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"I think the Ross Perot thing was when I really started picking up on that, because they were picking on him, and the man's a successful businessman, and if you check his company out, which I did, he did a lot for the people of his company."
Conaster says his switch to the Republican Party also had a lot to do with Clinton.
"Bush is family-oriented," Conaster says. "His stance on faith is bold. He's got backbone. He's got integrity. He's not afraid to do what he feels is right. You don't get that wishy-washy thing out of him."
At the same time, Conaster sees no moral problem with handing tax cuts to the wealthy. He shrugs at the idea that conflicts of interest, like the one between Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root and its ex-CEO Dick Cheney, could end up looting taxpayer dollars.
"You can invest in those companies," Conaster reasons. "Bush ain't just standing back saying we've got to give more money to the poor to stimulate the economy. That ain't what makes it work."
In fact, creating jobs and training people for new jobs has worked to stimulate the economy in the past, but it was essentially abandoned as a government policy.
In the early 1970s, wages stopped going up for males, and in particular for lower-income or middle-income, less-educated white males. Nearly 60 percent experienced either a decline or almost no gain in wages, Madrick writes. They rose for minorities and women, but only because they'd been so much lower to begin with.
With a little more imagination, the government response might have been to step in and re-train the workers who were falling behind. It would have meant more spending, but not a huge increase, Madrick says, and it might have helped avoid the pervasive anti-government feelings heard on my trip through the South.
Instead, as Carlton Sparks suggests, those low-skill workers just kept falling behind until companies started shipping their jobs out of America.
"You wouldn't believe the jobs we've lost in this area, and this wasn't a great place to come to work to start with," Sparks says. "But these companies that keep farming it out overseas . . . where's your kids going to work one of these days?"
If progressive politicians want to break the GOP death grip among rural whites, Sparks' question is one they need to answer.