gwynnek
@gwynnek.bsky.social
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Expert plate spinner. Changing the world one pixel at a time. Also dogs+food+fam+bad culture. she/her [posts+ likes my own]
Expert plate spinner. Changing the world one pixel at a time. Also dogs+food+fam+bad culture. she/her [posts+ likes my own]
![Electability was a concern for Obama from the start. On Oct. 3, 2007, Politico cited a poll in which “a clear majority of those surveyed, 57 percent, said Clinton is the Democratic candidate with the best chance on Nov. 4, 2008.” By contrast, the site noted, “20 percent think [John] Edwards is most electable and 16 percent think Obama is.” Clinton campaign surrogates went hard on the issue. A Dec. 7, 2007, Washington Post piece described a conference call in which Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel, a Clinton supporter, told the press that she would “be best able ‘to connect in rural America’ and that he had seen people with pickup trucks in his state covering up their old George W. Bush bumper stickers with Hillary Clinton ones.” Said Democratic Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh on the same call: “I think Hillary Clinton has the best chance of being electable in swing parts of the country.” In January 2008, a well-connected Obama fundraiser named Robert Farmer announced dramatically in a Washington Post op-ed that he would no longer support the young Illinois senator because he had concluded that Clinton was “more electable” and “it would be tragic if we selected a nominee who falls short in the general election.” (In particular, he argued that Obama would be crippled by negative campaigning in a way that Clinton could not be, because she had “already been vetted beyond imagination.” Swing and a miss on that one, Robert Farmer!) On March 5, 2008, Politico wrote about a Clinton speech in which she “stressed that she’d won states like Ohio, crucial to the general election,” while “her aides began an argument that they will need to win with the Democratic Party’s elite: that Obama can’t be trusted to win.”
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Why couldn’t Obama win those Rust Belt and rural states? For one, he was too far left. On Dec. 11, 2007, Politico published a piece called “Liberal Views Could Haunt Obama” that cited a questionnaire his campaign had filled out when he was running for sta…](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:2orsuabrdskjpuglpru77po2/bafkreihkfr5evqnyve45p6nturglieq3nhkuxqhybiluhlmwxxuk34eayi)
