Obama: how he's selling his message to small-town sceptics

If you want to get to Lebanon, a town of about 3,200 inhabitants, the easiest way is to fly into the Tri-City Airport on the Tennessee side of the Appalachians, then drive about 45 minutes north-east through some of the most gorgeous hill country in America. The back road that leads to Lebanon High School is lined with trailer-size houses on the edge of collapse, their front porches buckling in the sun.

But then, as you approach the school, you see a few neat rows of brand-new town houses, with prices in the high $200,000s – the unmistakable landscape of the new economy. Lebanon is slowly becoming a symbol of hope for towns all over the region that dream of turning south-western Virginia, with its abundant land and cheap labour, into the next hi-tech hub. Local counties have raised up a half-dozen "shell buildings" – essentially empty warehouses already connected to sewers and broadband lines – to attract businesses looking for ready-made space. Inspired by the influx of technology jobs, officials in the area have started what they call the Return to Roots programme, in which they aggressively seek out qualified graduates who have moved away for other jobs and try to lure them back home.

Barack Obama came to Lebanon High for a town-hall meeting with voters on the Tuesday after Labour Day (the first Monday in September), marking the first time that any presidential candidate had stepped foot in the area since Jimmy Carter came to nearby Castlewood in 1976. The campaign made tickets available to its local offices a few days before the event, and a lot of the roughly 2,400 attendees queued to get them. As a result, most of the voters in the school gymnasium seemed to be committed Obama backers already.

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The programme opened with the validators. This is a critical part of Obama's small-town strategy – getting respected surrogates to stand up and say that Obama is a guy you can trust. The first person on stage was Ralph Stanley, the 81-year-old legendary bluegrass musician, who was born in nearby Stratton and makes his home in Dickenson County. He unfolded a piece of paper and read, in a shaky voice: "I want to endorse Barack Obama as the next president of the United States. Thank you very much!" The gymnasium exploded.

(When the candidate met Stanley backstage, Obama told him that he had some of Stanley's banjo music on his iPod. Stanley nodded appreciatively, but a few minutes later he turned to a friend and asked, "What's an iPod?")

Stanley was followed by Cecil Roberts, the white-bearded president of the mineworkers' union, who preached as if he were at a revival, putting Obama's early years into a framework that south-western Virginians could understand. "Moses was a community organiser!" Roberts thundered. "And yes, Jesus was a community organiser!" Then came Rick Boucher, the owlish congressman who represents Lebanon and its surrounding counties in Washington. "Senator Obama is a friend of coal and the thousands of jobs it brings to south-western Virginia," Boucher assured the crowd. In fact, he repeated this line – "Barack Obama is a friend of coal" – no fewer than five times in 10 minutes.

Obama finally bounded on-stage to an ovation that rocked the bleachers. He delivered a newly sharpened version of his basic rally speech, pacing the stage as he spoke, his pitch rising as he punctuated each point in a long list of indictments against the Bush years and John McCain. He stressed his own American story – the mother on food stamps, the grandfather who fought in "Patton's army", the father-in-law who worked a shift job with multiple sclerosis and never missed a day. The speech wasn't appreciably different from one he would have given at an arena packed with 20,000 people in Philadelphia or St Louis.

It was only after the speech, prompted by questions from the audience, that Obama tried to reassure the crowd that he was not some San Francisco liberal who pitied rural people for their religiosity and their pastimes. One man wanted to know what Obama thought of those who looked down on Sarah Palin because she was evangelical. No doubt thinking of the persistent rumours still flying around the internet that say he is a closet Muslim, Obama reiterated, for about the seven millionth time this year, that he, too, is a practising Christian. "This is a nation of believers," he said, "and I'm one of them."

A teenage girl asked Obama what he might do specifically for rural America. I found it odd that Obama had to be prompted to address this question, but he warmed to it immediately, ticking off a list of public investments that his administration could bring to the region: broadband lines, school financing, the development of biodiesel fuels. He talked about creating more jobs for local students, "so when they graduate from college those kids can stay here and live in Lebanon instead of having to go and work someplace else".

