A 2008 Election Campaign Reminiscence: Battling for Presidential Candidate Barack Obama in Small Town Pennsylvania (2)

by R. Lee Cook

Indeed, the county of Clarion, which consists of thirty-four political sub-units of townships and boroughs, has been solidly Republican for more than a decade, boasting a 2644 margin among its 23,296 registered voters on November 6, 2007.And two of its three county commissioners were Republican as well.

In the highly contentious, bitterly fought 2000 general election which saw George W. Bush narrowly defeat former Vice-President Al Gore, the Republicans carried Clarion County by 4191 votes, though they lost the state by 4.2 percentage points or 205,847 votes. And what would prove most heartening perhaps to Republican strategists, was the fact that 4 years later, despite widespread vocal opposition to the Iraq war and a host of other intensely partisan issues, incumbent President Bush increased his victory margin in the county by 823 votes, as well as his support in the state as a whole, before losing to Senator John Kerry by a mere 2.5 percentage points or 144,248 of the votes cast.

Encouraged by these promising trends, Senator John McCain and his strategists made Pennsylvania “his do or die state” wrote the authors of their 2008 election post mortem, but the success of this critical choice would depend, they added, on the ability “to figure out how to win over working class white voters in bigger numbers than Bush did in 2004, while also trying to cut into Obama’s likely margin[s]” in the Pittsburgh and Philadelphia suburbs.

But this was a strategy doomed to failure because of several crucial factors McCain strategists could not account for. The first was the fact that about half of this state’s voters were college graduates and this group was a strong element of Obama’s support, in addition to that he already enjoyed on most college campuses nation-wide. Secondly, Obama not only won Pittsburgh and Philadelphia by the prodigious margins expected but he did not concede, unilaterally, the middle of the state; rural, and small town areas such as Clarion County, as had been the practice of past Democratic Party presidential campaigns. And lastly, the Democrats worked hard to vastly expand voter registration rolls which further increased their existing advantage here.

Bill Miller was one of many persons who played a pivotal role in thwarting the Republican strategy, in Clarion County and many places demographically similar of the specially targeted states of Pennsylvania, Indiana and Ohio- so-called “battleground states”. And it indeed was a countless series of “electoral battles” fought out on “the ground” akin to trench warfare- where the support of virtually every voting sector was sought and few conceded- which turned the tide and reversed the eight year trend of Republican gains, fatally dimming the hopes of the McCain-Palin candidacy.

For Bill Miller 2008 was an election year whose significance assumed near epic proportions. And as he earnestly conveyed to me recently at the beginning of our extensive interview he felt the country could not bear “another” four years of a George W. Bush administration, even if under the guise of Senator John McCain, it had become that personal to him. A major change in Washington, D.C., at the nation’s political helm to him, therefore, was not merely needed, but imperative.

As he surveyed the national and local political scene at the end of 2007 and watched the 2008 general election season approach, I asked him to share, what were his thoughts and perspective and his plans. And given his keen sense of the necessity for a major shift in the country’s political direction, I wanted him especially to share his opinion of the gathering list of prominent Democratic candidates preparing to make a run for his party’s presidential nomination. As we look back now and reminisce the list included among others, New MexicoGovernor Bill Richardson, Senators John Edwards, Christopher Dodd, Joe Biden, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the early prohibitive favorite and clear front-runner at the time. Bill provided me his take on the Democratic primary race as it began taking shape in Clarion.

“I could sense real quick here there was an awful lot of support for Hillary Clinton.” he related. “She had so many women after her, because of the opportunity to have the first female President and that was a driving factor around here with many, many women- my wife Judy included.”

“With Barack Obama, right here right at this time, with the type of area we are in, he did not have a lot of tremendous support going into the primary. Now in a subtle manner he had my support; but really, here locally, he really was an afterthought. I think people were scattered in where they wanted to go, whether it be Biden or Richardson who had a lot of following around here.”

I inquired about the local sentiment toward John Edwards, who had run in 2004 with Senator John Kerry as the Democratic Party nominee for Vice-President, whose campaign was based largely on a working class, populist-style appeal.

“John Edwards, for some reason, didn’t have the big following. But as things developed Hillary Clinton seemed to pull out all the stops here for Pennsylvania. I am not sure that Barack Obama put his eggs in this basket, and probably rightly so, because she had a big edge. Let’s face it, the women viewed themselves as a minority- being that they have never had a woman elected as president. They coalesced and the obvious result occurred. In Pennsylvania she won. As I look back on it, it is very possible that during the primary Barack Obama realized early on that this was going to be a tough nut to crack.