Middletown, Teetering On the Divide

"The glory days are gone," says his friend Joe Castelo, the former mayor of nearby Hartford City.

"Our students at Ball State . . . they don't stay around here," says Ray Scheele, a political science professor.

Once upon a time, "a guy who worked in the automotive industry here could have a boat, two cars, and his wife didn't work," Castelo says. "You were looked at like an idiot for going to college."

It will never be back the way it was, they all say. New jobs may come to Muncie, but it will never again be so easy to make a good living without a college diploma. And that's just the way it is. So when a candidate promises jobs, what sorts of jobs? And does the audience hear what it wants to hear because it wants things back the way they were?

The pollster, the politician and the professor are all Obama supporters. They think the Democratic vote will be close in Muncie, as it is across the nation, with the college students and the academics and the black community voting for Obama, and the white working class going for Clinton.

Speaking of Clinton.

"She opened up last week with, 'The issue in Indiana is jobs, jobs, jobs,' " Scheele says dryly. "And it played real well on the news."

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When the Lynds landed in Muncie, they were nostalgic for what Muncie had been before industrialization. Now, industry is leaving Muncie and nostalgia has taken hold again.

Not among the young people, though. The young people are outta here. Everyone you talk to, their kids have left town for Indianapolis, New York, Washington.

"I would never stay here, ever, ever," says Destiny Wilcox, 23, of Evansville. It's Saturday and she's in her cap and gown, having just graduated with a degree in advertising from Ball State. Why would she stay in Muncie? she says. What would she do? Retail? Food service? Work at the university? "There are no jobs here."

At Clinton headquarters, DiAnne Hannah, 63, says she's voting for Clinton because Clinton "knows what reality really is," is steeped in the issues and can fix the problems with jobs and health care. Hannah says she left her job as a financial aid adviser at the university last year because she'd reached retirement age and she felt like if she stayed, she'd be taking the job away from someone younger, someone who really needed it.

"What chance do our young people have to stay here?" she says.

"What about someone like me?" says the woman across from her, Marti McKeighen, who's been making get-out-the-vote calls. Twenty-four years making auto parts on an assembly line at BorgWarner and now BorgWarner is leaving town. "I can't get my retirement and I'm 55 years old -- what's going to happen to me?"

Hannah and McKeighen start to reminisce about downtown Muncie and the way it was, back before the big-box stores and the strip malls. Grant's, JCPenney, the dime store, the soda fountain.

"This is old Muncie talking here," Hannah says.

"I remember when they had the Cinderella shop downtown," McKeighen says.

"Oh, yes," Hannah says.