If the sense of alienation that many Southerners feel toward President Barack Obama wasn’t already clear to the known universe, it became so on Tuesday night.
John Wolfe, a Chattanooga attorney operating on a shoestring budget in seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, took 42 percent of the vote in the Democratic primary in Arkansas, to Obama’s 58 percent.
That is scarcely a glowing endorsement of a sitting president.
But Democratic primary voters in Kentucky struck an even more humiliating blow against Obama: He again got 58 percent of their votes — but “uncommitted” got pretty much all the rest. And the embarrassment arguably was even more intense in the May 8 West Virginia primary, where a man serving time in a federal prison for extortion got 41 percent of the Democratic vote.
While all three states are highly likely to go Republican in the November general election anyway, the obvious lack of confidence that so many of their Democratic voters have for Obama doesn’t bode well for the president elsewhere.