When I asked one of the Obama volunteers at my ward campaign headquarters how she thought Obama would do in our poor, urban, distressed part of town, she said she was the first African American to move to East Cleveland, and she knows everyone there, and they will all vote for Obama... and then I realized it was Mrs. Jones.

Last July, when I first started renovating my house in East Cleveland, I got word I needed to go down the street and talk to Mrs, Jones... “in the pink house”. As I approached her yard, I heard “How dare you move into this neighborhood without visiting Mrs. Jones, first!”. This ball-busting, no bull-shit, very outspoken and cool veteran of the war for civil rights - as a black and a woman – and keeper of the guard against hopelessness - East Cleveland's “first African American” citizen - says East Cleveland follows her, and she is voting for Obama... the “first African American President”... and I know she is right.

These wonderful, broken-down, lead-poisoned old neighborhoods on the East Side of Cleveland are full of Mrs. Joneses, who were the first African Americans in their parts of town, in the early 1960s, and have been rocks of their communities ever since, even as their misled neighborhoods have been destroyed around them. Which, in these days of universal political failure, brings the Joneses' discussions to our other Jones... Senator Stephanie Tubbs Jones... who the REALNEO Mrs. Joneses feel has betrayed her community by being the number one African American supporter in the world for Hillary Clinton for President.

“Everyone is entitled to their own opinion...”, the Joneses say... but, they add, “how Stephanie (these women raised Tubbs Jones, so can talk like that) is running around the country campaigning for Clinton, instead of solving local problems, all to retire into a big appointment for herself, is just wrong”... “she will not be forgiven”, they conclude.

Obama represents change, and the Joneses all know that. So do the Roulets... the longest-living residents of our neighborhood of Shaker Heights, pan linked here, voting for change, since 1962.

Keeping up with the REAL NEO Joneses, vote for change.