Having finished that thought, Obama suddenly straightened up, as if something else important had just occurred to him. "One thing I want to make clear while we're on this topic of rural America," he said, looking around the gym. "There are a lot of folks who come up to me and say, 'You know, Barack, I like your economic plan, and I'm tired of George Bush, but you know, I got my NRA mailing, and I'm worried you're gonna take my gun away.' " Obama likes to do this – to momentarily inhabit the mind of some composite character and act out his side of the conversation – and he was met with knowing chuckles.

"I just want to be absolutely clear, OK? I just don't want any misunderstanding when you all go home and you talk with your buddies, and they say, 'Oh, he wants to take my gun away.' You heard it here, and I'm on television, so everybody knows. I believe in the Second Amendment. I believe in people's lawful right to bear arms. I will not take your shotgun away. I will not take your rifle away. I won't take your handgun away.

"So if you want to find an excuse not to vote for me, don't use that one!" Obama said, eliciting a wave of laughter and cheers from the crowd. "It just ain't true!"

***

Obama achieved his main objective in Lebanon: he showed up where no modern Democratic nominee had before, taking on social issues and planting himself squarely in the mainstream, and he hit on the list of issues that Warner and others urged him to mention. When I caught up with Congressman Boucher not long after the event, he told me it had been "terribly important". Boucher had recently commissioned a poll in his district, which he gave to the Obama campaign, and while he wouldn't tell me any of the specifics, he did volunteer that McCain was "significantly ahead". Still, the poll showed an unusually high number of undecided voters – perhaps not surprising given that in the Republican primary McCain lost badly to Mike Huckabee in the south-western counties. "People are not enthusiastic about McCain," he told me. "They want to get to know Barack Obama better. They're waiting to be persuaded.

"The grapevine is the single most powerful form of communication in my district," Boucher continued. "All those people in that gymnasium, I'll bet every one of them went out and told 10 people, 'Hey, he was terrific.'"

Still, it occurred to me that during his appearance in Lebanon, Obama did little more than briefly nod to a series of local concerns, as if he had been carrying around a list that needed to be checked off before he got back on his plane and headed east to Norfolk. "Keeping jobs at home" was a great applause line, but Obama didn't betray any awareness of the novel public programmes that might make that goal possible. Far from celebrating Lebanon, as Warner suggested, Obama made only passing reference to the new jobs that were revitalising the town, a success story that would seem to have justified his coming there in the first place. Obama mostly made the same general appeal he was making in more diverse and liberal parts of the country, with a few perfunctory detours along the way.

It is often said in politics that a candidate's strength is also his weakness. Obama's greatest asset as a candidate, the trait that has enabled him to overcome both a thin résumé and the resistance of his own party's establishment, is his placidity. Even more than through his ability to give a rousing speech (plenty of other candidates, from Ted Kennedy to Howard Dean, could do that), Obama has differentiated himself from recent Democrats by conveying a sense of inner security that is highly unusual in a business of people who have chosen to spend every day asking people to love them. He does not seem like a candidate who's going to switch to earth tones in his middle age or who's going to start dressing up in camouflage to rediscover his inner Rambo. Obama is content to meet the world on his terms, and something about that inspires confidence.

And yet that same lack of pathetic neediness may in fact be a detriment when it comes to persuading voters who, culturally or ideologically, just aren't predisposed to like him. I once heard a friend of Obama's compare him with Bill Clinton this way: if Clinton sees you walking down the other side of the street, he immediately crosses over to shake your hand; if Obama sees you coming, he nods and waits for you to cross. That image returned to me as I watched Obama campaign in Lebanon. Clinton wouldn't have wanted to leave that gym until every last voter had been converted, even if that meant he had to memorise the scheduled sewer installation for every home in Russell County. To seek election in 2001, Mark Warner, Virginia's former Democratic Governor, a similarly tenacious glad-hander, went to rural Virginia again and again because, deep down, he needed to change people's perceptions of who he was. Obama doesn't connect to the world that way, which is probably why his campaign has always preferred big rallies to hand-to-hand venues. Obama gives the impression that he's going to show up and make his case, and if you don't fall in love with him, well, he'll just have to pick up the pieces and go on.

