Reply #44: Here's a few: [View All]

[lumberjack_jeff]

1) His plan for healthcare will fail to solve the problem. The cost of that failure will be another 20 years of conventional wisdom that public solutions will not work. There's a very good argument to be made that failing to try is better than doing something that is doomed to fail.
2) At every turn, his supporters reinforce the perception that Obama is smug and condescending. "Bitter rural voters" would not have been an issue at all had his more urbane supporters not laid the foundation with 50 thousand "College graduates vote for Obama! See? Old peoples 'r dumb! LOLZ!!11!"
3) Obama has an uphill fight with southern rural whites. It's intellectually lazy as well as fucked-up arithmetic to write them off. We don't need a majority of them, but we need enough of them to vote for Obama to not negate our advantages elsewhere.
4) Michelle. I know that acting like a candidate's spouse puts a severe crimp in your style. Do it anyway.
5) The above lack of identifying with working class people makes him more susceptible to a perception that he's the guy to blame for unregulated immigration (and unreasonably huge numbers of h1-b visas). His rhetoric, given his public persona as demonstrated by his supporters, makes anything he says against NAFTA look like a head-fake.