U.S. REP. John Murtha took a tremendous amount of heat for labeling his western Pennsylvania constituency racist during the recent campaign.
The reaction to his comment — which he later backtracked on and then amplified by replacing “racist” with “redneck” — by politicians and pundits is reminiscent of the scene in “Casablanca” in which Capt. Renault says he’s “shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here” as a croupier hands him his winnings.
Anyone who has lived in western Pennsylvania knows exactly what Murtha was talking about. Casual racism is commonplace here, especially in rural areas where people may live their entire lives with little or no contact with members of the racial and ethnic groups they denigrate.
The routine bigotry of rural Pennsylvania is usually limited to hateful words passed from generation to generation and racist graffiti on rusted railroad bridges and abandoned buildings. Occasionally it is acted upon, as it was in Otter Creek Township the day after Barack Obama was elected president.
While most of the nation was either celebrating the historic victory of Obama, set to become the nation’s first black president in January, or lamenting the failure of the John McCain-Sarah Palin ticket, a few good old boys decided to mark the occasion by spray-painting “Obama” on a black man’s car and burning it.
That’s an extreme example of the racial attitude here in western Pennsylvania. Elections results from Mercer County may indicate a less incendiary form of bigotry.
McCain-Palin won the county by a razor-thin, quarter-percent margin. By itself, that result isn’t a huge surprise. Despite its Democratic registration edge, Mercer County is largely conservative and has been represented by Republicans in the state and federal legislatures for decades.
But an informal, and definitely unscientific, analysis of the results of a few key races reveals a curious anomaly in Mercer County voting patterns: About 2,300 voters who supported Democrats in the district’s two Congressional races apparently abandoned the party’s presidential ticket.
Discounting write-ins and third party votes, a total of 52,872 voters cast ballots in the 3rd and 4th Congressional districts; 52,949 people voted in the presidential race.
Logic indicates that the same voters who went for the Democratic candidates for Congress would also touch the screen for Obama. But voters here defied that logic. Unofficial results show 28,658 votes for Democrats in the congressional races and 24,214 for Republicans. In the presidential race, Obama garnered 26,397 votes; McCain got 26,552.
The difference between the congressional and presidential totals breaks down to about 5 percent of all the ballots cast on Nov. 4.
Since the county elections office doesn’t provide a breakdown by party affiliation, it’s impossible to identify all the ticket splitters as Democrats and it would be irresponsible to say race was the only explanation for Obama’s loss in Mercer County.
Legitimate reasons — Obama’s relative lack of experience, the fact that one of the Democratic Congressional candidates was pro-life and incumbent fatigue — could be behind the numbers.
Or it could be that some people still judge a candidate not by the “content of his character” but by the color of his skin. The election wasn’t the end of the struggle for equality and acceptance, as some have argued, but a milestone for a nation that hasn’t yet reached the end of the road.
Obama’s victory nationally shows how far the country has come since the bad old days. Mercer County’s elections results — an arson in Otter Creek Township — show how far we still have to go.
Opinion
OUR VIEW: Obama victory a milestone, but doesn't spell end to racism
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