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Most of Wal-Mart's blue-smocked employees greet the news that a reporter is in the building with startled amusement or downright evasiveness, as if they're being asked what color underwear they're wearing.
Person after person shrugs when asked who they plan to vote for in November. Most say no one. They don't follow it, don't have time for it.
Few even know that Edwards, the North Carolina senator who moved as a child from Seneca to Robbins, NC, is a favorite son. There's an Edwards campaign sign, faded from the sun, in the window of the local Democratic Party headquarters and a gravestone marking a family plot in the city's cemetery. But it doesn't seem today as if Edwards' roots even matter.
A few women say they'll vote how their husbands are voting, and that's for W. In grocery stores and fast-food joints all over town, the pattern is repeated: a shrug, an admission that they don't follow politics too much, and have no particular plans to vote.
These are workers who are sitting near the bottom of an economy that lately has been particularly hard on the lower middle class. "Roughly, since 1973, we've been growing about 1 percent a year slower than we did since 1870, and that's very significant when you accumulate it over time," says economist and professor Jeff Madrick.
You might expect a little outrage from the average worker when confronted with the policies that have led to the current state of the economy, but that outrage is distressingly rare. Instead, the opposite appears to be happening -- a sort of political paralysis that's reflected in the blank stares of Seneca's Wal-Mart employees.
It's no surprise to Emory University's Merle Black that many of the women we talked to have no plans to vote. He notes that the poorest and least educated Southern whites used to vote but now seem to have dropped out of electoral politics almost entirely.
"They're either alienated, or they don't see that their interests are advanced or that they have any real motivation to take part," Black says. That might sound like a promising voting bloc for Democrats, but Black notes that the lack of unions in the South makes it difficult to organize working-class Southerners into a group that would work together for their own economic and political interests. And who's to say which side they'd be more pre-disposed to support?
In the Super Wal-Mart, Adam Canady, from nearby Walhalla, hurriedly opens box after box of CDs amid the buzz of customers in the electronics section. His smock is festooned with small pins and his nametag. He looks up from the drudgery and practically sticks out his chest when he says he'll vote for Bush. "He's the only one who's shown himself capable of leading," Canady says.
Sentiments like Canady's and the fact that Al Gore won just 42 percent of the vote in 2000 haven't stopped the Democratic presidential candidates from campaigning like hell in South Carolina, a state they think will prove their bonafides with Southern voters on Feb. 3. Never mind that they don't have a chance of winning the state in the general election, or that some pundits say the primary is so unrepresentative of the state that nearly 90 percent of the voters are black -- in a state with a 30 percent black population.
In the parking lot of Mary Ann's eatery back in Towns County, GA, four men huddle around a cream-colored, rust-pocked Silverado pickup. A red, white and blue placard below the sign for the Young Harris Motel proudly reads: "American Owned." It's cold, and the sky is promising snow.The men are examining a diesel generator in the back of the pickup. I ask whether they plan to vote to re-elect President Bush.
"Hell, no. I've been starving since Bush became president," says a man, 25-ish, a dump-truck driver in a baseball cap and sunglasses.
"It's about conflict of interest," he continues, stretching "con-flict" out as if it's two words. "He come from oil, so we attack a place with oil. There's plenty of dictators in Africa doing worse things to their people, and [Bush] don't do nothing about them."
The oldest member of foursome, craggy-faced with a camouflage hat, turns to me and leans close to my face.
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NEW WINDOW GALLERY-Pat Rhea-ACRYLIC PAINTINGS-April 05-30 2024 VALDESE, NC 28690 @ New Window Gallery/Play It Again Records
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- Mondays-Sundays. Continues through Dec. 31
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"Blood Residue Analysis of Paleoamerican Stone Tools in the Carolinas" @ Native American Studies Center
- Fri., April 26, 12-1 p.m.
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Brightfire Music and Arts Festival @ GreenLife Family Farms
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ARTS RENAISSANCE, a GALA supporting the ARTS in South Carolina @ the Columbia Museum of ART
- Fri., April 26, 7-11 p.m.
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Weird, wonderful and just plain useless gifts
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