Hillary Clinton ended Tuesday night with a big victory in West Virginia, showing once again that old, white, poor, uneducated people really don't like young, witty, urbane, well-educated black men. Quelle surprise.
Hillary argues that West Virginia and its massively huge five electoral votes is a key swing state for the general election. Democrats, she says, haven't won the White House since 1916 without it. Let's review that list of Presidents: Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter and Clinton.
Know who else you don't see on that list? Adlai Stevenson, Hubert Humphrey and Michael Dukakis. They all also won WV, but lost anyway, as did Carter in 1980. So I wouldn't exactly call Mountain State success a Presidential predictor. What this history does indicate is that WV trends Democratic: since the Depression it has voted Republican only 5 times, and 4 of those were for incumbents.
So claiming that West Virginia is some kind of Democratic bellwether of November success is a disingenuous exercise in selective truth telling. By the Clintons? Encore, quelle surprise.
Another truth that they won't tell you is the 10 delegates they picked up Tuesday were erased by the 8 superdelegates Obama picked up Monday and Tuesday, plus, in a stunning reversal, one of Hillary's PLEDGED delegates in Maryland announced a switch to Obama. So for Monday and Tuesday, Clinton's net gain in delegates is exactly zero. Her "impressive" win in West Virginia is a hollow victory.
The real victory Tuesday came in Mississippi's special election.
In Mississippi's First Congressional District, Democrat Travis Childers defeated his opponent in what has been a Republican stronghold for years and years. His opponent had tons of support from the Republican Party as conservative icons Mike Huckabee and Dick Cheney came to MS to stump for him. They also ran television ads tying Childers to Obama. They think Obama, not Clinton, is the boogyman to scare conservative Southern voters into voting Republican.
Well, it didn't work there, just as it didn't work in Louisiana's 6th Congressional District on May 3. There, Democrat Don Cazayoux won a seat that had been Republican for decades. There, too, the Republicans ran ads tying Cazayoux to Obama.
Cazayoux and Childers join Illinois Democrat Bill Foster, who won a special election in the 14th there in March for a seat that had been held by not just any Republican, but by Dennis Hastert, the longest-serving Speaker of the House in history. Foster immediately declared as a superdelegate for Obama.
And although it was not a switch from Republican to Democrat, I would also add Andre Carson's special election win in Indiana's 7th district as significant. He is a black Muslim. In INDIANA!
What all this drives home is that Obama's coattails are already gaining impressive victories for Congressional seats when he's not even the nominee yet. Childers' victory happened because people everywhere want change in Washington, and Obama is emblematic of that change.
The real bellwether of success in November is not a traditionally Democratic state that sometimes votes Republican, but these traditionally Republican districts that are electing Democrats to Congress. THAT was the real election, the only meaningful election, on Tuesday.
And Obama won it.
