You are both quite right, the people of West Virginia, Western Virginia, Kentucky and Pennsylvania failed to vote their interests as far as Obama's election was concerned, TWO TIMES. Now, they are paying the price. The question for us is how did this happen? How is it that a man who told the world that he was about, in effect, to shutdown the coal industry and inferentially increase electricity prices for all of us get elected?
We all know that Obama was a media creation, an empty suit otherwise, who rode a wave of media manufactured Bush hatred and media manufactured adulation into the Oval Office. By experience or achievement, Obama was less qualified than any president in the 20th century to hold the office.
If we want to win elections we should try to understand how it is that the people of West Virginia would put a Democrat senator in office when they should have known a couple years into his first term what they were getting from Obama. We want to understand the low information voter who was so ignorant that he does not even vote his own interests. We should try to understand how it is that the Democrat party has got a whole demographics to vote not their interests but their tribe.
In other words, we should try to understand the dynamic that puts Democrats in office and keeps conservatives out of office against not just logic but against the pocketbook interests of those voters.
While we are considering how it is that low information voters failed to vote their pocketbooks, we should also consider how it came to be that well informed and well-heeled business interests like the coal industry failed to mobilize to defeat Obama as the health insurance industry had mobilized to defeat Hillary care? What changed?
We saw the same phenomenon on Wall Street. My point is that we do not understand on several levels what it is that drives the voters to the voting booths and what it is that finances those who drive them.
