Obama avoids "bitter . . cling" comment, popularity increasingly grows with rural and small town vot

You're invited to participate in this high-trajectory Obama timeline. :)

For starters, candidate and president-elect Obama has more effective policy in regards to the financial institution crisis. And he gets credit for this.
 
The fact is that Obama was correct in his assessment of rural voters and it was the right wing media that made it a big deal.
As for him being more effective that is going to be hard as the pundit class in D.C. was immediately saying after the election that the deficit was more more important than unemployment.
Another problem was the financial institutions were basically threatening to crash the economy further if there was more conditions for bailouts.
Obama needed to have 62 or 63 Democratic Senators at the start of his administration to pass anything more comprehensive then he was able to.
 
The fact is that Obama was correct in his assessment of rural voters

Of course he was right, but it was still the sort of dumbassery (to say it out loud) that OF COURSE the other side is going to gleefully glom onto.

Obama is a smart guy and skillful politician. He should have known better.
 
I think it was a dreadful mistake.

What states do you think he would have carried without that remark that he did not in OTL? (You will probably reply by giving a bunch of states he didn't come close to carrying in OTL and that had voted Republican in presidential elections for decades before and after that remark...)

BTW, I also think that Romney's 47 percent remark cost him very few votes in 2012 and even Gerald Ford's premature liberation of Poland in 1976 didn't hurt him much.

Basically, these "gaffes" are used as an excuse to vote against a candidate by people who would have voted against the candidate anyway.
 
You'd need to avoid Carter and/or Bill Clinton to get a democratic party not willing to do this.
Yes, Carter was a deregulator of such industries as trucking and air travel and communications. And, Pres. Clinton was a big supporter of NAFTA.

But I don't think either one was against the middle class. Just not that effective in quicker and smarter feedback to see if policy was actually benefitting and growing the middle class.
 
To grow the democratic share of the vote in rural areas, Obama would have to be far more radical than he was. Obama throughout his early presidency was pathologically conciliatory, refusing to even hold the banks who had nuked the global economy accountable when Tim Geithner told him "No.". If, however, some traumatic event could convince him to use every ounce of power his legislative majority granted him, I think Obama could have completely reshaped the American landscape and secured the rural areas with heavy democratic inroads.
 
. . . was the financial institutions were basically threatening to crash the economy further if there was more conditions for bailouts. . .
Huge issue, and you've probably heard that in negotiations the party who cares more, loses. The big boy banks knew we wouldn't let the economy crash, and we knew that they knew it.

One alternate may have been if Pres. Bush or president-elect Obama were openly talking with mid-sized banks to see if they wanted to ramp up. And then, the 'big boy' banks would not have been the only game in town.
 
Last edited:
Maybe it made things worse, but Obama said this at least in part because he'd been losing the voters he was talking about to Clinton in the 2008 primaries. That suggests he already had a problem with them, and obviously the Party as a whole has had a serious problem with winning working-class whites since 2000. I think a lot of it is simply unavoidable, as the South really started abandoning them in the 90's and 00's, and Obama was always going to have an uphill battle to bring them back for obvious reasons.

As for bank policy, that seems like another issue entirely. Obama would need to ditch Geithner for another economic adviser, but the thing is, the popular political consensus in 2009 was that whatever role the banks had had in getting us into the crisis, we'd still need their expertise to get out of it. Unless Obama tapped someone like Krugman or Stieglitz to lead the Treasury Department, I'm not sure how tough we could reasonably expect his Administration to be. And Krugman supported Hillary in the primaries, so I really don't see that ever happening.
 
Of course he was right, but it was still the sort of dumbassery (to say it out loud) . . .
Yes, it was dumbassery but also an intellectual / emotional flaw that he just didn't "get" highly religious persons.

Look, most of us who are not highly religious may not fully approve of or get persons who are. And/or maybe Obama in Indonesia from ages 6 to 10, or in Haiwaii, or among African-Americans in Illinois, had saw that as a person's job and external circumstances improve, the person tends to move back away from being so (overly?) religious. Also, occasionally a person is highly religious as a teenager, and becomes less so as he or she becomes older.

But it's still a huge mistake to think that preaching at a person is going to help.
 
Obama is still black, and America is still a deeply racist country.

