Country roads, take me home

Is this the last trail for the Hillary White House express?

West Virginia casts its votes in the Democratic Presidential Primary marathon today. Of course, it may be easier to find an African-American in Iceland than in the Mountaineer state (only 3.3% of the population) so Hillary should have one last big night as this thing winds down towards it's inevitable conclusion. It's sad that race keeps coming up as a deciding factor in this contest. I suppose this years election will be dissected for years on that subject alone. I would expect that Obama has some big time superdelegates set to announce in the wake of this big victory in order to give the mainstream media a chance to stay focused on his inevitability as the Democrat Party nominee.

This is coming at a time when we once again see that the electorate is disgruntled with the current administration and there is little doubt that the war in Iraq and the price at the pump has a lot to do with that.

Once you factor all that in, it is not only amazing but instructive that most polling data still shows John McCain either competitive or the front-runner for the fall election. How can this be?

Perhaps it is because of the actual choices: a generic Democrat would win heavily, but given the two alternatives to McCain, he remains preferable to many who would otherwise pull the lever for a Democrat.

What happens next? It's likely that next Tuesday's contests in Kentucky and Oregon are a split decision like last weeks contests in Indiana and North Carolina. At this point, Hillary may be doing little more than negotiating for the DNC or the Obama donors to pay off her sizable campaign debt.

Otherwise, she may be simply waiting and hoping for some fortuitous Reverend Wright-type of revelation or an Obama campaign fluff to cast further doubt on his viability in the minds of superdelegates.

But all you have to do is quietly talk to Democrat party operatives in places like Ohio, Texas, Pennsylvania, and Michigan to know that Obama has a formidable challenge ahead of him to win that oft-cited white working class vote. And he won't be able to win them by whining about Republicans "trying to use the same distractions" as in the past. That may play well with his current voters; not with the ones he needs to win over for November.

In that vein, consider this: No Democrat has won the general election without also winning the West Virginia primary since Woodrow Wilson in 1912. Can Obama break that streak?

Coach