Orlando, Fla.–Debra McCall earns $16,000 a year and considers herself a success story. A black woman, she left Chicago three years ago, and gave up her welfare check. Now she sells organic coffee at the farmer’s market in downtown Orlando. She has a connection, she tells me, who goes down to Nicaragua and picks up the beans when he’s down there.
As far as I could tell, I was the only one Saturday to buy a bag of the stuff, and I did that only to entice her to tell me her thoughts on the election.
“I’m not voting. It almost makes me cry, because this is the first time,” she explains, leaning back in her chair, which seems molded to her. “Both parties are….” The perfect word not ready on her tongue, she gives a “psssh” exhalation and waves both her hands as if to brush away the Republicans with her right and the Democrats with her left.
A disaffected African-American woman voter, McCall should make John Kerry grimace. But the more she talks, the more McCall surprises me.
Smiling, as the small farmers’ market crowd matches the idyllic central Florida afternoon, McCall revels in her turn of fortune. Four years ago, she was cold and wind-bitten waiting for her welfare check. Now, she is a self-made woman, and that has changed her perspective on the world. McCall is a businesswoman who has escaped the cycle of dependency (she scolds her relatives who still live on the dole). Surely, though, she is liberal on other issues?
“Bush is a human being,” she begins when I ask her about the president. “He makes mistakes like the rest of us. At least he ain’t got his parents around his ankles. You know what I mean?”
McCall went on. “I don’t care if they didn’t find any mass-destruction weapons.” The war still made us safer, she believes. She also doesn’t trust Kerry.
Finally, she says, in a hushed tone, as if her sister in Chicago might hear, “I hope Bush wins.”
As a parting note, she smiles big and tells me: “I love Cheney, too. Did you see him tell Edwards, ‘I don’t know you.’? Damn!”
The story was the same with Pete Smith. “Both parties suck,” he said, more direct than McCall. Watching the debates, his reaction was: “someone’s blowing smoke up my a**.”
“Both parties are to blame for NAFTA. Both parties caused outsourcing.”
On Iraq, though, Smith almost spoke directly from the GOP talking points. “I think it’s good that we are taking the war to the terrorists. Car bombs are blowing up in Baghdad instead of here.”
“Don’t try to tell me a drinking buddy of Ted Kennedy is going to keep us safe,” he said.
Smith went on at length about the evils of the welfare state and Kerry’s plans to expand it, specifically on health care. Smith also told me he will not vote.
Both Floridians support the war. Both believe strongly in individual responsibility. Both are forthcoming in their distrust of Kerry, and neither had anything particularly bad to say about Bush.
In short, both of these Floridians should be voting for Bush. Neither would consider voting for Kerry, but come November 2, McCall and Smith plan to stay home. If they, and those who think like them, do stay home, Bush will lose Florida and Ohio. If Bush loses either of those states, he’s toast.
As a contrast, every war critic I spoke to in a three-day trip through the Sunshine State was dedicated to voting against Bush. They also planned to try and convince their friends.
One merchant at the farmer’s market explained “usually I’m not that political,” but the Iraq war had radicalized her. She has no idea what Kerry’s foreign policy is and didn’t quite trust me when I said he had voted for the war authorization. Still, she’s dedicated to opposing Bush. “People are dying over there, and he’s got this smirk that I would like to punch off him.”
She caught herself after that quote, a little embarrassed, and clearly not usually prone to such outbursts. She apologized to me.
Her son in the army, she said, used to support Bush but no longer does. He doesn’t think the administration is adept at running the military, she tells me.
Bush has not given his own people a reason to vote in the way Michael Moore and the New York Times have inspired their people.
The debates so far show that the GOP strategy is to attack Kerry. The president and vice president appear to have given up on selling themselves. In that case, Bush and Cheney have three weeks to convince these voters that Kerry really is an unacceptable alternative. The trick is how Bush can do this without simply turning more voters off of politics.
It’s a fine line to walk, but it may be the only path back to the White House.
–Timothy P. Carney is a reporter for the Evans-Novak Political Report.