The Hidden Obama Vote

I just called my father to wish him an early Happy Father's Day.  My annoyingly punctual and conscientious sister always gets in the first call, winning for herself the title of Best Daughter Ever. So I thought I'd beat her this year by getting it in a day early.  This, of course, after not having called him for a month. He let me know in his typically "casual" style: "Well, as I told you when I spoke to you LAST MONTH..." What can I tell you? I'm a bad daughter.

After my mother's death almost a decade ago, my father moved to Florida, got remarried, and then moved to her home state of Alabama.  Yikes.  I hesitate to say that my father married into a family of yahoos, but let me just say this: on the wedding day, the parking lot was filled with pick up trucks with rifle racks and families wearing matching formal cowboy outfits. This would be merely colorful, were it not for the more disturbing reinforcers of all my anti-southern prejudices: the casual physical abuse of the children, for one.  As my father's new daughter-in-law explained it, Dr. Spock was a communist and there was nothing that a kid could do that wouldn't be cured by a good whipping with a belt. Then there was the father who announced with pride that he had gotten his one year old son into drinking early by giving him a shot glass of beer over Christmas.  And we won't get into the conversations about "the coloreds." They insisted that southerners were not prejudiced against "the coloreds," and then promptly proceeded to note how some football players really did "look like monkeys." My teenaged son was baffled.  He looked at me at one point and said, "How do I even respond to that, Mom?"  I said "I don't know.  Just be grateful your gay brother isn't here.  There'd be a fist fight for sure."

So when I spoke to my father, this Saturday before Father's Day, I asked him "So who's everybody down there voting for, for president?" Of course, I knew the answer, but I was trying to tease his preferences out of him.  My father, after all, was the only Republican in a long, proud line of Democrats. (His sister, my Aunt Florence, still has a ceramic plate shrine to President Kennedy in her livingroom.)

His voice got very low, as though he didn't want anyone around him to hear what he was saying.

"Well, you know. They're all Republicans around here."

"Yeah, okay. Well, but who are you supporting?"

"You know," he whispered. I sort of THOUGHT I knew, but the rest of his sentence clinched it:

"George Bush did it for me.  I'm never voting for a Republican again. I just keep my mouth shut, because I don't want to get them started, but I'm finished with the Republicans.  I was against this war from the start, and I'm against it now.  We never should have been there, and we should just get the hell out."

Mind you, this is one of the "hard working white males" that Hillary crowed about.  A dirt-poor farm boy from rural Maine, he dropped out of school in the 8th grade to get in on the tail end of WWII, a war which took the life of his beloved older brother. He broke his ass on a daily basis, keeping a roof over his family's head. He drove diaper delivery trucks, he delivered milk, he drove and then repaired school buses.  He got up at 4:00 in the morning to go to work, got home at 4:00 p.m., took a nap, then left at 6:00 for his second job.  We were never anything approaching rich, but I don't remember lacking for anything I needed, thanks to my Dad.

So Dad is keeping his mouth shut, but when the time comes to pull the lever in the voting booth in a little town outside of Birmingham, he's pulling it for Obama, because he trusts Obama and the Democrats to do what the Republicans failed to do: keep faith with the American people.  All I can say is, if my father's voting Democrat this year, the Republicans don't stand a chance.