Day Twenty: Death of a Bellwether

Ground Zeroes

I was hoping for this.

As we all know, on the night of November 4th, Barack Hussein Obama (I've taken to including his middle name just to incense anti-Middle Eastern bigots) thoroughly thrashed the fossil that passed for his Republican challenger to become the President-elect of the United States (insert applause here). Remarkably, and unlike the previous two presidential elections, the race was over in relatively short order - Barack easily beat his opponent and was announced the winner just prior to eleven o'clock Eastern time. What we didn't find out, at least not until yesterday, was which candidate with which Missouri chose to throw in it's lot.

Apparently, Missouri is a McCain state. For me, this is great news because I grew tired of hearing how Missouri had voted for the winning candidate in every election except one for the past century. This inconvenient truth tended to give rural Missourians (who pretty much guide the state's vote) a little too much credence. Based on what little I know, Dems typically get St. Louis, KC and a few other clear-thinking counties, and the rest of the state goes to the GOP.

The Missouri situation neatly encapsulates what generally happens in the rest of the country as well, with urban areas usually supporting the left and rural and suburban areas going right. That's why right wing pundits can laud the good sense and down home decency of "middle America" (ALWAYS code that is exclusively reserved for white folks) and be critical and dismissive of America's snobbish "latte drinking" cities (which are heavily populated by minorities).

Observers from near and far have noticed for many years that Missouri has been a remarkable indicator of the direction in which the country will go with regard to picking the President. Political scientists struggled to provide an explanation for the phenomenon but failed to reach a consensus. Given that Missouri had become a solidly red state over the past few election cycles, GOP mouth pieces, of course, had all of the answers. Missouri was, according to them, a snapshot of the "real" America. It represented the conservative values of Richard Nixon's and Ronald Reagan's Silent Majority.

Well, as Sergeant Waters said, "Not No More." Apparently, America wasn't listening. This time around the Show Me State blew it. I couldn't be happier because, as a black person, I never felt that Missouri's red voters spoke with my voice. This election marked a point at which black folks' desires and voting patterns were not subjugated in favor of rural interests. No longer is an entire nation made to suffer because rednecks and hillbillies who don't know any better can't quite get it right. Indeed, as Missouri goes, so too go the dummies who voted to make the same mistake not one, not two, but three elections in a row. It's time for the inmates to hand back the keys to the asylum.