COMMENTARY | Is President Barack Obama going to lose Pennsylvania next year and has he already written it off? That seems to be the premise of a recent Pittsburgh Tribune article examining the changing political dynamic in a nominally Democratic state.
While Obama won the state handily in 2008, the Republicans swept the state in 2010, winning a Senate seat, a lot of House seats, both chambers of the state legislature and the governorship. Disapproval of the president remains high among Pennsylvania voters at 59 percent.
Despite the fact Obama took Pennsylvania last time, his position there has always been soft, especially outside urban and suburban areas. During the 2008 primaries, Hillary Clinton took the state by nine points, according to the Pennsylvania Department of State, largely due to strength with blue collar Democrats.
Pennsylvanians have been dubious about Obama since the infamous bitter clinger speech the then-candidate made to a group of well-heeled campaign donors in San Francisco, as quoted by the Huffington Post. "And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations." This sort of thing played well to rich folks in California but not so well to the people in Pennsylvania whose votes Obama wanted. Those remarks have never been forgotten by those very "bitter clingers" as many opponents of Obama now call themselves.
If Obama is contemplating the loss of Pennsylvania, along with nearby Indiana, he is looking at a challenging electoral map. He will have to win a number of southern states such as Virginia, North Carolina and Florida where his prospects appear to be even dimmer. The math simply does not add up.
If a sense of resignation, perhaps alternating with desperation, starts to sink in on the Reelect Obama campaign, those feelings are likely to spread among Democrats as a whole. There is nothing like a campaign that is sinking to bring out the most unattractive behavior in the people running them. Think about Jimmy Carter in 1980 or George H.W. Bush in 1992. It is a hard thing to lose the White House just four years after having won it. But it looks like Obama is now facing that bitter fate.
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