For the love of god, if you can't see that Clinton's gas tax holiday is nothing put pure political pandering jimmied up to get votes and nothing else, then you're not only a hack and shill for Clinton, you're a moron if you think we're buying it. Please, please, please.

They're jealous of her teeth! I'm from KY and THAT'S FUNNY! Thanks for the laugh!

Kentuckians and West Virginians, by and large, are nothing if not traditionalists. They have more in common with most of PA than either they or Pennsylvanians know or will acknowledge. However, there are few African-Americans in either state, no Catholics to speak of and little history of immigration, except for the recent arrivals, not a high percentage of the well-educated, per capita, and an economy based entirely on blue collar laborers, and farmers. Many of these voters also possess the same degree of racial biases common in other parts of the country and the world. Their race-based perceptions are not unique to them, running the gamut from the hardliners to what is most commonly heard, "I'm not a racist, but....." kind of "racism." Obviously some of these white, blue collar voters are going to vote for Obama, but not many of them will for all kinds of reasons, most of which DO NOT primarily have to do with race.

Both of these places loved Bill Clinton. They're loyalists.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and make a prediction, Obama will loose both states.

Gore Vidal in "Screening History" observes that the reason there are so very few movies set in the period of European exploration of North America, and the colonial period, is because so much of it so unbelieveably horrid. Most Americans would believe it was all make believe, the fruit of some "I-hate-America" liberal slant.

Little of the actual history conforms with what most of us learned about it in school.

I went to school forty years ago. When I was in school, and where I was in school, KY, believe me they didn't teach us about how the U.S. Military poisoned the blankets with smallpox that they then gave to the Lakotas. Yes, we got the Conquistadore memos, but only in the shallowest, most cursory way: names, dates, rivers "discovered", etc. The details were sketchy, nothing about "genocide". The details I learned later, all on my own, reading Zinn's books and "Lies My Teacher Told Me", and reading Vidal.

If you'll also re-read what I paraphrased Vidal as writing, you'll see that he didn't say there were NO movies set in that time, just few are. And also he was talking about A-list Hollywood blockbusters similar to the scores of movies screening British history starring big named actors, and Cecil B. DeMile stuff, not reel-to-reel, DVD, documentaries made specifically for the classroom.

So what would you have Obama do, Joan? Any ideas? How does he work for or appeal better to white, working class blue collars? How?

Ok Back...I give up. You win. I wasn't there. I'm just making this up. I knew it all along. They told us all about it in the 2nd grade I just wasn't paying attention. Despite the fact that I was an A student all throughout my schooling, I'm just being unfair to the world class history lessons presented to me forty years ago in a KY classroom in a small town in the western part of the state. I was asleep. I didn't care. What exactly is your point? I'm describing what the American history taught me was like forty years ago and you're insisting that I am wrong about it? How do you know? Are you bragging that you got it and the dumb KY classes I attended didn't? I don't recall anyone ever saying that all classrooms and all schools are equal. They never have been and they still aren't. I'm describing my experience and I'm describing what most of the people know whom I've worked with and around my entire adult life. It hasn't been MY experience that many people? most people? a few million of them? know much about the kind of American history as presented in these kind of books. Most of them could give a rat's ass frankly one way or the other and are just as comfortable with the myths and fables as they are with the actual facts. Forgive me if it sounds like I'm trying to say your history classes were full of fakery. Good for you that they weren't, but you're the exception. Which is MY point.