The Crawford Myth

From Mouse Words:

Okay, it's hilarious that the newspaper in Crawford is endorsing Kerry. It's pathetic that the AP headline tries to minimize this by drawing attention to the size of the town. The article itself is especially aggravating as the AP writer continues to pee all over this small town paper by drawing attention to its small circulation and the fact that it's new.

I'm from a small Texas town and I can assure you this is not as small a thing as they want it to be. Many small town papers breeze over politics if they can help it, because small town people are bored and there's always someone who will start a personal vendetta against the editor of the paper if his politics are different than theirs. Texas small town newspapers' main job is to report on high school football and publish lots and lots of pictures of the local citizens so they have clippings for their scrapbooks.

[snip]



It's not just that he's lost Crawford, which could be an indicator that rural people everywhere are fed up; it's that without the carefully constructed image of him as an Everyman from Anywhere, TX where they are just bursting with pride at their boy done good, he could lose a lot more people who vote for him for that reason. The story will probably be buried, but let's hope that every comedy writer on TV just can't resist cracking on it.