Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Your Messiah Is Not Your Second Choice

Let me add to Jonathan's takedown of the Democrats-thought-Obama-was-Messiah meme most recently being pushed by Ross Douthat. If this meme is any sort of acceptable generalization about Democrats, why wasn't he the first choice for most of them?

The 2008 Democratic primary was extraordinarily drawn-out, with each state voting before Hillary Clinton officially conceded. Hillary got a big chunk of the Democratic primary electorate. And a fair number of people who ended up choosing Obama over Hillary initially supported another candidate (in my case, John Edwards) who fell out of the running before they got to vote. While the measures of the primary popular vote that make sense to me have Obama getting the most votes in the end, enough of those have to come from former supporters of other candidates that it's ludicrous to regard Obama as everybody's Messiah. He wasn't even a majority of Democrats' first choice.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Looks like a whole new level of Democratic self-flagellation: 'Obama? We didn't really want him in the first place!'