Imagine my surprise. The shock. I check my in-box and there it is, big and bold and all caps: An email from the South Carolina Democratic Party. Subject: SC IS OBAMA COUNTRY.
I opened the thing and began to read.
"This is truly Barack Obama's moment--will you help us elect him? In January, South Carolina Democrats showed the world we could get behind Barack Obama's message of change..."
Damn right. On January 26, 2008, I was--to paraphrase Michelle Obama--really, really proud of my state. For the first time in my long, politically engaged life. I was foot-stompin', "Hallelujah!" shoutin', tears-a-flyin' proud. I cried like a baby and hugged folks I barely knew. Honey, this South Carolinian's balloon didn't land for a week.
I gotta tell you, as much as I love my home state, last fall I would rather have had Florida or Michigan get the early primary date. South Carolina has glorious beaches, aristocratic Old South Charleston, the fabulous foothills of the Upstate. We have Southern cuisine to die for (you haven't lived until you've had a heaping plate full of Low Country shrimp and grits). We have some fine colleges and universities. We have class and culture, gentle manners, soft accents, wonderful people.
But we have Bob Jones U, a wide swath of the fundamentalist Bible Belt and a long, ugly history of the KKK, Strom and the Dixiecrats and Jim Crow. Clearly, we still don't know which flag to fly high over the state capitol, which to salute first. We have loved Bush, bullets, bombs, beer bottles and Biblical bombast. We're hard-wired somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun. As a liberal and a supporter of Barack Obama, an empowered South Carolina scared the bejesus out of me.
Oh, ye of little faith.
The SC primary statistics speak for themselves: Over 532,000 Democrats voted--that's about twice the number who voted in 2004. It's around 100,000 more than the number of Republicans who voted in their primary. Obama netted 55% of the vote to Clinton's 27% and Edwards' 18%. Among Palmetto State Dems, Obama carried 54% of women, 81% of African Americans, 49% of white Democrats between the ages of 18-35. In exit polling, 55% of South Carolina Democrats said Barack Obama was the candidate most likely to unite the country.
In the final days before our primary a number of polls, including the McClatchy/MSNBC survey, told us Obama could expect to win no more than 10% of the white vote. They were wrong. When the voting booth curtain closed behind them, 25% of white Democrats voted for Barack Obama. While not the majority of us, two and a half times more white folks than expected chose Obama.
The statistics, the two-to-one rout that spelled the end of the Edwards campaign and exposed the vulnerable underbelly of the Clinton campaign, became the Big Story.
It was the wrong story.
As early as September 2007, when Hillary Clinton was still "inevitable", Brad Warthen (editorial page editor of The State--South Carolina's largest newspaper) wrote:
"...on Saturday the [Obama] campaign is going to try to knock on 50,000 doors in South Carolina. Every county is organized, hundreds of volunteers are ready in-state and hundreds more are expected...from elsewhere to help. Should be quite an impressive feat if they can pull it off--and if any campaign can, it's Obama's.
"...I overheard somebody at another table at breakfast talking about Obama, and I find myself wondering if the guy is taking over South Carolina..."
No less a veteran journalist than Lee Bandy, who covered SC politics for forty years, said he'd never seen anything like it. The grass roots movement surprised everyone, as did the momentum, the enthusiasm of the Obama campaign which had brought the principles of community organizing to a state where the Democratic Party had become little more than a political cypher. The party of the also-rans.
It was clear months before the primary, despite conventional wisdom and poll numbers, that something was happening on the ground in South Carolina. Something different. Something new. Obama field organizers moved to the Palmetto State for the duration. They lived among us, ate meals with us, attended church with us. They met with us in small groups, in our homes and our churches. They discussed issues with us--Iraq, education, health care, jobs, poverty and how the widening gap between the haves and the have-nots impacts us all. They shared their stories with us: How they'd come to believe in Barack Obama's vision, his plan for the nation. If we had questions, they provided answers.
And they asked us to share our own stories. Our own problems, our concerns, our needs. They listened. They took note of what we said. The information would be shared with Obama HQ in Chicago.
The Obama campaign in South Carolina became a personal one. "Each one reach one" was central to the effort here. We were, at the end of the day, responsible for our own campaign--house by house, neighborhood by neighborhood, town by town... It was an exercise in empowerment and individual responsibility. Such a bottom-up campaign defied reason. Defied political logic. Barack Obama, as Democratic nominee, was a long shot.
Oh, ye of little faith.
On January 26th, South Carolina voters upset the political apple cart. In major fashion.
Now the state Democratic Party declares we are Obama Country. It's a lifelong Southern liberal's dream. But the vaunted media-map of red states/blue states still shows us scarlet. As red, I am prone to complaining, as a ripe tomato.
There's hope. Democrats outvoted Republicans at our primaries. There are more women than men who vote in South Carolina. Younger voters are fully engaged. African Americans are energized and committed. We are, in increasing numbers, fed up with George W. and the war. We're fed up with being lied to, with politics trumping sound, humane public policy. We're overworked and underpaid. Too many of us have seen our jobs outsourced. We need health insurance. We're tired of an educational system that leaves our children on the bottom rung of the ladder. We're poorer than much of the rest of the country. Too many South Carolinians are desperately poor. We're sick of promises made and broken. We may well be sick and tired of Lee Atwater-style 527s and dishonest, dishonorable smear-mongering. He was one of us, after all, and on his deathbed he deeply regretted the sins he'd committed in the name of winning-at-any-cost.
As red as a ripe tomato. Maybe so. But sometimes "ripe" is too close to "rotten" for consumption. The grass roots movement is gearing up again. Maybe, on Election Day 2008, South Carolina Democrats--from the bottom up--will lead a statewide revolution. We'll refuse to take one more over-ripe bite; we've been mindlessly red for far too long. This is Obama Country.