No change.

Rural voters, who the OP asked about, are not the core of the racist rot in the country. That would be the bougie white suburbs, who are also the GOP's core base. Rural voters can be won over by offering them economic incentives via an actual modern welfare state and jobs guarantee.

In essence, offer something concrete to rural voters rather than the usual Dem condescension and half measures, and they will stick to that like white on rice.
 
While I agree that this has little effect on the election in question, there is a certain type of Democratic candidate that has arisen over the past two election cycles in opposition to the ideas embodied by this. While maybe not that crucial to the electorate in rural and less urban areas, it was pretty important to political insiders in those locales. You get people like Tim Ryan in Ohio, Jason Kander in Missouri, and now Richard Ojeda in West Virginia and Randy Bryce in Wisconsin (to name a few) all kind of representing this stand against both the Republican line and "Democratic elitism."

I think what they represent has a pressure behind it that's not going to be stopped if the Obama administration avoids this gaff (or these gaffs, if there's more than one), but it would certainly have to find its oxygen elsewhere. In a way, having these bland insults to refute is better for them than having to reach for something more contentious to oppose within the party.
 
When running for office it’s generally a good idea to not insult people whose votes you are trying to get, even if what you say is more or less true.

In fact saying something that is true may be worse because it forces people to look in the mirror and cronfront themselves.
 
. . . (You will probably reply by giving a bunch of states he didn't come close to carrying in OTL . . .
Well, I suppose I could blunder and say, "Well, heck, Obama could have even carried Texas and Oklahoma!," but I tend to think I know a little bit more about politics than that. ;)

But I think it did hurt him with people on the edges and margins who might believe a certain way but not be all that interested in politics.

For example, it made any kind of reasonable gun control much more difficult for the entire eight year duration of Obama's presidency. A so much better approach might have been to ask, Okay, what might be some reforms which, say, 70% of gun rights advocates agree with and which might really make a difference. Obama's statement added fuel to the fire for the Fox News crowd for claims that Obama was against Christianity or against religion or was "really" a Muslim and/or for similarly ridiculous claims. And it fueled claims that Obama was a radical when he in fact governed solidly as a centrist. In fact, one could probably find more examples of radicalism on Reagan's or Clinton's part while president, than on Obama's.
 
Last edited:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-...he-u-s-financial-crisis-idUSTRE72U4E720110331

.

.

September 7, 2008: The U.S. government places Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into conservatorship.

September 15, 2008: Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and Bank of America announces plan to buy Merrill Lynch & Co for $50 billion.

September 25, 2008: JPMorgan Chase acquires the banking operations of Washington Mutual Bank.

.

.
September 2008 was when our U.S. economy was tettering.
 
You're invited to participate in this high-trajectory Obama timeline. :)

For starters, candidate and president-elect Obama has more effective policy in regards to the financial institution crisis. And he gets credit for this.
Is there hard data that proves this "gaffe" affected his popularity with rural voters significantly?
 
Is there hard data that proves this "gaffe" affected his popularity with rural voters significantly?

From what I remember - and correct me if I'm wrong - this comment had more of an impact on the Democratic primaries than the general election. Regardless, even if he hadn't made that comment I doubt Obama's vote total would be substantially affected. But maybe he wins Missouri, which he just barely lost to McCain. Otherwise Obama's election, the makeup of Congress, and his presidency unfold as they did in OTL.
 
So far as the rural vote is concerned, look at the maps of Wisconsin and Iowa--and compare Obama's 2008 showing there with those of Al Gore, John Kerry, Obama himself in 2012, and HRC in 2016.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dc/Wisconsin_presidential_election_results_2008.svg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2f/Iowa_presidential_election_results_2008.svg

Yes, Obama did poorly in Appalachia in 2008, but that is part of a long-term trend--in 2000 Al Gore did worse there than Bill Clinton; in 2004 John Kerry did worse than Gore; in 2008, Obama did worse than Kerry; in 2012 Obama did worse than he had done in 2008; and in 2016 HRC did worse there than Obama had done. When there's a pattern like that, I don't think that a single remark that had been largely forgotten by November (people had more important things on their minds, like the financial crisis) was all that important.

To put it another way, I think the remark was about as important as "you didn't build that" in 2012... :p
 
Top