***

In some other election year, that probably wouldn't have been enough to sway the undecided voters who came to see Obama at Lebanon High. But this isn't any other election year. George Bush's approval ratings are the lowest on record, the Republican nominee is an erstwhile foe of the NRA and taxpayers are doling out loans to Wall Street while their own credit suddenly dries up. As this campaign's symbol of change (the word is all but tattooed on his forehead), Obama has become, in a sense, the default candidate – the guy you choose if he can clear even a modest threshold of acceptability. Voters in places like Lebanon were not, as Obama joked, looking for excuses not to vote for him; they were looking for reasons they should. The uncommitted voters in the gymnasium might not have run back home to tell their friends how "terrific" Obama had been, but they may have said that Obama didn't seem alien or condescending – that he wasn't the contemptuous, tax-loving liberal they had heard so much about. And maybe, this time, that would be enough.

A week after Obama visited Lebanon and Norfolk, I went to see Jim Webb in his Capitol Hill office. Obama's campaign considers Webb, a war hero and former Republican, to be one of its most critical validators all over Virginia, specifically because he appeals to white men who are sceptical of Democrats in general. In fact, Webb's Scots-Irish family hails from coal country. Not long after he entered the Senate, he became embroiled in a mini-controversy when an aide accidentally carried one of Webb's favourite guns on to the Capitol grounds.

I was surprised, then, when Webb told me that while he was enthusiastic about Obama and would campaign for him, he did not intend to vouch for him on social issues. "I believe Obama has the temperament, the intellect and the ideas to be president," Webb said. "But I don't talk about his positions, and I don't defend his positions." When I commented that Webb wasn't where Obama was on gun rights (Obama favours what he calls some "common sense" restrictions), Webb cut me off. "No, he's not where I am on guns," he said pointedly. It occurred to me that this was probably the kind of validation Obama could do without. (Webb appears to have softened his stance. A few weeks later, he decided to tape an ad promising voters in south-western Virginia that Obama would not, in fact, confiscate their guns.)

Webb and I discussed the conventional wisdom taking hold – in discussions not only about Virginia but about Pennsylvania and Ohio and Michigan as well – that white men weren't breaking Obama's way mostly because he's black. Webb disagreed. When it came to white working-class and rural voters, Webb said, what mattered was whether Obama seemed to share the same basic small-town values. "Does he understand me?" Webb said. "Can I trust him?"

At one point, when we were talking about the south-western part of the state, Webb suggested, half seriously, that I should talk to his cousin Jimmy, who writes a column for The Lebanon News. (The number of Webb's cousins is something of a joke in Virginia; he's related in some way to the entire western part of the state.) So when I got back to my office, I tracked down cousin Jimmy, who, it turns out, is 78 years old and knows Virginia politics as well as he knows the old coins he sells to collectors. Jimmy Webb told me he was a strong Obama supporter, but he had a slightly different take on things than his famous cousin.

"When you get past Roanoke and out this way," he told me, "in south-western Virginia and eastern Tennessee, blacks are just not that popular. That's one of Obama's problems. I've had Democrats tell me that they're not even going to the polls." I heard much the same thing from Steve Cochran, the Democratic committee chairman in Montgomery County. (Believe it or not, Cochran, too, is somehow a distant cousin of Webb's.) "I think if the people of south-western Virginia had the opportunity to meet Obama and see how intelligent he is and how genuine he is and how caring he is, there would be no question," Cochran said. "But there is still this little bit of scepticism in Appalachian Virginia, as there is in a lot of other parts of the country, that this guy is still just a little bit not like me. I see people having a little trouble getting around that colour barrier."

How race affects Obama's effort to broaden the electoral map is the most persistent question surrounding his campaign – and perhaps the least answerable. A bracing poll released last month by the Associated Press and Yahoo, in conjunction with Stanford University, concluded that Obama might be losing as many as six percentage points nationally because he's black. This was based on the finding that 40 per cent of white Americans admitted to some negative views toward blacks. Such polls are frequently cited as proof that Obama would be walking away with the election were he more than half white.

And yet from all available data, Obama isn't actually doing any worse with white men than the last two Democratic nominees, both of whom also ran at a time when the national climate offered considerable advantages – Gore because the country had enjoyed a long period of prosperity, Kerry because of the failing war in Iraq. According to exit polls, Kerry lost the overall white vote by 17 points in 2004. Recent Gallup tracking polls, while somewhat erratic from week to week, have shown Obama running above that level; polling in early October had him down by only eight points among white voters. "Obama's doing better than Gore or Kerry," says Dee Davis, who founded the Centre for Rural Strategies in Whitesburg, Kentucky. "And I think both of those guys were white the last time I looked at the paper." According to exit polls, Kerry received only 27 per cent of the white male vote in Virginia in 2004, a figure Obama is poised to surpass, according to a pollster working in the state.

