STEPHANIE SALTER: She’s white, older, a feminist — and she’s for Obama

By Stephanie Salter
The Tribune-Star

TERRE HAUTE April 12, 2008 10:21 pm

— Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all
— Emily Dickinson

Judy Dukes is none of the things she is supposed to be: She is not young, black, male or a political neophyte.
Retired, she is no one’s idea of “affluent.” Instead of an urban hub, she has spent her days in the small cities of a state that has not gone for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1964.
But in the contest of 2008, white, 67-year-old, female, pro-labor, feminist, mother Judy Dukes is totally, and unapologetically, working to get Barack Obama into the White House.
Does this make for incredulity among her friends or charges of “traitor” from strangers with strict requirements for sisterhood?
“The worst response I get is silence,” Dukes said, “because it carries the strong sense of disapproval.”
Negative vibes are never a problem when Dukes is at the front desk of Obama’s Terre Haute headquarters on Wabash Avenue. Surrounded by fresh-faced, energetic college students — to whom she refers without irony as “my bosses” — Dukes plays to her strengths. They lie not in beating the bushes for volunteers via cell phone, but in answering the campaign’s land line and greeting the curious who walk through the front door.
Her comfort level as often the oldest person in the room likely is the product of career choice. For most of her adult life, Dukes earned a paycheck by teaching public school teenagers to construct decent sentences and to find pleasure between the hard covers of books.
Long ago, she learned that one of the best ways to teach is to model, and that the most effective teachers remain students forever.
A natural constituent of Hillary Clinton — for whom Dukes says she gladly will vote if Obama loses — she nevertheless found herself inclining toward Obama. The more she read of his policies and listened to his speeches, the more she believed he has not only the charisma to unite and redirect a nation, but also possesses the intellectual and emotional goods to make the change lasting.
“It wasn’t the way he spoke, but the content of what he had to say,” Dukes said.
Several weeks ago, a presentation at Indiana State University by four of Obama’s foreign policy advisers iced it for her.
“They were all four older people. One was a retired Air Force general. Another was a woman, a Harvard professor, who’d worked in the Pentagon and helped General [David] Petraeus write a manual for soldiers. Two had worked for the Clintons,” Dukes said.
“They were able to explain, so clearly, the changes that have taken place in other nations since the Vietnam War and how America has not kept up. We’re still conducting foreign policy the way we did before Vietnam, back to the Korean War era. Their main thing is, the United States has got to deal with the reality of the changes, and they believe that Obama is the one to do it.”
Friday, as the Obama office was abuzz with anticipation of the candidate’s North Vigo High School appearance, Dukes actually had to be forced to accept a much-sought ticket to the event.
It wasn’t because she didn’t want to see and hear the man she says has “restored my hope for my country.” Far from it.
“I’ve already voted for him,” she kept explaining to the kids around her. “I don’t want to take a ticket from someone who might still be on the fence. If I can get one vote for Barack by getting an undecided to hear him, it’s worth passing up the chance to see him.”
But her young bosses would hear none of it. Every Obama volunteer had earned the right to sit in the bleachers at North and see their guy in three-dimension. And so Dukes joined them, watching as the senator from Illinois inspired 2,700 people to 19 full standing ovations.
When it was over, Dukes said she was as moved by the makeup and enthusiasm of the audience as by Obama’s celebrated oratory. On Valley Viewers, a Web forum she created awhile back, Dukes wrote the next day:
“Imagine being in a packed gym with people of all ages, colors, ethnicities, occupations, shapes and sizes who all want the same things, and then having a magnificent man appear who truly understands not only what they wish for, but why they have these wishes, and can articulate these things as if he can read their minds and say what they might not be able to express, themselves.”
Ironically, the day after Obama’s visit, the airways and Internet were filled with scathing remarks by Clinton and Republican John McCain, who pounced on one piece of one sentence that Obama had uttered during a San Francisco fundraiser.
Clinton, particularly, blasted her Democratic rival for being “condescending” of small-town and Midwestern citizens and making “demeaning” comments that are “elitist” and “out of touch” with working people.
Dukes’ response: Don’t judge snippets. Read all 16 sentences, in context.
“If you read it all, he has nothing to apologize for, and I wish he wouldn’t, because anyone who misinterprets him wants to do just that,” she said.
On the 25th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Dukes was asked to share her memories for the newspaper of the high school at which she was teaching. Part of her remembrance read, “I knew in that moment, apart from the shock and the sorrow, that neither my nation nor my own personal world would be the same again. The hope of the new generation was gone.”
In 1968, after the murders of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, Dukes did what many disillusioned people of her generation did: “I stopped focusing on my country and focused on my private life.”
The pain of the last seven years, however, has pulled her back to attention — acutely. She sees as wondrous that hers is the political party in which a woman and a black man are the final two choices for presidential nominee.
“I am so glad to have lived long enough to see this happen,” she said.
But, for Dukes, the choice is clear: Obama “offers something we haven’t had in years — hope that things can be better.”
Unlike her youthful volunteer colleagues, that hope springs from decades of living, and it has increased in preciousness.
“I’m going to be 68 years old,” Dukes said. “I don’t have a whole lot of votes left. I want to make this one count.”

Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com