An interview that Brad Watson of WFAA-TV in Dallas conducted with Obama has been getting a lot of attention. A lot of it has centered on Obama’s visible testiness at the questions, but I’d like to point out his baffling ignorance of Texas history:
He stated that he lost Texas by “a few percentage points” in 2008 when it was actually closer to 12%.
He stated that Texas has “always” been a Republican state, which displays an amazing ignorance not just of Texas history, but of the entire post-Civil War era, in which Democrats overwhelmingly dominated the Jim Crow-era states of the old Confederacy, Texas included. In fact, Texas was considered a one-party Democratic state up until John Tower won the special election to fill Lyndon Baines Johnson’s unexpired Senate term in 1961.
The overall thrust of the interview is why Obama isn’t more popular in Texas. “Too big a spender, too liberal, too incompetent, too prickly, and too out-of-touch” all cover it rather nicely, but you can add “appallingly ignorant of basic historical facts” to that list…