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Biden will help ticket, rural N.C. backers say
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DNC 2008
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Published: August 27, 2008
Updated: 08/27/2008 01:45 am
DENVER
To beat Sen. John McCain, Sen. Barack Obama's campaign knows that it must win over white, rural and working-class voters who overwhelmingly supported Sen. Hillary Clinton in the primaries.
"We've been working really hard against the ‘I'm just going to stay home' or the ‘The country's not ready'" for a black president attitudes, said September McCrady, an Obama delegate from Statesville, which has been hit hard in recent years by the loss of manufacturing jobs.
McCrady and other Obama backers from working-class parts of the South say they think that the addition of Sen. Joe Biden to the Democratic ticket will make it easier to connect with voters in the region. North Carolina, with its 15 electoral votes, is considered by some political analysts to be up for grabs, although the state hasn't voted for a Democratic candidate for president since Jimmy Carter in 1976.
Biden, who was born in blue-collar Scranton, Pa., and is among the poorest members of the Senate, spoke to the Democratic convention last night.
McCrady, a local party treasurer, recalled a conversation she overhead in the grocery store on the day Obama picked Biden. "They were like, ‘That's going to do it for me,'" she said of a voter who was on the fence about Obama.
Other Obama supporters say that even though Biden will help, the campaign must do more to win over that key voting bloc. Other challenges remain.
"We know that the racial factor is a component for some union members," said Karen Ackerman, the political director for the AFL-CIO.
Ackerman said that the union's direct-mail campaigns will aim to make some of its roughly 2.1 million members "more comfortable" with electing the first black president.
The union hopes to convince voters affected by a souring economy that his position on pocketbook issues "trump any kind of hesitation they have about the color of his skin," Ackerman said.
Thomas Coley, a retired union technician from Greensboro, said that message is best directed at older workers and retirees.
"The retirement sector, simply because of the way they grew up, they are the ones who will have to look at the issues," Coley said.
Mike Evatt, a delegate from Seneca, S.C., who works at a food-packaging plant, worries that Obama may have a hard time connecting with some of his white co-workers who think Obama is elitist. By focusing on the economy, Obama can keep blue-collar workers from tuning out the election or supporting John McCain, he said.
"The economy's in shambles and I think people are going to vote more on their pocketbook than maybe they have been," Evatt said.
Obama, who beat Clinton handily in the North Carolina primary, struggled in the largely white western third of the state. The region -- the only part of the state Clinton won -- is a hotbed of blue-collar conservatism.
Obama remains a "hard sell" in the region, said Clinton delegate Ethan Staats of Cashiers.
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