She did not understand the wrath directed at her, only that she would bear it.
“You wonder where all that anger is coming from,” she said. “They don’t even know me.”
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‘I dig my heels in’
She sat in a folding chair by the tent, the daughter of union Democrats from central Illinois, brushing away the American flag that kept flapping in her face.
“No anger issues here,” Barnes said to the man still looking for the Romney bumper sticker.
A band was starting to play Willie Nelson songs, barbecue smoke was in the air and kids were in the moon bounce, and Barnes, who is 60, was in good spirits.
“The more they attack, the more I dig my heels in,” she said, defending views that she traces back to a civics teacher who had students vote in the 1964 presidential election between Republican Barry Goldwater and Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson. Barnes, 12, picked Goldwater.
“He was the underdog,” she said. “Then later, when I really got into it, I thought: ‘Yeah, I’m for liberty. Yeah, I’m for fiscal responsibility. Yeah, I believe everyone should be responsible for their own actions,’ ” she said, describing values she considers conservative. “It sort of stuck.”
Barnes had always understood life through the prism of her own experience, and little had happened over the years to change her politics. She went to college at Illinois Wesleyan University in the 1970s and heard about women burning bras and demonstrating for equal rights, which never really made sense to her, she said.
“I don’t know, I personally never felt that I needed liberating,” Barnes said. “I guess that is thanks to my parents. They always said: ‘Do whatever you want to do. Work hard and you will get where you want to be.’ ”
She took that to heart, never questioning whether she got more or less than she deserved. After college, she moved into an efficiency apartment and worked two jobs, as a secretary and at Burger King. She was so poor that she applied for food stamps but got rejected for making too much money, she said.
She survived on peanut butter and crackers, and came to expect that others facing tough times could, too, if they were as determined. She eventually saved enough money to move to St. Louis, where she held several more secretarial jobs until she finally “married the boss,” as she put it.
She and her husband never had children, which she called a “conscious choice” of the sort she figures all women have. Instead, they traveled the world for his work, she started a small business making clothespin dolls, and these days she enjoys dancing with her husband at local Twilight Tuesdays concerts in the fall. She has also become immersed in Republican politics, a passion that began when she volunteered during the 2000 election.
Barnes’s business card now lists positions in eight local Republican organizations, including the one sponsoring Fenton Days, where she sat in a lawn chair in the sun.
“Did you see ‘2016’?”asked a woman under the tent, referring to a new film that claims Obama’s upbringing infused him with anti-colonial attitudes that make him uncomfortable with American preeminence, and that describes a diminished nation if he wins reelection.
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