Reading about the impressive crowd size at the Portland Obama Rally caused me to reminisce about another awesome Presidential rally - John Kerry's Portland water front park rally in 2004.

Here are some of the awesome pictures:

The crowd size was estimated at 50,000.  Link

Some 50,000 people came out to hear John Kerry and special guests speak in Portland on a sweltering hot summer day. Your phototographer arrived before 10AM, and Kerry finished speaking a tad after 2PM. (I'm wearing a towel over my head - find the shot of me in here).

Along with Kerry, the rally included quick speeches by Oregon's Democratic representatives and leaders: Governor Ted Kulongoski, Senator Ron Wyden, and Representatives Darlene Hooley, David Wu, and Earl Blumenauer. Celebrity guests included actor Leonardo DiCaprio, and rock musicians Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora (who played two accoustic songs).

Finally, the Kerry busses arrived, and Kerry's step-son Chris Heinz spoke briefly first. Then Tereasa Heinz Kerry spoke for quite a few minutes. Jim Rassmann (whose live Kerry saved in Vietnam) also spoke briefly. Retired General Tony McPeak - a Republican critic of Bush's policies - was on stage but did not speak.

Kerry spoke last. He got a lively reception from a large crowd that had been waiting several hours in the heat.

Watching that rally, I was very confident that John Kerry would become our next President.  He and John Edwards were getting amazingly huge and enthusiastic crowds all over blue America.

I cried the day I watched John Kerry concede in Boston on TV.  It was incomprehensible to me why he would lose  --  he was getting huge and fantastic crowds all over the place compared to GWB.

I'm less naïve now.  Like Kristen Breitweiser, I have learned to understand that it is all about swing state electoral votes.  Big crowds in Oregon and Pennsylvania are fantastic but they won't guarantee us victory in November.  Both Obama and Clinton would beat McCain in Oregon according to the most recent head-to-head Oregon poll (Link),  but that would not guarantee us victory in the 15 critical swing states that include Ohio, Florida, Michigan, West Virginia.

Kristen's article Reality Bites: Swing-State Math is very helpful to me in understanding why John Kerry didn't win.  It's a must read.  

Excerpt:

In '04, I traveled as a surrogate for the John Kerry campaign. I was sent to places like Iowa, Ohio, Nevada, Colorado, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, and Florida. Quite the roadtrip.

In the beginning, I wondered why I kept getting sent to these random "swing states." Iowa (a state in 2004 with, yes folks, only one Starbucks!!) Why did Iowa matter? I was a political novice. So dumb. So naïve.

To me, it seemed so terribly undemocratic that a handful of states could determine who became our president. Likewise, It never truly clicked in my head when my New Yorker friends would wryly state that their vote didn't count. Of course their vote counted. Every vote counts. This is America, right?

And then on Election Day '04, I learned the hard way why those swing states mattered so much. John Kerry lost Ohio and Florida and therefore lost the election to George Bush. Four more grueling years of Republican rule. My impression on that sad day? 1460 days to go.

Now with roughly 240 days until Election Day '08, one thing remains the same: THE ONLY VOTES THAT WILL MAKE THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ELECTING JOHN MCCAIN AND A DEMOCRAT TO THE WHITE HOUSE ARE THE SWING STATES.

So with all this talk of delegates and superdelegates counting and not counting, why has nobody (at least to my knowledge) looked at how either Clinton or Obama performs against McCain in the crucial 15 swing states? Frankly speaking, isn't that really all that matters?

Like Kristen, I want a nominee that can win the GE -- the one that has a better odds at winning the swing states.  In my opinion, that candidate is Hillary Clinton.

The next primary will be in West Virginia.  I have therefore taken a look at its past election patterns.  

I present below the WV maps of the immediate past two GE.  The maps are from uselectionatlas.org.

2004 -- John Kerry 43% (red) versus George W. Bush 56% (blue)

2000 --  Al Gore 46% (red) versus George W. Bush 52% (blue)

Both Kerry and Gore lost WV and they also lost the General Elections.  

How about the maps when our guys won - Clinton 1992 and Carter 1976 -- are they different?    

Here are the maps:

1992 - Bill Clinton 48% (red) versus George H.W. Bush 35% (blue)

1976 -- Jimmy Carter 58% (red) versus Gerald Ford 42% (blue)

These maps have shown once again that small-town Americans play a crucial role in determining whether we would win WV in 2008.  They are the swing voters.  The Presidential candidate that can connect with these small-town voters had a better chance of winning the State and also the GE.

We have a new WV head-to-head poll conducted among primary voters (democrats and independents):

Link

Against Senator McCain, the presumptive Republican Nominee, 62% of the likely Democratic voters in this West Virginia poll say they would support Clinton. The split is 37% to 35% of the likely Democratic voters in an Obama-McCain matchup in November, respectively.

Blankenship says that means, if Senator Obama is the Democratic Nominee for President, he will have a hard time winning West Virginia as part of the General Election.

