Why Obama got his ass handed to him in West Virginia

Probably the best short analysis you’ll read comes from West Virginia resident Christy Hardin Smith of Firedoglake. Someone in the comments at FDL asked Christy why she thought Hillary did so well and this was her reply:

Because she campaigned her ass off here, and Bill Clinton was really loved here a lot. She played to the homespun, religious, rural voters with a lot of respect and care in her appearances — genuine respect and care, from everything I saw and heard. And people loved it.

Obama barely campaigned here. It was as if WV didn’t exist until the last minute when he did a stop on Monday in Charleston. He had done two other drop-in speeches that I know of, but no retail politics at all. As in no door-to-door, town hall meeting type voter outreach. And that arms-length style is exactly what kicked Gore and Kerry’s asses here the last two election cycles.

Which, btw, I told several Obama people a while back. Voters here don’t feel like they know Obama at all — they at least got to know Clinton through her first lady years and again through her steady campaigning here for weeks. Plus, she had the bulk of the party leadership here in her corner early on — and they are all very loyal, very hard-working folks in terms of GOTV. Obama came off as uninterested in WV — and the vote shows exactly what folks in WV think about that. And I say that as someone who cast her vote for Obama today.

That’s pretty spot on.

Obama and his staff have run a brilliant campaign, but their handling of West Virginia wasn’t one of their better moments. Sure, the numbers don’t add up for Hillary, but the narrative for the rest of the week will be how glorious it is that the tenacious Pantsuit Zombie has risen again and that white folks are growing increasingly uncomfortable with Obama (even though Indiana and North Carolina proved it was trending in the opposite direction). I never thought he had a chance in hell of winning there, but they should have tried a little harder to keep her margin of victory down to keep the pundits in check.

MORE: Kyle from Comments from Left Field looks at West Virginia and Travis Childers’ special election win in Mississippi. Maha has a nice roundup of salient factors in WV as well.

Posted by Kevin K. on 05/13/08 at 11:35 PM • Permalink

Categories: Politics • Election '08 • Barack Obama • Hillary Clinton • Poliblogs •

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Brush it off your shoulder, Kevin. It’s only five electoral votes that will go to McCain no matter who the Democratic candidate is.

Comment by Cali Tejano on 05/14/08 at 01:52 AM

Cali, yeah, I know that, but I think he could have yanked back the reins on this a bit with a day or two of campaigning there. Here’s going to have to do it in the general regardless. I just think a 20 point loss would have looked a hell of a lot better (obviously).

Comment by Kevin K. on 05/14/08 at 06:55 AM

I wonder if he’ll make more of an effort in KY? I watched some of the MSNBC and CNN coverage to see if the commentators would run with the Resurrected Pantsuit Zombie narrative, but aside from the usual suspects (Pat Buchanan, chiefly), they were pretty dismissive of The Great Victory’s significance.

Comment by Betty Cracker on 05/14/08 at 08:11 AM

Yeah, I’m rather surprised they didn’t buy into the “Obama is unelectable” narrative last night and this morning. I guess it helped that Scarborough is off this week or it would have been much worse.

Regarding Kentucky, I think it was Chuck Todd last night who pointed out that he really only needs to campaign aggressively in Louisville and the NW suburbs and he can keep the margin down. I hope they do at least that.

Betty, did you watch her speech? Chris and I were amazed that even Maddow thought it was her best. I thought her NH speech blew it away. She was extremely lackluster for the first half of last night’s speech, the speech itself was a poorly-constructed hodge podge of talking points and the crowd seemed barely into it, aside from a few folks who were going out of their way to make up for the lack of enthusiasm.

And what the fuck was up with the bowling pin? Was that supposed to be a lame jab at Obama’s bowling score?

Comment by Kevin K. on 05/14/08 at 08:23 AM

Yeah, I saw it and had a similar take. Maddow is usually so right on, but I agree—the NH speech was way better. Of course, they didn’t manage expectations too well when Terry McAuliffe said it was going to be The Greatest Speech in the History of Human Vocalizations.

I’m sure the bowling pin was a lame-ass jab at Obama too. Good lord.

Comment by Betty Cracker on 05/14/08 at 12:50 PM

I think it was one’a them there double significance things: The clear one being yeah he sucks at bowling and the holding of the pin signifies it haunting him. The other not so clear one being…and I’ve heard a black stand-up comedian or too give the funny militant black’s take on the only black militant safe sport to play as being bowling because that’s the only sport where the object of the game is for the “black” ball to knock-down all the “white” pins with “red-necks”. And in a sense holding that pin in the air is signifying the revenge of the red-necks.

Yeah I know it would make the average 9-11 truther cream on himself…but hell…how nutty was holding a bowling pin in the air…and who’d let that clown in with it??? You gotta be pretty invested in the message to actually lug the damn thing around…or at least i think so.