Sen. Barack Obama has a good organization here. He hasn’t visited much, and his campaign is downplaying this state’s importance in the race for the nomination, which he has almost wrapped up. Still, the Obama team is trying to exceed his low expectations here—which call for Hillary to win by at least 25 points.
He may do that, but I’m not quite convinced. Steve Henry, a former lieutenant governor and prominent Democrat, told me that he had organized for Clinton in western Kentucky—and failed to find a single county judge (that’s the local chief executive) “who wasn’t willing to support Hillary.” In other words, most of the party structure in the state is for her, thanks in part to the Clintons’ long, friendly ties to the state.
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Kentucky is shaping up as another haunting asterisk in Obama’s extra-inning victory box score. In the fall, Obama doesn’t have to win all of the voters in Shively. Indeed, Kentucky may not even be in play in the race against Republican Sen. John McCain.
But Obama is going to need to reach them if he wants to become president of all the people, even of all the Democrats.
I drove out Dixie Highway to talk to voters who’d gathered in the gym of Butler Traditional High School to see the former president and, by extension, support his wife.
They came in three categories. One was represented by a lady of uncertain age from a small county in eastern Kentucky. You know her type from the pictures: a visage lined deep with care and too many cigarettes, a smile-through-it-all smile: a survivor in the guerilla war of life. “I’m with Hillary ‘cause there is no quit in her,” she said. “She’s not a quitter and neither am I.” Clinton is a symbol to voters such as these and, in that sense, you can’t possible ask her to drop out of the race until the last dog dies.
Greg Wagner, who is in the real-estate business in the area, embodied the second category. He wore a bright blue University of Kentucky jacket and cap. His support for Clinton was cold-eyed and somewhat resigned. He was a Democrat and simply saw no way that America would ever elect Obama to the White House. It was just too heavy a lift. Obama’s failures in some other states bothered him deeply. “I would hope that he could win in the fall, but how?” Wagner said. He assumed that primary failures were a signal of weakness in the fall. “How can we win the White House without Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida? I just don’t see it.”
Carl Bensinger, a local lawyer who wore a business suit and black overcoat to ward off the rain, defined the third category. He was for Clinton because she was the most experienced. But he thought that either she or Obama would be able to unite the party at the Democrats’ convention in Denver. Obama could, he said, win those swing states of Pennsylvania and Ohio. “Concern about the economy trumps everything else,” he said. “That’s how we win.”
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