Electoral Hangover

So, not the greatest day for Obama yesterday. He certainly closed a big gap with Clinton, but at the risk of echoing her talking points, it's also true that he poured a lot of money and effort into the state, and it wasn't as successful as it should have been. Ultimately, it seems like the failure was in my newly adopted city. He won Philadelphia county, but only 65 to 35. And he won two of the adjoining counties, Delaware and Chester, but by smaller margins. And he lost Montgomery and Bucks. Montgomery especially surprised me, as it is pretty affluent and home to lots of colleges. The redoubtable Kos (who usually drives me nuts) has an analysis that explains the losses pretty well, I think.

One question: has anybody seen Ted Kennedy recently? In the lead-up to Super Tuesday back in February, Senator Kennedy was everywhere, and was being hailed as the saviour of the Obama campaign. Since then, it's been zip. Caroline Kennedy has certainly been on the trail a lot, but no Ted. Given that I imagine he still carries a certain weight with white working class Catholic men--the demographic everyone seemed to be worrying about here--I would have thought he would be deployed to Pennsylvania.

My guess is that Obama has long since started campaigning for the general election. And since one of the angles the Republicans seem to be taking on him is his status as the "most liberal senator" (whatever that means), I'm guessing that he is not going to publicly deploy Kennedy again unless it is absolutely necessary to win the nomination.

I suppose that's okay. But not okay is the fact that I suspect this explains why Obama did not campaign for the LGBT vote in Philly, as I wrote in my last post. Every Democratic candidate knows that the gays are going to vote for the Democrat, no matter what. So if Obama is confident in the nomination, he's going to avoid placing himself in situations that give ammunition to homophobic Republicans. Clinton, on the other hand, is in full-on pandering slash-and-burn mode, and so she's going to cheerfully do whatever she can to make the LGBT community forget about Don't Ask Don't Tell, DOMA, and the other niceties of the Clinton administration.

Let me tell you, it gets really old, election after election, to have your vote taken for granted. Of course I'm going to vote for the Democratic candidate, and of course the Clintons were much more pro-gay than George Bush Sr. or Bob Dole would have been. But in electoral politics, passive voters are only going to get you so far: what matters the most is having committed activists on your side, out there spreading the word.