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In Louisiana, a unique coalition of blue collar whites and blacks elected Gov McKeithen to his second term in 1967-8 over a Klan backed candidate, and also elected Edwin Edwards governor multiple times. They had to deal with just these kinds of attacks. Personal contacts, and the fact that the Original Knights of the Ku Klux Klan had tried to kill a number of whites, including reporters, opened the door for whites to begin to think about economics over racial solidarity. Now Louisiana had an earlier model of populism Huey P Long. So while North Louisiana was viulently racist and anti-Catholic, they also had to agree that the people screwing them over were from Standard Oil (then the dirty tricks king of the block- if you stood in the company's way bad things happened to you) and other comapnies, not the black people.
My point is that a relentless, well organized populist organization can overtake racism. Obama has to do what Clinton did: accept that populism and make it his own. Clinton didn't bow to populism until after Wisconsin. That's when she began to win. He needs to stop being measured on globalism and make populism the center of the campaign. Not that he knows their pain; force the media (as the View did) to contend with what he wants to do for rural America. His ideas can fit a populist model. He can use that well organized ground operation to bypass the media and get the message out.
This is not inevitable. There are historical models for overcoming the use of race to split poor whites from their pocketbooks. He needs to use them. He needs to study Long.
