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

by R. Lee Cook

The borough of Clarion, gently nestled among the forested hills of the county of Clarion, sits along a scenic ambling river of the same name, in a rural area of northwestern Pennsylvania famous for its “wilds”. It is the county seat, and boasts a population of around 6000 during summers but expands to about double that number during the rest of the year when the students return to the university in the fall.

The borough is a college town and Clarion University is the area’s biggest industry as well as its gravity center. It is one of fourteen sister institutions, scattered about the “Keystone state” in places like it, through the providence of its state college system.

The county’s historic courthouse which was built in 1842 and government offices, in addition to the regional hospital, are housed here. It is a quiet, pleasant town, of a starkly modest scale of wealth and amenities, when contrasted with the metropolitan dimensions of Pittsburgh further west or Philadelphia far to its east. And despite its large college student base and sizeable academic contingent, it is an area, generally, politically, very conservative  and predominantly Republican, according to the county’s longtime Democratic Party chair, Bill Miller, a retired university faculty member and proprietor of a local bed and breakfast.

Yet despite years of unrelenting frustration trying to spread the gospel of his progressive liberal politics on infertile soil, this feisty former college swimming coach- who fielded numerous championship-caliber teams during his long tenure at Clarion- felt inspired as the 2008 general election season dawned. Undaunted by the fact that George W. Bush had resoundingly outpolled Democratic Presidential hopeful John Kerry county-wide in the 2004 election, by an even wider margin than Al Gore in 2000, he felt uniquely energized to take up the looming electoral challenge, if not exactly optimistic that things might be different in 2008.

“The political climate that was set up by the eight years of [President] George Bush” he explained, “made me enthusiastically ready to do battle-I don’t like to use his words-but that is basically what it was. And I wanted to make sure that no matter who the [Democratic Party] candidate was, that we would be successful; because I felt our country could not stand any more years of the same philosophy.”

Though the Republicans had lost Pennsylvania in the prior two national election campaigns, because President George W. Bush significantly improved his electoral performance in 2004- losing by a mere 2.5 percentage points to Senator John Kerry- strategists for the John McCain-Sarah Palin ticket initially felt they would be able to give the state’s Democrats a serious run for their money. Many mainstream media political pundits thought so as well.

Senator McCain in making the breathtakingly unexpected choice of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his Vice Presidential nominee, desperately hoped they could make major inroads in this traditional Democratic Party stronghold, as well as win other states in the region like Ohio, specifically because of the preponderance of small towns, populated by voters who tended to share many of the conservative views Republicans had become so adept at garnering support from. In the best-selling 2008 election post-mortem treatise, How Barack Obama Won, its authors, MSNBC News correspondent Chuck Todd and Sheldon Gawiser, categorized Pennsylvania as one of a handful of “key battleground states” that would determine the national election campaign’s outcome.

“Pennsylvania has been considered a swing state for quite some time” they wrote, “despite the fact that it has voted Democratic in the last five elections. A Democrat hasn’t won the presidency without Pennsylvania since Truman defeated Dewey in 1948”.It was for all of the above reasons that McCain would spend “a great deal of time and money” in the state but ultimately to no avail, surmised the authors because many of the rural and small town areas he counted on to switch sides in the 2008 campaign failed to do so, despite the special additional factor of the Barack Obama candidacy instead of the anticipated one of Hillary Clinton.

Bill Miller was keenly aware of the stakes and realized that his state would likely become a key focal point of the national Republican campaign effort; especially areas such as Clarion County, in his “neck of the woods”. And he was fiercely determined to grant the enemy no quarter or concede no ground. He told me that he “knew what we were up against”. And he believes deeply that had they “not persevered” the Republicans might have won the state of Pennsylvania and McCain and Palin rather than Obama and Biden might instead be the current occupants of the White House.

“I really believe that.” He confided to me. “I am a realist and I knew as we approached this [the campaign] that I was not operating so much from an area of strength, what with the party registrations in Clarion and the type of environment we have here. My job was going to be to narrow the margin of the loss, because we knew in our hearts that because of the great disparity in registration here, we were going to have to really mobilize and narrow the difference between the two parties; so that when our voters were added to the whole of Pennsylvania, Clarion County would have held its own enough to make a difference.”

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