Clinton Candidacy Shines Spotlight on Key Obama Weakness
Last night’s 65-30 blowout loss in Kentucky shows where Barack Obama’s biggest problem lies, and it’s not winning over supporters of Hillary Clinton who feel she’s the better, more electable candidate. The real challenge is breaking through to Democrats and Republicans who aren’t even considering Obama as an option. After losing Ohio and Pennsylvania by ten percentage points, Obama has been crushed in West Virginia and now Kentucky, despite the likelihood of Obama becoming the Democratic Presidential nominee and the lack of major policy differences between himself and Clinton.
Take a look at exit polling numbers from Kentucky compiled by CNN.
More than half of Kentucky Democratic primary voters (51%) consider Obama to be dishonest and untrustworthy. They broke for Clinton 89-5, with 4%uncommitted. Only 50% of voters said they would vote for Obama against John McCain. Roughly one-third (32%) of yesterday’s voters plan to back McCain in that matchup, and 15% said they would abstain from voting. Keep in mind that these totals do not include Republicans unless they crossed over to vote in the Democratic primary, and only 6% in the polling identified themselves as Republicans.
The Democrats don’t need to win Kentucky to win the White House, but they do need to win states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia, where Obama is failing to pick up support among the same type of rural voters who rejected him in Kentucky. That rural support helped Bill Clinton take office and kept Al Gore and John Kerry from doing the same. Clinton’s latest blow-out wins look bad for Obama, but they serve him well in one regard: the losses have shined a giant spotlight on his biggest weakness with enough time to fix the problem or at least minimize the impact in the states that appear likely to decide the election.
