Missouri’s Moods
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in 2008 Election, Barack, McCain, MissouriSt. Louis, MO…
“Who do you think will win around here?” I asked.“Obama,” Robbie Haggard answered flatly, and several others agreed.
“But Missouri’s always been Republican,” Pyle protested.
“I think Missouri’s had about enough,” Holly Haggard said.
Sedalia, MO…
People like Maureen O’Hare, whom I found shopping for shoes in the Sedalia Wal-Mart with her daughter Ashley Smith and bright-eyed 2-year-old grandson Traven. Sedalia is an old railroad town of about 20,000 people — a population essentially unchanged in the past 90 years. George W. Bush won two-thirds of the vote in Sedalia and surrounding Pettis County in 2004, and one of those votes belonged to O’Hare. But after years of voting for Republicans, she told me, she feels compelled to change horses. Of Obama, she said simply, “I think he would do better in a crisis.” Her daughter nodded in agreement as Traven watched impatiently from a shopping cart.
Troy, MO…
I met Kim Cannon on a bench outside the Hair Design Team salon in Troy, where she was taking a smoking break between customers. It was a pleasant afternoon, and from where she sat, the green hills of northeast Missouri — Mark Twain country — rolled gently in every direction. A lifelong resident of Lincoln County, Cannon has seen those hills stitched with new roads and dotted with parking lots, but not so much that she can’t still spy open fields in the distance.Politics is a popular topic at Hair Design Team. “The funniest part are my clients who say Obama is the Antichrist,” Cannon said. “I just laugh.” Because after months on the fence between the two candidates, Cannon has come down on Obama’s side, and the reason is simple: “The economy is terrible, and he is more for the working man.”
As they say…so goes Missouri, so goes the election…
This entry was posted on Friday, October 10th, 2008 and is filed under 2008 Election, Barack, McCain, Missouri. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
October 10th, 2008 at 8:40 am
“But Missouri’s always been Republican,†Pyle protested.
Wow. The ignorance that people have about the state they actually live in is staggering.