A barber's perspective on election? It's a coin toss

Barack Obama will win Minnesota and its 10 electoral votes for the Democrats on Nov. 4.

Richard Moynihan's lucky silver dollar says so.

Moynihan is my go-to guy for election predictions because he knows how to take the pulse of public opinion. He owns the Fort Road Barber Shop on St. Paul's West Seventh Street. Barbers, like bartenders, know what people are thinking, or at least saying.

My old neighborhood, by the way, is busy putting on lipstick and perfume. The GOP convention is coming and West Seventh is being "beautified" so Republicans won't be discomfited by the squalor of St. Paul when their limos roll in from the airport hotel strip to the Xcel Energy Center. I don't see much difference: Churches, mortuaries, liquor stores, restaurants, tattoo parlors, pawn shops and bars. But a few flower baskets have been added to camouflage the weed patches. The Republicans are too good for us, if you ask me.

Moynihan, 69, has been cutting hair on West Seventh since the Reagan era when hair was big and business was good. These days, a lot of younger guys shave their heads to save money and look like assassins, so Moynihan's customers trend older and grayer than the general population. Still, he has a knack for gauging opinion, based on what he hears from his chair, where a regular haircut costs $12 now, up a buck from what it cost in 2004.

I made several visits to Moynihan's shop during the 2004 vote, taking a "barber poll:" Half of Moynihan's people preferred John Kerry; half wanted to reelect George Bush. To decide the issue, Moynihan took out his lucky coin -- a Liberty head dollar that his father gave him for doing chores when he was 10 years old -- and flipped it a few days before the election.

It came up Kerry, and Kerry went on to win Minnesota by 100,000 votes. Although he lost 31 other states to Bush.

This time around, Moynihan decided to call the election early: He flipped his coin in his shop Wednesday, and called it tails, for Obama.

Tails it was.

I'm betting Moynihan's 1878 silver dollar is right on the money in Minnesota. Once again, however, his customers seem deeply divided. The difference this year, Moynihan says, is that his customers seem to be uncertain how to talk about what they think.

That might be -- there is no getting around it -- because for the first time, a black man is a leading presidential candidate in a country that is no good -- still -- at talking about race.

"There's a reluctance -- a real touchy feeling -- about the election," Moynihan says. "People are uncomfortable having to make up their mind about voting for somebody black. That's about where it is."

A recent Washington Post/ABC poll showed more than half of white voters consider Obama "risky." Other polls show that almost a third of whites acknowledge prejudice towards blacks. The issue of race may be weighing against Obama, almost secretly.

Moynihan hears it all.

"I'm not a one-way street; I listen to everybody," he says. "McCain's a good man. He spent a lot of time in a prisoner of war camp, and I'd love to vote for him, just because of that. But as for the rest of the issues, I can't vote for him. I'll vote for Obama."

"I know who I'm not voting for," said Homer Hansen, 74, a retired airlines mechanic who lives in the Fort Road neighborhood and had just received a $10 buzz cut from Moynihan. "That'd be Obama."

Hansen is a Democrat but said he isn't in the mood to vote for a Democrat this year: "Not when they put Obama in there," he said. A gun collector, he said Obama has "sidestepped the gun issue."

Moynihan says a lot of his customers think the Democrats will take their guns away. Some say only the Democrats can get us out of Iraq. Others say the Republicans have the best chance of keeping gas prices down, but some customers worry that if the Republicans start drilling for oil, there will be tar on the beaches. There's only one thing that most agree on:

They don't much like the choices they are being given.

"We don't have any candidates that can do the job," said Pete Fisher, 67, a retired real estate appraiser who was getting a trim. "McCain's too old. He's older than I am and I'm too old, And Obama is too inexperienced. And what about energy? With all that money we spent in Iraq, couldn't we be energy independent by now -- if we had spent it for that instead?"

"That's a nice question," Moynihan said, working the clippers and lowering Fisher's ears. "But I don't know the answer. That's why I cut hair."

Moynihan is too modest. The man cuts hair, and he puts his ear to the ground. I'll check in with him again later.

But as for that coin toss, I'm not ready yet to bet the farm on Moynihan's 1878 dollar. Maybe he flipped it too early.

He tossed it 10 more times after it came up for Obama, just to see how it bounced. It was down the middle: Heads for McCain five times, and tails for Obama five times.

So as we gird for the GOP, Richard Moynihan says there's really only one thing we know about the election:

Anything could happen.

ncoleman@startribune.com • 612-673-4400