NEWSWEEK: Cover: The End of the South -- How Obama vs. McCain Is Unsettling the old Confederacy

[jefferson_dem]

NEWSWEEK: Cover: The End of the South
How Obama vs. McCain Is Unsettling the old Confederacy
Christopher Dickey Goes Back to his Roots in the South to Learn 'Tenor of a Region' That has Been Critical to U.S. Presidential Elections

NEW YORK, Aug 03, 2008 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- Newsweek Paris Bureau Chief Christopher Dickey recently returned to the U.S. South, where his family has roots, and found that George W. Bush and Barack Hussein Obama have unsettled the region deeply: "the first with a reckless war and a weakened economy, the second with the color of his skin, the foreignness of his name, the lofty liberalism of his language." In the August 11 Newsweek cover, "The End of the South" (on newsstands Monday, August 4), Newsweek looks at the race issue head-on in the region that has fought the longest and the hardest, and suffered the most, trying to come to terms with it. Dickey, who drove through Tennessee, Georgia and the Carolinas, found the political emotions "more exposed than they've been in decades."

"After many years away I was exploring my own blood ties (which include an ancestor named after Sherman by his slave-owning-yet-Unionist parents), but also gauging the tenor of a region that has been critical to every U.S. presidential election since 1932, and may be again," Dickey writes. "If you don't win anything in the South, you need 70 percent of the rest of the country," says Merle Black, a political scientist at Emory University in Atlanta. "If you can win some of the South, that gives you breathing space." Polls suggest Virginia is in play. And the Obama campaign is approaching North Carolina and Georgia as if they might be, although like most people, Black (who is white, and from east Texas, which is deep in Dixie) thinks John McCain will win in both those states if only as the default candidate, the un-Obama, Dickey writes.

The South I saw was troubled by changes that go well beyond this "change" election, Dickey writes. "A generation is growing up with traumas more immediate than those of the 1860s-or the 1960s. Shana Sprouse, 21 and white, and born and raised in Spartanburg, S.C., said she's going to vote for Obama because her 26-year-old boyfriend is racked with cancer and she and he have spent the last two years trying to find ways to pay for his treatment or, now, his hospice. Jobs are disappearing to places that are truly foreign, not mock-strange states like California. New immigrants are introducing brown into a color map that has long been dominated by black and white. There is a sense that a world is ending, maybe not this year but inevitably."

"The election, and Obama's candidacy, have focused these anxieties like a lens. I found whites frustrated and indecisive about the campaign, families at odds, generations divided. Many who thought themselves beyond prejudice were surprised by their suspicions of the young black man from up north. Meanwhile, many slave-descended blacks, hugely supportive of the half-Kenyan, half-Kansan, Hawaii-reared Obama, seemed afraid to hope too much, inoculating themselves with pessimism about the chances that any man of color could win the presidency, even this man, even today, or that, if he does, he will survive. As I say, emotions are raw."

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http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/newsweek-cover-end-south/story.aspx?guid=%7B6F967EDC-A0D0-4B76-8B54-90E4CF769543%7D&dist=hppr

[GoesTo11]

1. McCain's ancestors were slaveowners

William Alexander McCain had owned 52 slaves. The senator seemed surprised after Salon reporters showed him documents gathered from Carroll County Courthouse, the Carrollton Merrill Museum, the Mississippi State Archives and the Greenwood, Miss., Public Library.

"I didn't know that," McCain said in measured tones wearing a stoic expression during a midday interview, as he looked at the documents before Tuesday night's debate. "I knew they had sharecroppers. I did not know that."

...


"I knew we fought in the Civil War," McCain went on. "But no, I had no idea. I guess thinking about it, I guess when you really think about it logically, it shouldn't be a surprise. They had a plantation and they fought in the Civil War so I guess that it makes sense."

"It's very impactful," he said of learning the news. "When you think about it, they owned a plantation, why didn't I think about that before? Obviously, I'm going to have to do a little more research."

Then he began to piece together information out loud. "So maybe their sharecroppers that were on the plantation were descendants of those slaves," he said.



http://archive.salon.com/politics2000/feature/2000/02/15/mccain/print.html