenty-one) to get an abortion without parental approval. They couldn’t get an aspirin in school without a parental okay. But an abortion? Come, come. Again, I’m not alone.
There is excellent reason to believe an Obama administration would support positions that I find morally reprehensible. Not only that, but it can be expected to appoint Supreme Court justices with similar views. I cannot support this no matter who the person is or what his other positions may be. There are, I suspect, many people in this nation equally torn.
A lot of people like me may explain why McCain is hanging in even though in states like Virginia, Obama’s paid staff outnumbers McCain’s four to one. In Ohio, McCain can afford staffed offices in a handful of crucial counties. Obama has them in all counties.
Obama is probably going to win. (The Republic will survive – I discovered that when Truman won by lunchtime the day after election day in 1948.) This is, after all, the man who found a dozen ways to take down the Clinton machine in the primaries. He kept nickeling and diming his way to the number of delegates needed for the nomination. Give him that, he doesn’t quit.
He also has awesome resources. Republican strategists who talk about the Obama money machine sound a lot like awed World War II German generals describing a superbly equipped allied attack. “My front,” gasped a Nazi general after a thousand plane allied assault, “looks like the face of the moon.”
Obama will very likely roll on to victory. But the reason it isn’t already a rout has more to do with issues than with hidden pockets of racism. It is possible to like the man and loath his policies. That pretty much sums up my feelings about the Senator from Illinois.
I can understand that McCain can’t afford to campaign in Michigan – but couldn’t Obama show up just to say, “Hi”? It’s strangely lonely with no canned messages asking me to vote one way or the other. It could give us an inferiority complex. We’ve got enough grief with a collapsing auto industry.