Chill Cobra: Haven't You Heard Of Big Sky Sportsmen For Obama?

There is an Obama campaign organization in Montana. The Geezer has no such presence in the Treasure State. There is something for the late-night jokesters here. The Cobra needs to take a trip out West. If this is (fair & balanced) political realism, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
They Get It
By Timothy Egan

A big red-headed guy in a pickup pulling a fishing boat stopped in front of Barack Obama headquarters here — loaded for bear, as they say.

Land Tawney, a fifth-generation Montanan with a gap-toothed smile, was wearing a plaid shirt and a camouflage cap atop his head. He belongs to Sportsmen for Obama, which sounds like Facebook Users for McCain, or Linguists for Bush.

I asked him whether fellow members of the hook-and-bullet community are concerned about Obama’s race, or the depictions of him as un-American. Montana, after all, has a black population of less than one-half of one percent.

“For 95 percent of the people, it doesn’t matter or even come up,” said Tawney, whose name suggests that he was predestined never to spend his days under fluorescent lights. “For the other 5 percent, yeah, there’s some talk.”

The furor over this week’s New Yorker cover — the satirical cartoon of Barack and Michelle Obama in Muslim and black-militant poses — boils down to this: We get it, but what will those folks in fly-over country think?

The answer is that they get it as well. Irony, it turns out, does cross the Hudson River. And if they don’t get it, if they see the cover as affirmation of the sludge they’ve heard on talk radio or certain cable outlets, they’re never going to vote for Barack Hussein Obama anyway.

People forget that part of the inspiration for the magazine cover is this year’s best media-division political laugher: the suggestion by Fox News that a triumphant knuckle bump between the Obamas, a gesture familiar to any third grader in Little League, could actually be “a terrorist fist jab.”

More importantly: Why are there sportsmen for Obama? Or for that matter, nearly a dozen paid Obama staffers in Montana, a state that Democrats have won only twice in the last 50 years? Surely, its three electoral votes are not the draw.

Recent polls show Obama ahead or nearly tied in Montana, North Dakota and South Dakota, the northern tier of the Democratic presidential desert. Talking to people under the Big Sky, you get the sense that three things are in play in the landscape of altered political expectations.

One is that people who live in states with few blacks seem more open to the idea of a president who is not white. Perhaps race is more of an abstract, an ideal. The raw, sometimes tribal clashes of ethnic groups, where a long-ago slight can harden into a political attitude, seems less pronounced.

Thus, Obama is ahead in Oregon, which has a black population of 1.9 percent, but is having trouble in Michigan, where 14.3 percent of the population is black and the white suburban diaspora has complicated views about race informed by black-majority Detroit.

The second factor is the Democratic Party’s decision to field operations in all 50 states, a plan that was scorned when Howard Dean, the party chairman, first proposed it in 2006. Following that lead, Obama has fully staffed offices in five cities in Montana. He’s visited the state three times, and he’s on the air with television ads. Senator John McCain has no paid staff and has yet to set foot here.

“It’s not a head fake,” said Caleb Weaver, a spokesman for Obama in Montana. “We think we can win it.”

The final thing is that the more time Obama or his people spend in states thought to be out of reach, it’s less likely that there will be another mistake like the one he made at that California fund-raiser when he referred to small-town voters as bitterly clinging to guns and religion. As they get to know him, he gets to know them.

The National Rifle Association expects to spend $40 million during the campaign, partly to persuade gun owners to vote against Obama — a full blast of “I’m a bitter gun owner and I vote,” as the N.R.A. button proclaims.

“There’s a lot of talk about Obama and guns, and — I’ll be honest with you — a lot of fear,” said Tawney. “But at least he’s not trying to fake it. Not like John Kerry with a dead goose over his shoulder and new hunting outfit one month before the election.”

The biggest misperception of people in Montana, he said, is that everyone is a rube just off the hay truck. That’s not to say there aren’t militia wackos hiding in the hills, trading toxic nonsense about Obama’s secret Muslim past.

But for every nut, there’s a New Yorker reader — and then some.

[Timothy Egan, a contributing columnist for The Times, writes the weekly "Outposts" column on the American West. Egan — winner of both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award — graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in journalism, and was awarded an honorary doctorate of humane letters by Whitman College in 2000 for his writings on the land.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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