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Read other letters about this article
Quoth ShawnWM:
And I'm betting that the same people who think a Dem who lost by a full 17 percentage points in California and New Jersey, who demonstratably can't win New York, Florida or Ohio (and Pennsylvania without a lot of help from rightwingers who deliberately voted in the Democratic primary) are the same people who think the anecdotal evidence from some alleged Obama loving "trailer park" dude scientifically points to a sure-fire win across Red America -besides the fact that near every kid in the Ohio Valley now is talking about Obama's "terrorist ties" they "heard about".
Oh, boy. How many ways can a person be wrong in one paragraph? Other folks have already demolished the false "17%" statistic, so let's start with the absurd idea that Obama wouldn't win California, New Jersey or New York. The current polling for McCain vs. Obama and McCain vs. Clinton shows either Democrat winning California easily. Obama is actually polling better than Clinton in New Jersey, even though she won the primary there. It's true that at the moment, Clinton does slightly better than Obama in New York, but that's to be expected. If Obama wins the nomination, do you really believe that New York will vote for McCain?
I firmly believe that a lot of the Clinton and Obama supporters who are currently saying that they'll vote for McCain if their candidate doesn't get the Democratic nomination will change their minds by November. I'm sure that they really believe what they're saying now, but once the primary season is over and they start thinking about McCain's policies and agenda more carefully, they'll come around. Some of them may hold their noses while voting for a candidate they don't care for personally, but I can't believe that self-described feminists would vote for a candidate who's consistently anti-choice, or that voters who praise Obama for his position on the war would vote for a candidate whose support for the war has been unwavering.
As for Ohio and Pennsylvania, current polling shows McCain beating both candidates in Ohio and either Democrat beating McCain in Pennsylvania, both by substantial margins. (See electoral-vote.com for the details.)
Next, let's look at the claim of "rightwingers" voting Democratic in Pennsylvania. I don't think there's any solid evidence about Republicans voting tactically for either Democratic candidate, but let's remember that Rush Limbaugh is still telling his supporters to vote for Clinton, not Obama.
Finally, the article doesn't claim that Obama will necessarily win the votes of these "bitter" voters. It just says that they don't seem to disagree with Obama's characterization. And that seems to be borne out by the polls (see Tuesday's War Room for details). There's also a good piece about the whole "bitter" kerfuffle by a columnist from the Philadelphia Daily News, which you can read by clicking on my name.
Will Obama reach these voters? I don't know. But I do know that working-class Americans respect honesty and integrity, and rightly or wrongly those are not qualities associated with Hillary Clinton.
