To Say Obama Won the 2008 Election Is a Huge Understatement

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Thu Jan-29-09 11:04 PM
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To Say Obama Won the 2008 Election Is a Huge Understatement

The 2008 presidential election can best be thought of as two elections. Obama vs. McCain was the official election. The other election, Obama vs. Bush, was the unofficial election, but in many ways the more meaningful of the two.

I say that Obama vs. Bush was the more meaningful of the two elections partly because it was the one in which people had a good idea what they were voting for. George W. Bush had nearly an 8-year presidential record that voters could observe and vote on. McCain on the other hand had no such record. To many voters he was simply �McCain the Maverick�. His whole campaign was based more on that slogan than anything else.

Furthermore, the reason that President Obama sometimes needs to remind Republicans that �I won� is that those Republicans argue for a continuation of governing in the Bush tradition � not in the �McCain the Maverick� tradition. Most Congressional Republicans want nothing more than to continue the same failed policies that our country lived with for the past 8 years and that voters soundly rejected in the 2008 election. But to best understand the magnitude of that rejection, we need to consider and look separately at both the official Obama vs. McCain election AND the unofficial Obama vs. Bush election:

Obama vs. McCain

The Obama vs. McCain election was impressive enough. It was a solid victory for Obama, but it wasn�t a landslide. Obama received more than eight and a half million more votes than McCain, giving him a net advantage of about 7% in the popular vote.

In the Electoral College, Obama won more than twice as many votes as McCain, 365-173. Compared to the very close 2004 election, in which the Republicans had to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of Ohio voters in order to win, Obama lost not a single one of the states that John Kerry won, and he picked up nine additional states from all over the country, including three Western states (New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada), three + Midwestern states (Iowa, Indiana, Ohio, and one electoral vote in Nebraska), and three Southern states (Florida, Virginia, North Carolina).

Obama vs. Bush

It�s a little more difficult to assess how Obama performed against Bush in the 2008 election because we don�t have official results for that. Nevertheless, the exit polls provide some very clear and striking information on that subject.

Those exit polls (See page 6) show that John McCain was vastly more popular than George Bush. Aside from the fact that only 27% of voters approved of George Bush�s job performance, almost all of McCain�s support in the 2008 election came from voters who believed that he would NOT continue George Bush�s policies. Among voters who thought that McCain would continue Bush�s policies, McCain received only 8% of the vote. But among voters who thought that McCain would NOT continue Bush�s policies, McCain received 85% of the vote. In other words, what little support McCain received in the 2008 election came from voters who thought of him as �McCain the Maverick�, not as someone who voted for Bush�s policies more than 90% of the time � which he did.

A reasonably accurate measure of voter support for Obama�s vs. Bush�s policies (the policies that most Congressional Republicans favor) comes from voters who believed that McCain would continue Bush�s policies. Those voters composed about one half of the electorate, and they voted for Obama overwhelmingly � 90% to 8%. Never in American history has there been a landslide in a presidential election of anywhere near those proportions. In order to avoid such a landslide, �McCain the Maverick� had to convince about half of the electorate that he would NOT continue Bush�s policies.

Historians say Bush presidency was an abject failure

For those Congressional Republicans who aren�t influenced by the near total repudiation of Bush�s policies by American voters, maybe they should consider what historians have to say on the subject. American Historians have a broader knowledge and understanding of American history than do most Americans, and so they should be better able to put the Bush presidency in proper perspective than are most other Americans.

I posted about this recently, but it bears repeating in the context of this post. A poll of 109 historians was conducted by George Mason University�s History News Network in April 2008 � prior to the worst of our current recession/depression. In that poll, 107 historians rated the Bush presidency a failure, and 2 rated it a success, as depicted in this graph:

In that same poll, 61% of historians rated Bush the worst U.S. President ever, and only 4% rated him in the top 30 (including 2% who rated him a failure). Those figures are depicted in this graph:

The bottom line

If Republican Congresspersons want to vote against the plans of President Obama and Democrats in Congress to put our country back together again, that�s their right. But to whine and complain and rage that their ideas aren�t being taken seriously enough is highly disingenuous or just plain childish. Their policies have been tried for eight long years. Those policies and the president who championed them have been utterly repudiated by the American people. They have been even more thoroughly repudiated by American historians. The evidence shows that had our country not passed the 22nd Amendment to our Constitution, and had George Bush decided to run for a third term, he would have been trounced by Barack Obama far worse than was John (�Maverick�) McCain, and very possibly would have suffered the worst landslide in a presidential election in U.S. history.

These people really don�t deserve to be taken seriously, and certainly they should not be allowed to obstruct serious efforts to put our country back together again.