”You are not going to see me in parades on a Saturday down in Vidalia because that is not where the votes are and that’s not where the fundraising will be,” former gubernatorial candidate Guy Millner (R-Ga.) infamously told a group of university students on the campaign trail in 1994. (Vidalia population: 10,491. Georgia population: 4.6 million.)
The political firestorm of offended rural voters was textbook politics. The other candidates — Republican and Democrat — quickly pounced on the remark and trekked to Vidalia, Ga., for campaign events. Millner’s campaign kept digging the hole deeper by accusing the other candidates of pandering. Then Millner offered a semi-apology, saying, “If I offended you or anyone else by the remarks attributed to me, I sincerely and humbly apologize.”
The tone-deaf campaign began holding events and media interviews in Vidalia. But the problem wasn’t just with the voters in that single small town. Vidalia now represented all of rural Georgia and pointed to a much larger theme of an out-of-touch elitist candidate who had difficulty connecting with “real” people.
Millner went on to win the Republican primary but failed in the general election as the slight against rural Georgia lingered. It haunted him again in a bid for the Senate in 1996, a campaign in which I served as his spokesman.
More than a decade later, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) told a crowd of deep-pocketed California supporters that small-town Pennsylvanians just don’t get it. “It’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations,” he said.
As a product of small-town America, let me tell you that we do indeed “cling to guns,” not because we are bitter but because we believe they offer protection. And we “cling to religion” not out of resentment but for salvation. (As an aside, it was particularly interesting for him to single out anti-trade sentiment since he and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., are in a race to out-pander each other on opposing free trade.)
Seemingly channeling Guy Millner, Obama issued an “apology” that blamed the people who heard his words. “[I]f I worded things in a way that made people offended, I deeply regret that,” Obama said, trying to backtrack after the remarks became public.
It is not the way his statements are worded that is the problem. It is that voters have little to go on when it comes to Obama other than his words. Small-town Pennsylvanians will cling to those since they represent his actual sentiment and tell a little more about the man.
Remember Vidalia, Barack. The campaign missteps come and go. The larger themes they point to linger on.