Word: virginia
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Hillary Clinton's lopsided defeat of Barack Obama in West Virginia Tuesday night was not a surprise; the polls had been even more lopsided. And it didn?t change the dynamics of the Democratic race; Obama's lead still looks insurmountable. But losing does have a way of making politicians look like losers, and the next primary in Kentucky looks like more of the same terrain that's been tough for Obama, heavy in older, working-class whites without college degrees. So the question of the moment has become: Do Obama's continuing struggles with those particular voters suggest potential...
...factor we're not supposed to mention, the factor the Clintons keep getting in trouble for hinting at. It's just that Obama, well, this is awkward, but he's, um, black, and most voters aren't. According to exit polls, one in four Clinton voters in West Virginia said race was an important factor in their vote, which is amazing in an era where people who think like that aren't supposed to admit it. Shouldn't they at least have pretended their issue with Obama was that he is an elitist...
...good news for Obama is that he's still comfortably ahead in pledged delegates, that superdelegates keep breaking his way, and that despite the Clinton campaign's pronouncements, West Virginia won't change that. He barely mounted a campaign in the state, in part because he wanted to start campaigning against John McCain, in part because he knew he was going to lose; he even said so in Charleston on Monday. While Obama has consistently outpolled Clinton among blacks, young voters and college graduates, Clinton has been more popular among less educated blue-collar whites of a certain age. That...
...other good news for Obama is that his Democratic-primary problems in battleground states need not translate into general-election problems. West Virginia Democrats are still fond of President Clinton, and three-quarters of his wife's supporters said his campaigning was important to them. But Democrats are still likely to support a Democratic nominee in a Democratic year, and national polls suggest trouble for the G.O.P. in almost every state; President Bush?s approval ratings are abysmal, voters trust generic Democrats more than Republicans on every major issue, and Obama and Clinton are both leading McCain even though they...
What's been overlooked is that Obama has won plenty of white voters; otherwise he wouldn't have carried Iowa, Idaho, Colorado and Virginia. He won some white working-class voters, too, a lot more than Chris Dodd or Bill Richardson did; he just didn't win as many as Clinton, who tailored her campaign towards the "beer track" after Obama started drubbing her among wine-trackers. Over the next six months, Obama will have plenty of time to let those beer-trackers know that he comes from a middle-class family, that he started his career organizing laid...