The Death of a Red State

Ever since, the city has been divided over the charges that the raid was unduly harsh and led to split families and abandoned children. When then-mayor Tom Selders went to D.C. and gave a speech about the ICE's policies, local anti-immigration forces responded with savage, Swift-boat-style fliers. One, a model of racial subtlety, accused Selders of being a friend to "gangs." The smear campaign worked, and in as perfect a metaphor for American politics as you'll find, the professorial Selders was ousted in favor of Ed Clark, a hulking, shiny-headed retired police officer who ran on a get-tough-on-immigrants platform.

Everyone at the Markey fundraiser agrees that the anti-immigration sentiment expressed by Clark — what one woman calls the "frothing-at-the-mouth guys" — is a key reason this district has been a GOP stronghold since 1972. But the district might turn blue next month, and it's no accident that it's happening in a year when the presidential race has forced long-simmering racial issues out into the open. For all the fuss about the economy and terrorism, the battle between Obama and McCain is ultimately about bigotry and how much of it we'll tolerate.

If you're skeptical about the extent to which it always comes back to race, just listen to the arguments that conservatives are making about the causes of the financial crisis. Turn on any conservative radio station today and you can hear somebody blaming the entire crisis on the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, which forced banks to make credit available in low-income neighborhoods. Through this bit of rhetorical gymnastics, conservatives have now pinned one of the most outrageous cases of fiscal irresponsibility in the history of rich white people on what Rush Limbaugh calls the "approved Democrat constituent." They're saying that the entire financial system has gone Krakatoa because poor black people didn't make their payments.

Once you grasp that, you'll understand that there isn't anything on Earth these motherfuckers won't try to pin on lazy minorities. And you'll understand why this is more than just a presidential race. This is about an America that is steaming toward an uncertain future and has yet to decide whether it wants to face its problems or curl up in a ball and blame all the changes on Mexicans or blacks or whatever other "approved Democrat constituent" happens to be handy.

The day after the fund-raiser in Greeley, several hundred scruffy students gather for an Obama rally at the University of Northern Colorado, mulling around on a small rectangle of green lawn between two concrete high-rise dorms that look like some architect's idea of a prison on the moon. Many of the students happily quaff beers, indifferent to a strong afternoon showing by the Greeley shit-wind. The stage is occupied by a bunch of white kids with dreadlocks offering an attempt at Obama-inspired bourgeois white-person protest reggae. "Change," they sing, "is what we nee-eee-eeeed. . . ."

It's a touchingly earnest scene — one that would probably win John McCain 10,000 votes an hour if broadcast live on cable stations around the country. After all, the Republicans want nothing more than to tell Middle America that Barack Obama is going to turn their kids into Ziggy Marley, or some even more sinister betray-your-race archetype, like Cat Stevens or John Walker Lindh.

If you think it's silly to make a leap from digging Obama to supporting terrorism, consider that at this very moment, just south of here at Centennial Airport in the suburbs of Denver, Sarah Palin is about to make news by telling supporters that Obama was "palling around with terrorists" when he served on a charity board with Weather Underground founder Bill Ayers. The Republicans have made Ayers a central figure in the campaign because he was a white college kid who spent time trying to be black, dreaming as he did of forming a "white fighting force" to help a "Black Liberation movement" overthrow The Man.