Gee, I didn't know the primaries were over and we declared a nominee. I thought it was still being contested.

If Obama does somehow get the nomination, he can forget the rurals, he can forget the white working class voters, he can forget everybody except African Americans and the latte-swilling crowd.

I have never in my life seen such stupidity exhibited as in the mindless Obama cult. He will be lucky, should he be the nominee, to win a single state. As it is, he will win only D.C.

All this hand-wringing misses the important point that Obama puts the West in play, where rural voters DO like Obama. Sure, we may not carry Rust belt rural, uneducated, religious white voters, but then again, when have we, recently? Bill Clinton had Ross Perot to thank for his sub-majority win: Clinton did not carry these places. But the West will flip for Obama, and out here there is very little love for Hillary Clinton. With the West in play, plus Virginia and North Carolina likely swinging blue this election for Obama, Obama has a robust strategy for scooping up the electoral votes he needs.

You clearly didn't read this piece very carefully. These voters (I'm one of them) don't, for the most part, think this way about Obama, any more than they thought that way about Kerry and Dukakis. If that was so, why did Jesse Jackson do so well here?

So, let's just forget about these folks? Forget about rural folks? Any candidate who thinks that way doesn't deserve to win. Any citizen like you who thinks that way doesn't deserve to live in a country where ALL its citizens should be valued.

seemed those Pennsylvania folks loved Obama - check out photos here:(click on yellow folder for best shots)

http://greenserver.dyndns.biz/bw/photos/obama/

I'm sick and tired of Appalachian people being called racist when racism exists throughout the country. Appalachian people didn't invent segregation, and often have rejected it. They didn't invent slavery and often rejected it. Appalachian people didn't invent the housing discrimination that resulted in inner cities from Washington to Detroit to Atlanta to Los Angeles. My state and county and city and neighborhood are far more integrated than most areas of this country.

Rural westerners may automatically vote Republican, but Appalachian voters do not. Most Appalachian voters are Democrats. And they will vote Democratic in November if they are not ignored, or worse, made fun of. But if Obama doesn't come here and campaign, it will affect states from Pennsylvania to Tennessee.

Here's a hint on how to win rural white voters: They already have religion. They don't need some high-flown political substitute for it. Instead, the Democratic nominee needs to talk to them in terms of specifics. They are practical and want to know how politics will benefit their lives -- not so often in terms of handouts -- but in terms of how to recover their communities. The Democratic nominee needs to understand that in really small towns poverty may mean that there is not even a movie theater. Social life may take two forms, the church and the bar.

Obama lost in rural Texas, west of the I-35 corridor. That's another lesson. Those are rural voters, but many of them are not white. They're Hispanic, but they deal with the same problems. Prosperity has moved away to Dallas, Austin, and Houston and left them behind. If the Democratic nominee hits on the change meme but doesn't tell them specifically how that change will make their lives better, then they have no reason to vote Democratic. Don't be vague, don't talk abstractions, talk reality. They tend to think fancy talk is phony talk.

Of course, if the Democratic nominee only assumes that they are racially prejudiced and refuses to try to win their votes, that's not so visionary, is it? That's hope you can dump in an ashcan.

And for the person who is about to chime in that Texas isn't achievable, maybe it's not, but it's not very hopeful to assume so. Texas is baja Oklahoma. Is Oklahoma not achievable. West of Texas is New Mexico with only one true city and a population of rural Hispanic and white voters. Wanna give up New Mexico too?

-- AKA Smith

ABSOLUTELY!! Assuming that anyone who would not vote for Obama must be a racist who cannot be won over is narrow minded and divisive. That assumption comes across as elitist and paternalistic. Those are not qualities that Americans want in a President. Obama needs more than a slogan of Hope, he needs to prove it.

This is because most blacks feel that they have suffered in some sense through being black (whether this is true or not) and that if Obama is in the White House, there will be a president who understands how it feels to be black in America.

No mystery about that.

Don't we all want a president who we hope will understand our point of view?

-- Amerigo

So then if 90% or even 80% of the women in America voted for Clinton, they would have been rationally looking for a President who understands our point of view. Too bad women are not sexist enough for it to have worked out that way.

I don't know anyone in rural Kentucky but the folks who I know in rural Wisconsin that are most likely to vote for Obama are farmers (organic mostly, but I've also talked to a few conventional dairy operators who are pretty fed up right now.) They work where they live, out there in the country. The majority of rural residents in this state though, are ex-urbans with long commutes to city jobs who are voting for McCain. They do not live way the hell out for any sound economic reasons. Quite the opposite - they inconvenience themselves and their families precisely because they espouse the same city-hating and other-people-hating values that McCain does.

Obama can win the votes of every farmer in this state (especially if he tells them that he will help them get affordable health care.) But Obama will never win the majority of the votes in these rural precincts because the farmers are far outnumbered by the home schoolers, religious fundamentalists, gun nuts, and other castle builders down the road.