And Some Say "N***er" w/great affection. Really.

This is an unflinching report from the Appalachian heartland. It's where I live and work, both as an Obama activist and a journalist. Last Friday, I accompanied a production team from NHK, Japan's equivalent of PBS, on a tour of a rural West Virginia county on the Virginia border. On Saturday, NHK's news anchor, Goro Taguchi, flew into Dulles for coverage of the election. He met me in the Harrisonburg, VA, Obama campaign headquarters to see the vaunted ground game in operation late in the fourth quarter. His interview with me on the subject of race, WV, and the presidential election was filmed at Clementine, a semi-official "Obama" restuarant in Harrisonburg. Oh...we carried Harrisonburg, too.
Update: Let's understand the complexity of this term's usage in post-Barack America. It's the way a lot of people speak. And the beautiful complexity of this is...a lot of "rednecks," especially in deepest Appalachia are using the most offensive word in the language (when it's used toxically), as a badge of their support for Barack. Read Jim Webb's 'Born Fighting.' They're saying, 'If Barack backs us up, and he has to take it out in the back alley with these sonsabitches. We got his back.' If you read Webb, you'll understand that these are the people Barack wants to have at his back. For damn sure.