I thought this article was good and might help some of our fears about November. Not all of our fears but some of them. The red states seem to finally be waking up. They don't want to work their life away at WalMart.
Interesting excerpts from
Lost Jobs and Military Funerals Haunt Bush in the Heartland
Attention, Wal-Mart Voters
by Rick Perlstein
"...in this, Oglesby, Illinois's local den of iniquity, Republicans aren't hard to find, either. "I thought Bush would be a good man for the job at the time, and thought he'd be a good president," says the terse young man, whose nickname is Stony. "So I voted for him."
Stony is the kind of guy liberals love to worry about, the kind they fret they can't win over by next year's election. He works the midnight shift as a "picker" at a nearby grocery warehouse—the very job Tom Wolfe depicts as the soul of thankless blue-collar humiliation in his latest novel. Stony talks proudly about his union and, quietly, mentions his fears that his workplace "could have a shutdown any day. You never know."
Liberals: Worry less. Stony no longer supports George Bush: "Because of the war. Too many people dyin'." Neither does his drunken friend, who pipes up: "I hate him. Because there are kids getting killed every single day." And another oneWorry less. Intriguing cracks are opening in the Republican firmament. Take the factory owners I meet in the Rock River Valley's population center, the city of Rockford, who are ready to burn George Bush in effigy.
"I'm very conservative," Eric Anderberg of Dial Machine says, in the boardroom of the machine-parts factory his family built in 1966. "Always voted Republican. But I'm extremely concerned with what I hear from this current administration." Eric is 32, fiercely political, and articulate. He's called over two of his older industrial-park neighbors, Don Metz of Metz Tool and Judy Pike of Acme Grinding. Family manufacturers like these were the foundation of the modern conservative movement, reacting against the moderate Republicanism of Dwight Eisenhower in the '50s. Now they are a wedge in the Republican coalition. I ask if they could imagine supporting, for president, a Democrat. Don Metz, who in his golf shirt looks like he just came back from a midday round, doesn't hesitate: "No problem. Somebody steps forward and says we're going to make manufacturing a priority in this country." They would even donate the legal maximum of $2,000. And one more:"I won't go to Wal-Mart. My problem is that the company made $7 billion in profits. And yet they pay their workers substandard wages." Health co-payments are so expensive, he notes, that less than half sign up for the "benefit." This worker fears Wal-Mart more than he fears weapons of mass destruction. Because he knows which one is more likely to end up in his future. Americans who fear Wal-Mart more than apparitional WMDs (and apparitional dreadlocked drug dealers) are proliferating every day—and must be made to proliferate more, for the sake of our nation. This is the Democratic Party's hope: convincing Red America they can provide an economy that's safe for the whole family. Entire article found here:
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0349/perlstein.php
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