Barack Obama: Obama, Democrats and the Bubba Vote

Democrats haven’t won a majority of whites since 1964. The party leadership is worried that Obama can’t win if he doesn’t improve Democrats’ appeal to the white working class. Is the term “Bubba” helping or hurting Obama?

The “Bubba Vote,” a derogatory term that has replaced “Rednecks,” has come to mean rural, white, working class voters. Today these Bubbas are quite undecided and up for grabs.

Early in September former House majority leader Dick Armey, a Republican, made a statement in an interview with USA TODAY concerning these undecided white voters.

“The Bubba vote is there, and it’s very real, and it is everywhere,” Armey told USA TODAY and Gannett News Service. “There’s an awful lot of people in America, bless their heart, who simply are not emotionally prepared to vote for a black man.”

According to a recent AP-Yahoo News poll conducted Sept. 5-15, “18 percent of likely voters are up for grabs — undecided or willing to change their minds . . .” Many of the undecided are experiencing economic woes and consider the economy their top issue, and they are less intensely behind Obama than McCain.

Among these undecided voters, Democrats are much less intensely behind Obama than Republicans are behind McCain. Obama appears to have more people on the bubble, and many of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s former backers haven’t fully committed, while McCain’s backers are hard-core Republicans and excited by his running mate selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. . . .

A report recently completed by the Democratic Leadership Council argues that “it will be difficult for Obama to earn enough African American and youth support to compensate for enduring Democratic failures with white voters.”

Democrats have not won a majority of whites since 1964. Since 1980 though, Democrats have struggled to even remain competitive among whites, particularly men, and that has allowed Republicans to dominate the last quarter century of presidential politics. . . The report strongly suggests, however, that it will be difficult for the Obama campaign to win if he does not improve Democrats’ appeal to the white working class.

The questionable term, “Bubba voters,” seems to have caught on especially with Obama supporters and African-American columnists and bloggers.

An article Monday, Obama and ‘the Bubba Vote’, was posted in OpEDNews. It was written by Mumia Abu-Jamal (AKA: Wesley Cook) Former Black Panther Party activist, Abu-Jamal, was convicted and sentenced to death for the 1981 murder of police officer Daniel Faulkner.)

. . .If this Bubba vote has kept Obama from bouncing after a successful convention, McCain’s Palin pick has compounded this problem.

For it demonstrates that all the hue and cry over ‘experience’ was but a smokescreen for something else. It shows us that all the clamor over ‘qualifications; was naught but pretext.
For after all is said and done, for millions of Americans, Barack Obama’s blackness has made him automatically ineligible for election.

That’s not issues; that’s not views, that’s not politics; that’s race. Period. . .

What else is being said about support–or the lack thereof–for Obama among undecided Bubbas?

Continue reading: Obama and the Undecided Bubba Vote

by Faultlines USA
image: dbkp; dba-oracle.com
Source: Obama and the Undecided Bubba Vote

Tags: 2008 election, Barack Obama, blacks, Bubba, Dick Armey, John McCain, lack of, Politics, racism, redneck, support, undecided, voters, white