Speaking for me only
Rather than write up a long post about this manufactured bullshit coming from the Republicans and the Clinton campaign (aka “She”berman), let me just post some facts and some comments and let you figure it out on your own. And yes, I know that assuming you can think for yourselves is elitist, but so be it.
1.) What Obama said last night:
You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
2.) What Obama said again today:
“Lately there has been a little typical sort of political flare-up because I said something that everybody knows is true, which is that there are a whole bunch of folks in small towns in Pennsylvania, in towns right here in Indiana, in my hometown in Illinois, who are bitter,” Mr. Obama said.
“So I said, well, you know when you’re bitter, you turn to what you can count on,” he added. “So people, they vote about guns, or they take comfort from their faith and their family and their community.”
3.) The margin of victory in the 2004 Presidential election: 286-252
4.) Karl Rove’s 2004 strategy, as stated by Matthew Dowd:
One of the first things I looked at after 2000 was what was the real Republican vote and what was the real Democratic vote, not just who said they were Republicans and Democrats, but independents, how they really voted, whether or not they voted straight ticket or not. And I took a look at that in 2000, and then I took a look at what it was over the last five elections or six elections.
And what came from that analysis was a graph that I obviously gave Karl, which showed that independents or persuadable voters in the last 20 years had gone from 22 percent of the electorate to 7 percent of the electorate in 2000. And so 93 percent of the electorate in 2000, and what we anticipated –93 or 94 percent in 2004, just looking forward and forecasting –was going to be already decided either for us or against us. You obviously had to do fairly well among the 6 or 7 [percent], but you could lose the 6 or 7 percent and win the election, which was fairly revolutionary, because everybody up until that time had said, “Swing voters, swing voters, swing voters, swing voters, swing voters.”
And so when that graph and that first strategic imperative began to drive how we would think about 2004, nobody had ever approached an election that I’ve looked at over the last 50 years, where base motivation was important as swing, which is how we approached it. We didn’t say, “Base motivation is what we’re going to do, and that’s all we’re doing.” We said, “Both are important, but we shouldn’t be putting 80 percent of our resources into persuasion and 20 percent into base motivation,” which is basically what had been happening up until that point — look at this graph, look at the history, look what’s happened in this country.
And obviously that decision influenced everything that we did. It influenced how we targeted mail, how we targeted phones, how we targeted media, how we traveled, the travel that the president and the vice president did to certain areas, how we did organization, where we had staff. All of that was based off of that, and ultimately, thank goodness, it was the right decision.
5.) The fine-tuning of the strategy at the state level:
Six months after gay and lesbian couples won the right to marry in Massachusetts, opponents of same-sex marriage struck back Tuesday, with voters in 11 states approving constitutional amendments codifying marriage as an exclusively heterosexual institution.
Voters in Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon and Utah all approved anti-same-sex marriage amendments by double-digit margins.
You can go to the census bureau and look at the state rankings for unemployment, per capita income, persons below poverty level, health insurance, etc., and look at where these states ranked. Any guesses?
Again, this may be the elitist in me, but I am thinking you all can put this together on your own with the information I have given you. If a dumb rube like me can put this together and figure out that what Obama said is not only true in the anecdotal sense, but as far as actual numbers and facts go, certainly the alleged “progressives” leaping to seize some sort of advantage for Hillary can figure that out, as well. Which makes their smearing of Obama the past 24 hours all the more depressing.
And really, I have been brief. I just picked gay marriage because it was a glaringly obvious choice. You could go through the list of bullshit they churn up to keep you preoccupied- immigration, the war on Christmas, etc., and do this over and over again. No wonder they feel the need to destroy Obama. He really is a threat to the status quo.