General Discussion

Democratic. That was actually in my day as a young man. I was speaking of the south being left populist, probably more so than the rest of the country. As I said, in strictly economic terms, Huey Long was to the LEFT of Roosevelt. of course that was in the Thirties when the south was ravaged by the Depression more than the rest of the country also.

And I do agree that most of the people in '08, even the center-right ones WERE on the side of Obama. Case in point, I had a VERY conservative Mississippi cousin who hadn't voted for a Democrat since the Reagan era (at least) who voted for Obama in '08. A LOT of people bought into the "Change" mantra because they thought that the country was on the wrong track economically and that the Great Recession showed that. Then Obama went all-in on "bipartisanship" with people who made a conscious decision to be obstructionist and that pointed out the fact that nothing was going to change for them. People like my cousin. He went back to voting Republican after his hopes were dashed.

The problem was not that Obama was being obstructed. That should have been expected and accounted for. The problem was that Obama didn't point out the obstruction forcefully and often. When people are expecting a change in the governing philosophy and they don't get that change, they WILL look for "why". Each side SHOULD give a reason for that why. The Republicans DID give a reason why (bad policy by Obama) and the Democrats didn't. That was it in a nutshell.

The 2008 election could have been a watershed moment, not necessarily for the actual enactment of laws, that would have been difficult given the Republican policies of obstruction as history actually showed. But 2008 could have been a watershed election for changing the meme of governing that had been embraced by the citizenry since Reagan. Because that meme didn't change, our lot in life didn't change either and the Democratic Party is paying the price for that now.