Perhaps the problem with this entire discussion about race is that it begins with the wrong question. Most polls focus on determining the prevalence of racial bias among white voters and whether it will affect their choices on election day. This may be the best way we have to measure the impact of race, but it is hardly revelatory; no one should be surprised to learn that racial stereotypes exist, particularly among lower-income and less-educated white men, or that such stereotypes affect the way voters see Obama.

The more important question is not whether race is a factor in people's votes but whether it is a determining factor – that is, whether Obama's being black is the disqualifying fact for white voters that it might have been 20 years ago, or whether it has now been reduced to one of those surmountable obstacles any candidate has to overcome.

When Al Smith, New York's Democratic governor, ran for president in 1928, his Catholicism was a deal-breaker. When John F Kennedy ran in 1960, the prejudice remained, but it had lost its defining intensity. Kennedy felt sufficiently disadvantaged by his religion to address it in a major speech, just as Obama did on race during the primaries, but in the end, some sizeable segment of Protestant voters who had concerns about pulling the lever for a Catholic did so anyway. In other words, it may be possible for racial prejudice to exist, as all polls suggest it does, but for it to be only one influence among many, including voters' views on the economy and on McCain as an alternative.

There is another parallel in the Kennedy example that may prove relevant if Obama's strategists have their way. While Kennedy undoubtedly lost the votes of some Protestants who feared papal influence over the White House, their numbers were more than cancelled out by the Catholic voters who came to the polls at a level never before seen. Obama's strategists accept that there will be some number of voters – particularly white men –who will reject Obama solely because he is black. But they are betting, first, that most of these voters wouldn't have voted for a Democrat in any event and, second, that the groundswell of black support for Obama will produce enough new African-American votes in a lot of states to offset them.

In 2004, 60 per cent of voting-age black Americans went to the polls (compared with 67 per cent of white voters), and about 88 per cent of them voted for Kerry. Those are pretty impressive numbers, historically. And yet, with Obama on the ticket, it is not unrealistic to think that black turnout could increase by as many as five points and that Obama could increase the Democratic share of that vote to well over 90 per cent. All of which means that if Obama can perform at least as well as Kerry among white men in some of the reliably red states he's trying to turn blue, most notably Virginia and North Carolina, race as an overall factor in the election could end up winning Obama more votes than it takes away.

***

When I sat with Obama on his plane just three days after his first debate with McCain and not quite a week since the nation's credit system went into meltdown, the White House must have felt, finally, within his reach. National tracking polls showed him holding a consistent lead of four to six points for the first time in the campaign. In a string of familiar battleground states where Obama had been struggling to capitalise on anti-Bush sentiment and economic angst, a new round of polls showed him breaking out at last. He had finally put some distance between himself and McCain in Pennsylvania and Michigan, and he was on the verge of driving the Republicans from the latter state altogether. In Ohio and Florida, states that Bush carried twice, Obama appeared to have broken a stalemate and moved solidly into the lead. Such readings were merely snapshots, of course, subject to change at any moment, but even so, both campaigns seemed to sense that McCain's window for taking command of the campaign was beginning to close.

In Virginia, according to private and public polling, the shift was especially pronounced. Several polls would soon show Obama pulling ahead of McCain by a significant margin, and two would have his lead in the state soaring into double digits. More staggering was the data concerning white voters and, specifically, men. According to a random telephone poll by SurveyUSA (though often derided by rival pollsters, the outfit compiled a strong track record in the primaries), McCain was leading among men in Virginia by 10 points just after the conventions; by the beginning of October, Obama was leading by 11. Among white voters in the state overall, McCain's 22-point September lead had shrunk to single digits. In the rural Shenandoah Valley, running along the state's western border and down into coal country, McCain had led by 24 points in September. Now he and Obama were tied.

