Obama girl Natalie Tennant is a West Virginia long shot

One would ordinarily feel quite honored to be asked to run for senate by the Democratic Party but if one was the 11th person asked and 10 had declined, well, maybe not so much. West Virginia Secretary of State Natalie Tennant will face Rep. Shelley Moore Capito and attempt to hold onto the senate seat the Democratic Party has owned since 1958. It will be an uphill fight.
Governor Earl Ray Tomblin and Senator Joe Manchin had the good sense to skip the Democratic convention. Tennant was an Obama delegate. Tomblin and Manchin won their races with 50.5% and 60.5% respectively. Obama lost to Romney 62% to 35.5%, failing to carry a single county in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans two to one. Obama, to whom Tennant has hitched her wagon, lost 40% of the Democratic primary vote to a jailbird in a Texas federal pen. Perennial candidate Keith Russell Judd actually carried 10 counties.
A truly transformative president can change voting behavior in entire states and in West Virginia and Louisiana Obama has turned both from blue to red. Energy is not an academic issue in states that produce coal, oil, and gas. Obama's drilling moratorium in the Gulf and his war on coal in Appalachia have done mayhem to local economies and there is the devil to pay. Senator Robert Byrd, in his prime, would have had Obama's head on a stick but Tennant is sticking with Obama.
As of late, she has tried to put some air between herself and Obama.
“Let me make this clear right here, right now,” she said during a morning rally in Beckley. “I will fight any Republican or any Democrat — including President Barack Obama — who tries to kill our energy jobs, whether they are coal, natural gas, wind or water.”
Right girl. Why not include solar power?
About Obamacare? Squishy!
“There are elements in the Affordable Care Act that we need and elements that must be fixed,” she said without elaborating. “Rather than participate in partisan, divisive attacks, I say we get to work and make government function again – on our side.”
The traditional Democratic platitude where the government is supposed to take sides may not play so well in a state that is on the losing side.
Politico quotes Republican operative Andy Sere, “Geographically, the Democrats’ path to victory in this Senate race was having someone who was extremely strong in the only part of the state where Shelley doesn’t have a natural base and that’s the southern coal fields,” he said. “Instead, they are going to nominate a candidate who got pathetically low single digits in most of the southern coal county.”
Tennant, whose contribution to feminism was being the first female mascot of the West Virginia Mountaineers where she paraded about in buckskins, might be a plausible candidate in neighboring, true blue, Maryland but in West Virginia coal is king not Barack Hussein Obama.