[Vision2020] Will Mr. Burly Vote for Obama? (Garrison Keillor)

[Tom Hansen]

With thanks to a friend and fwllow Viz subscriber for providing this to me.

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Will Mr. Burly vote for Obama?

The thought of replacing the Current Occupant with the Angry Old Man of 
the Desert and Whoopee the Ice Queen is miserable in the extreme.

By Garrison Keillor

I was messing around in Tulsa, Okla., last week and got talking with a big 
burly man with a McCain-Palin pin on his blue blazer who told me he was 
descended from yellow-dog Democrats who thought the sun rose and set over 
FDR and Republicans were people who wore spats and top hats and sailed off 
Newport. So I told him that my Republican ancestors believed that only 
lazy people were unemployed in the '30s. He said, "So each of us is 
heading back to where the other one is coming from." He found that rather 
amusing. I said, "If that's so, I hope you're ready to be good and poor 
and endure some hard Minnesota winters."

"Poor, yes. Good, I'm not so sure about. Winter, no. No way."

He's proud of Tulsa, which survived the exodus of Big Oil and got into 
telecommunications and aeronautics, proud of its Art Deco buildings from 
the '20s, its art museums and ballet. "Outsiders hear Tulsa and they think 
Dust Bowl and Oral Roberts," he says, "but that's not who we are. This 
town is all about change."

I did not bother to tell him that change is exactly what the country is 
bursting to achieve in less than a week. Of course he knows all about it. 
Oklahoma seems safely red, but these days who knows? Obama looks more and 
more steadfast as the moment nears. The country longs for a president who 
can talk and think at the same time. We've been locked up with the Current 
Occupant for way too long and the thought of replacing him with the Angry 
Old Man of the Desert and Whoopee the Ice Queen is miserable in the 
extreme.

Most of my Republican friends are people who are not ashamed of having 
worked hard and done well in school, and their party's frantic appeal to 
anti-intellectualism is nothing they care to sign up for. Time to nip that 
sucker in the bud. The party needs to reform itself around some coherent 
philosophy of governance and vision of the future and for that, it must 
take a trip to the wilderness. They are quietly supporting the skinny guy 
this time around. They might tell a pollster otherwise but that's what 
they will do. Call it the Palin Effect.

Even Mr. Burly of Tulsa expressed sorrow over McCain's campaign, the 
jerkiness and desperation of it, and admiration for Barack's steadiness, 
his cool, his straightforward articulation and the old-fashioned story of 
his rise in the world. I thought about that the next day, flying to Philly 
and walking over to Independence Hall and riding the train to Lancaster 
through the little towns of old brick row houses, the red and golden 
trees, the trim farmyards and the fields of tan stubble, a state McCain 
has scrapped hard for even as he sank in the polls. I suppose he looks at 
that classic Rockwell landscape and those hardy German Lutheran faces and 
thinks those are his people and how can they possibly go for a Harvard Law 
graduate from the South Side of Chicago whose last name is Obama, for 
crying out loud?

They can and they will. Colin Powell was right when he called the guy a 
transformational candidate. We walk through the door and we close it 
behind us and the simplicity of it is dazzling. That's how it happens. You 
walk aboard a plane and glance into the cockpit and there's a woman in the 
left-hand seat, and who these days would even think this worthy of 
comment? You see Latino men and women moving up whose grandparents picked 
row crops for a living. In Tulsa, in 1921, there was a big race riot 
following the arrest of a young black man who was alleged to have touched 
a white woman on the arm. Fighting in the streets, neighborhoods torched, 
the National Guard called in -- and this story seems medieval to us, a 
dark age almost beyond our ken. That culture is gone, gone, gone, and on 
Tuesday we bury it by the simple democratic process of voting for the best 
man even though his father was African.

In America, a man is not held responsible for choosing his parents, only 
for his own life and conduct. This man promises to take us into a new era 
where we aren't defined by our differences, Short vs. Tall, Pale vs. 
Freckled, and can take a deep breath and do what's best for the country.

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Seeya at the polls, Moscow.

Tom Hansen
Moscow, Idaho
 
"We're a town of about 23,000 with 10,000 college students. The college 
students are not very active in local elections (thank goodness!)."

- Dale Courtney (March 28, 2007)


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