I personally know or represent in my law practice several working class and poor whites that cannot wait to vote for John McCain.

What strikes me as odd is that many of these same individuals have homes in foreclosure, can’t pay for health insurance, cannot buy prescription drugs and are forced to sit at the table and determine whether they will buy groceries or pay for gas. In a country with such vast wealth and potential, this should not be the case.

Yet, some of these same people refuse to consider the Democratic Party and Barack Obama to make a change. The question that begs to be asked is why?

The simple fact is that there are some who just are not going to vote for Obama or any other darker skinned person for President (i.e. Bobby Jindhal a Native East Indian who is an excellent Governor of Louisiana but is rarely mentioned as a future GOP presidential hopeful despite speculation that he was being vetted as McCain’s vice-president)

For me, while a race based decision to not vote for Obama is shallow, I still understand that there are some souls who have yet to evolve past what divides us. So let’s call these folks the “known quantity” that will most certainly never vote for Obama no matter what he says or does.

The “unknown quantity”, more popularly referred to as “swing voters” are the ones that the Obama must convince to side with him this fall if he is to best McCain. Of these swing voters, in the Deep South and quite possibly in other areas as well, some suffer from what I call the “poor white complex.”

During our early history, Southern Aristocrats derisively referred to poorer whites as “White Trash” and refused to afford them any of the benefits that their racial genetics would seem to otherwise afford them. From colonial times until the Civil War, a number of poor whites either served as indentured servants or laborers earning a living only slightly better than, or in some instances worse than, slaves. Today, in many parts of the south the descendants of poor whites enjoy the same chitterlings and scrap meats that formed the basis of the putrid slave diet because their ancestors were forced to forage for what they could find to nourish themselves.

Even during the Civil War there were a disproportionate number of poor whites who marched to their deaths under the Confederate banner fighting to preserve a way of life---Slavery--- that they never benefited from.

During Jim Crow, while the upstanding white citizens in the South formed White Citizens Councils to openly protest against racial progress, the Ku Klux Klan was often heavily stocked with poorer whites who, despite their impoverished existences, were tricked by their richer brethren into believing that spewing racist banter and lynching “uppity blacks” was a form of racial solidarity.

This mindset is still prevalent in some quarters today, even if it is no longer in the most virulent forms of yesteryear. There is still that subtle belief by some mis-educated whites that no matter how educated or well dressed or committed a black candidate for office may be there is uncertainty about punching the ballot for a person of African descent.

Now, of course Obama cannot go and win anyone over by reciting my theory, but he can certainly win some by going into the towns and hamlets and letting folks know that he has cogent plans to lift them from the doldrums of their economic hardships while hopefully disproving the insidious perception that he is inferior to them, even if he is the nominee for President.

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