A 2008 Election Campaign Reminiscence: Battling for Presidential Candidate Barack Obama in Small Town Pennsylvania (3)

by R. Lee Cook

“That is the way it played out here.” Bill summed up, regarding the ultimate outcome of the 2008 Democratic Primary in Clarion and the state of Pennsylvania. It simply came down to a showdown between the two heavyweights in the race for the party’s presidential nomination, an old fashioned shoot-out between Hillary and Barack Obama, which proved to be no contest at all in the end. The final vote tabulation provided the conclusive proof, which the Senator from Illinois probably imagined would be his fate from the outset. In Clarion County Obama garnered 1,728 votes or 33.6% while Hillary Clinton received 3,417 votes for 66.4%. State-wide Pennsylvania Democrats cast 1,061,441 votes or 45.4% for Senator Obama while Senator Clinton would receive 54.6% or 1,275,039 votes cast.

Then Bill and his lovely wife, Judy, a retired school-teacher, shared with me “a little personal story” from their primary campaign travails. When the primary campaign had begun to take shape and coalesce around the two heavyweight candidates Miller said, and “the others had fallen by the wayside pretty much, my wife and I drove to Pittsburgh to visit both [Candidates’] headquarters. Keep in mind”, Bill, the raconteur among the couple noted, “I was subtly an Obama supporter and my wife was not so subtly a Hillary Clinton supporter.”

“This was right when [the candidates in 2007] initially opened their headquarters. We were there two days later took a day to go to Pittsburgh to do this. We walked up the steps to the Hillary Clinton headquarters. They were still unpacking boxes and I was the first one to approach the table. I signed in my name on her sheet with my email address and that made me a Hillary person in their eyes, which was good. We got signs for Hillary because I, being the Clarion County Chair, had to really have the supplies for everybody. The people were very nice. They carried the signs out to our car. My wife’s name was not on their list.”

Bill continued. “When we got in the car, [Judy] basically said ‘you devil’. So what happened [next] was we went to the Obama campaign headquarters and it was exciting [there] with people rushing around doing jobs and this and that. We went in and I had my wife sign in there.” Did this all occur on the same day, I asked.

“The same day, an hour later. So now, both campaigns have the Miller family on their email lists. So we heard from both campaigns. And what happened for us favorably from this for our community is that because my name was on the Hillary Clinton list and one of their lead people in her campaign knew me, recognized my name. He called me and asked: Would you like [former President] Bill Clinton to come to Clarion? Now, from my position as Democratic Party Chairperson from Clarion County, I said amen, let’s go! So we had a wonderful visit from Bill Clinton.”

And so it developed from this personal episode that the Millers confided, that the former president, William Jefferson Clinton himself, acting in the role of surrogate for his wife Democratic Presidential candidate Senator Hillary Clinton would journey to Clarion and speak at the university in her behalf to an overflow and enthusiastic crowd of supporters mixed-in probably with not  a few local celebrity star-gazers on April 16, 2008, less than a week before the April 22nd, Pennsylvania General Election Primary. With over a 1000 persons crowded into the university’s auditorium, “it was a wonderful day here”, Miller and Judy both assured me.

In his role as the Democratic Party chair of the county organization I asked Miller to describe some of his and the eight-member executive board’s high agenda items as they geared up for what loomed as a general election season of critical importance in the Clarion community. They started their preparations early on he told me, even before 2007 when they began fundraising efforts with an eye toward the 2008 campaign. “I  actually think we started it in 2006. What we really did at that time was, we had a couple of local candidates we supported, but really our eye was on the prize.”

“Here in Clarion County where you have an imbalance in party registration throughout the entire county it is difficult against such a juggernaut for local elections. For us the state and national elections mean a lot because that is where we can have more of a say. That is where we can do a lot. What we tried to do during that [early] time was we did not spend a lot of money. We gained money. We had a war chest, which enabled us when it came time for the rubber to meet the road. We were ready and we had $12,000 to $15,000 in the bank waiting to be spent. We had a headquarters [in town] and we used it in a couple of the local campaigns so we knew what we could do with that. We were lining the fields. We were getting things ready. We were identifying people who would help us. We had a group of 90 families who donated money.”