A little wisdom from the South

I wanted to find out if folks really were as stirred up about Barack Obama as some are saying, so I went to my best source.

I called my friend Cooter Jackson. Cooter lives in a little town about 20 miles from Durham, N.C. He spent 30 years as a columnist for the Grits Advertiser ("All the news that fits, we print"), although he had to retire when he lost his sight in a fishing accident.

Some of you may notice that Cooter has a small resemblance to my friend Mick, who teaches at two community colleges in Southern California.

But it's obvious from the picture that the two men aren't the same. Cooter's hair is shorter, and you can tell from the dark glasses and the vacant stare that he's blind.


In fact, if you look at this picture of Mick teaching, his hair is longer and darker, and he clearly has his eyesight.

Now that we've settled that, it's actually sort of ironic. Cooter says being blind has actually helped him in a couple of ways.

"I was always purty good with the ladies," he said. "But now that I can't see, they're even more eager to come over. They say they don't have to put no makeup on and that's a pure pleasure."

So I called to ask him about Obama.

"Well, he surprised me some when he carried North Carolina last year," he said. "Part of it was McCain runnin' a bad campaign and part of it was folks bein' real fed up with ol' Dubya. Obama caught 'em at the right time, and there really ain't as much racism around here as there used to be."

And now, I asked.

"He wouldn't carry the state today," Cooter said. "Part of it is people thinkin' a president should be a miracle worker and he shoulda solved all the problems by now, and part of it is that he's probably a little more liberal than folks realized."

I asked him what he thought.

"Hell," Cooter said. "He's no more liberal than LBJ was, but Lyndon was a white Southerner, and back then conservatives hadn't turned 'liberal' into a dirty word. I think his biggest mistake is he left it to Congress to do health care instead of proposin' his own plan."

What about all the spending? The huge deficits?

"Bush ran the biggest deficits in history," he said. "He's the only president ever who cut taxes and went to war at the same time. Nobody was fussin' about it then. It's all about the propaganda, and Obama's losin' that battle to idiots like that Fat Boy on the radio and what's his name, Glenn Beck."

I knew Cooter had spent time with both Rush Limbaugh and Beck and he ddin't have much use for either of them. Rush had gone with him on one of Cooter's famous fishing trips.

"Worst one ever," Cooter said. "He just wouldn't stop talkin'. Scared all the fish away. And he kept smokin' those big ol' cigars."

Even so, he said he liked Rush a lot better than Beck.

"I met him at a party in Chapel Hill," Cooter said. "He has kind of a crazy look in his eyes, and I swear I never shook hands with anybody whose hands were softer and damper."

I asked him if he had any advice to pass along to Obama.

"He needs to get mad," Cooter said. "He needs to show some emotion, instead of just bein' so cool and collected about it all. Start runnin' people out there whose lives have been destroyed by insurance companies turnin' 'em down. Start askin' the folks on the other side what they'd do about that. He can still win this thing. He just needs to show he cares."