And yet it seemed fair to question whether anything about this sudden movement actually validated Obama's central argument about American politics – this notion that the cultural faultline in the electorate can somehow be bridged by a generational change in leadership – or whether it spoke to some more immediate, more desperate impulse in a shaken electorate. The campaign had become pretty much a referendum on the current economic carnage and eight years of mostly bad news turning to worse, and for the moment, at least, the crisis on Wall Street appeared to have accomplished what Obama's strategists had been unable to do for months leading up to it: change the focus from Obama's state of readiness and supposed elitism to George Bush's myriad failures. In 2004, voters in the newly influential exurbs chose cultural identity over their concerns about war and the economy, and this choice cost John Kerry Ohio and the presidency; this year, it seemed increasingly likely that those voters might tip the other way — and take the election with them.

***

Obama would gladly take that outcome, of course. But it would not be the transformational victory he envisaged when he set out to run, the one in which white men in exurbs and rural counties wouldn't just grudgingly vote for a Democrat out of frustration with the alternative but actually come around to the idea that a Democrat can share their values. "If I'm able to change this," he told me on his plane, meaning the cultural breach in American politics, "then it's probably going to be most powerful after I'm elected, when you're no longer in the context of day-to-day battle, and I can prove it by what I do."

I asked Obama if it was frustrating to have seen, throughout the campaign, so many polls that showed him trailing badly among white men with lower incomes or less education.

"It's not frustrating," Obama said, shaking his head. I found this believable; Obama seems almost impervious to frustration. "There are a couple of things at work here. Number one, let's face it – I'm not a familiar type." He laughed. "Which means it would be easier for me to deliver this message if I was from one of these places, right? I've got to deliver that message as a black guy from Hawaii named Barack Obama. So, admittedly, it's just unfamiliar.

"Which, by the way, is a different argument than race," Obama continued, pausing to make sure I understood. "I'm not making an argument that the resistance is simply racial. It's more just that I'm different in all kinds of ways. I'm different even for black people. I went through similar stuff when I ran against Bobby Rush on the all-black South Side of Chicago." In that race, a Democratic primary for Congress in 2000, Rush, the black incumbent, handed Obama his first and only political defeat. "It's like: 'Who is this guy? Where'd he come from?' So that's part of it.

"The second part of it is that I'm trying to do this in an environment where the media narrative is already set up in a certain way. So it's hard to not be dropped into a box."

He reminded me that back in March, for instance, he accepted a spontaneous invitation from a voter in Altoona, Pennsylvania, to bowl a few frames, and it turned out Obama was basically an awful bowler. Some commentators gleefully used this deficiency to portray him as out of touch with the common man, in a John Kerry-windsurfing sort of way. (Joe Scarborough, on MSNBC, used the word "prissy.") To Obama, this brought home the bleak reality that, as a Democratic nominee, he was going to be typecast, fairly or not.

"I am convinced that if there were no Fox News, I might be two or three points higher in the polls," Obama told me. "If I were watching Fox News, I wouldn't vote for me, right? Because the way I'm portrayed 24/7 is as a freak! I am the latte-sipping, New York Times-reading, Volvo-driving, no-gun-owning, effete, politically correct, arrogant liberal. Who wants somebody like that?

"I guess the point I'm making," he went on, "is that there is an entire industry now, an entire apparatus, designed to perpetuate this cultural schism, and it's powerful. People want to know that you're fighting for them, that you get them. And I actually think I do. But you know, if people are just seeing me in soundbites, they're not going to discover that. That's why I say that some of that may have to happen after the election, when they get to know you."

Hearing him say this a second time, it seemed to me a remarkable admission – if not a retreat from his driving vision, then at least a deferral. Normally, in political campaigns, you hope people get to know you and then decide to vote for you; Obama now believed that perhaps only the inverse was possible. Once, he might have thought that if he could only win a bunch of red states and pile up 350 electoral votes, he could obliterate the red-blue paralysis of the past decade and wield his mandate like a machete against the culture warriors in Washington. Now, it seemed, he understood that even a Reaganesque triumph wouldn't suddenly erase the effect of 40 years of exploiting peoples' darkest fears or ignoring their anxieties, the twisted and bipartisan legacy of a lost political generation. If he won, Obama would likely start out as a "51-per-cent-of-the-nation" president, no matter what the map showed. And then the campaign would begin again.