It looks like not much is going to change tonight. Obama will most likely win Oregon (I promise to check the returns at midpoint to verify this) and Clinton is projected to win big in Kentucky. Which the media and the Clinton camp is going to spin into the, by now very-tired, meme that Obama can’t win the poor, white, rural, uneducated vote. Which is getting annoying frankly. I mean, there are lots of rural, uneducated, white, poor Iowans who voted for Obama and surely there were some in Idaho (where he took 83% of the delegates) and maybe also in Nevada where they liked him just fine. And Oregon? Yea, turns out it’s kind of poor too.
So now there’s a slugfest going on: can the Democrats ignore these Appalachian voters? Is this poor showing in West Virginia, Kentucky and Pennsylvania indicative of a greater weakness? Why does the liberal Muslim candidate hate bitter America? yada, yada, yada.
What’s partly annoying about all of this is the assumption that Appalachia somehow stands for rural America. Honestly, a farmer in Iowa and a farmer in Kentucky have almost nothing in common. It’s a different mind-set, it’s a different set of economic realities, it’s a different history. It may be that Clinton’s organization just has a better ground operation or that Obama hasn’t been able to spend enough time in those places. And I’m not convinced that in a head-to-head battle with McCain that either Democrat would have much of a chance.
So now Obama can turn his “weakness” into a strength during the long, long summer … he can spend a lot of time criss-crossing Appalachia and talking about why they would be voting against their own interests to vote for McCain. I mean, geez, Obama is from Illinois — he hearts coal.
And Clinton has got to stop saying that this thing is not over. Look, mathematically, she can’t win. She can’t win even if she seats delegates that didn’t have the option of voting for Obama (hello Michigan!). She can’t win even if she argues that she wins the popular vote which she can’t argue because there’s no way to measure caucus states and — hello again! — Michigan. She can’t win unless the superdelegates defect to her en masse. Even 50+% of voters in Kentucky knew that she wouldn’t be the eventual nominee. And while I can understand why she wants to stay in the race (and I still don’t think it has to be a bad thing), there are good ways to stay and bad ways to stay. And this is a bad way to stay.
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