"Nothing's impossible but he will have an uphill battle here.  I think McCain is appealing to, oddly, some of the same people that Hillary Clinton is appealing to, conservative Democrats, lower income households, those with less education," says Blankenship.

This head-to-head poll suggests that in a GE match-up against McCain, Hillary has a great chance of beating McCain.  If Senator Obama is the Democratic Nominee for President, he will have a hard time winning this State.  The poll also shows that a large number of Hillary supporters (Dems and Independents) would defect to McCain if Obama becomes the Dem nominee.  They were the Reagan Democrats.  They would soon become McCain Democrats should Obama become the Dem nominee.  I personally think that class plays more of a role here than race.  I think they reject Obama for the same reason they rejected John Kerry -- they may perceive Kerry and Obama to be elitist.  

WV has once again shown that Hillary is one of a very rare breed of politicians, and especially rare among Democratic politicians, who've managed to connect to this class of voters.  It takes a very special Democratic politician to be able to bring these small-town folks home to the Democratic Party, where they belong.

WV carries only 5 electoral votes.  Considering the fact that Al Gore lost to GWB by a mere 5 electoral votes in year 2000, I would hesitate to dismiss the importance/relevance of this 5-electoral vote swing state in a GE.

The Indiana primary result map attached above shows that Hillary Clinton won 83 out of 92 counties and she won most of them by double digits.

Donna Brazille made the following comment last night:

BRAZILE: Well, Lou, I have worked on a lot of Democratic campaigns, and I respect Paul. But, Paul, you're looking at the old coalition. A new Democratic coalition is younger. It is more urban, as well as suburban, and we don't have to just rely on white blue-collar voters and Hispanics. We need to look at the Democratic Party, expand the party, expand the base and not throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Mr. Axelrod made a similar comment shortly after the PA primary.

Should Brazille and Axelrod dismiss the importance of these small town voters?

Let us take a look at the table shown below.

Link

Excerpt:

Ever since the break up of the "Solid (Democratic) South" nearly a half century ago, small-town America has been a loyal element of the Republican presidential coalition. Democrats have found ways to come close to winning the presidency, based on rolling up the vote in the cities and penetrating deeper and deeper into the suburbs. But since 1968, only those Democratic nominees from the small-town South, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, have actually been able to win the presidency.

Al Gore showed back in 2000 that a Democrat could narrowly win the fall popular vote with the cities and a fair chunk of the suburbs. Yet to win the electoral vote, their nominee needs to do a bit better. In short, the party has become quite expert at winning 48 percent of the vote, but it takes a special Democrat able to draw votes in small-town America to bring that extra 3 percent that would ensure victory. Quite possibly, Obama has the political skills to do it. But his tepid primary showings in rural parts of key battleground states such as Missouri, Ohio and Pennsylvania places the burden of proof on him to demonstrate that he can do it.

Based on these historical perspectives, I doubt that we can dismiss the critical importance of these small town voters.

I personally think that we dismiss them at our peril.

The central argument provided by economists against a short-term gas tax holiday is as spelled out by Krugman: Link

It's Econ 101 tax incidence theory: if the supply of a good is more or less unresponsive to the price, the price to consumers will always rise until the quantity demanded falls to match the quantity supplied. Cut taxes, and all that happens is that the pretax price rises by the same amount.

George Frost has made a number of good counterpoints in today's Salon article, arguing in support of the idea that gas tax holiday can work if properly implemented.  

I would add that in fact, the economics of a windfall profits tax are far more compelling than the economists lets on. A true windfall tax is a one-time event administered retroactively to a period of profit activity over and above those profits, which might be earned in a competitive market. Such a one-time windfall profits tax is the "best of taxes" in that it has absolutely no impact on resource allocation.

I would like to point out here an additional weakness in the economists' argument.  The economists assumed that the price of crude oil today is made according to traditional relation of supply to demand.  It may not be so.

More below the fold ...

I'm interested to find out whether by denouncing Rev. Wright, Obama has 'turned the corner' on the issue?

I present a couple of available poll results below the fold.

If you know of other polls, please post them in the comments section.  Thank you.

The PA primary exit polls showed that an unusually high percentage of Hillary supporters would not vote for Obama in November should he be the nominee.

Is this a big problem for Democrats?

This is just a reporting of the Dem primary popular vote tally gleaned from the MSM.  If you have additional popular vote tally from the MSM, please add them under the comments section.

From Paul Krugman's NY Times Blog -- A picture is worth a thousand words:

One thing that doesn't seem to have gotten much scrutiny in the "bitter" controversy is the suggestion that the past 25 years have been an era of continuous economic hardship for the American heartland. If we're talking about the decline of industrial cities, there's some truth to that picture. But if we're talking about incomes and employment, the Clinton years were pretty good for middle-income Americans -- and especially good for middle-income Midwesterners.

Link