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Posted: May 13, 2008 4:39 PM
W. Va. Votes, but Twinges From Lack of Obama Face Time
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Robert Rupp, like most political watchers and polls, expects Sen. Hillary Clinton to waltz out of West Virginia with a win in Tuesday’s primary even though chances are looking dimmer that she’s going to win the Democratic nomination.

But Rupp, a political historian at West Virginia Wesleyan College, told the Online NewsHour that Sen. Barack Obama didn’t necessarily need to give his pre-emptive Mountain State concession speech on Monday.

Obama’s camp gets high marks in Rupp’s book for organizing far ahead of the primary — even in heavily Republican counties. But he called out the campaign for not putting in enough face time — just one speech on Monday in Charleston and a brief stop at a pool hall down the road. Obama talked up his love of country and his conviction that veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars deserve better care from their government when they come home, the Associated Press reported.

“They have the organization, they have the signs, but they’re missing the candidate,” Rupp said of the Obama campaign in West Virginia. “In Appalachian politics, it’s face to face.”

On the other hand, Clinton herself has put in at least 14 appearances all over the state in the past week, not to mention those by her husband.

The state is “older, whiter, poorer and worse educated than most of the rest of the nation — all demographics that have flocked to Clinton in primaries so far,” Salon.com noted. “This may be the state where one of the Clinton campaign’s arguments about electability — if you don’t win the state in the primary, you can’t win it in the general election — comes closest to being true.”

But another young Democratic candidate to whom Obama is often compared launched a shoe-leather campaign in West Virginia 48 years ago and left with an unexpected primary win, Rupp said.

West Virginia appeared to be a lock for Hubert Humphrey in the 1960 primary, while John F. Kennedy faced a seemingly insurmountable anti-Catholic bias in the state.

But Kennedy eventually won by confronting that bias. He declared that he wouldn’t take marching orders from the pope and said in a TV appearance that “I am not the Catholic candidate for president.”

Kennedy, his charisma, his family and their money eventually helped him prevail with 61 percent.

“John Kennedy pandered, but he gave us idealism,” Rupp said. “Now we have a choice of Hillary, who panders, and Obama, who doesn’t know we exist.”

Rupp said race is a significant factor in the West Virginia vote, but far from the only factor.

“People forget that this state’s voting for a woman, which is almost unheard of,” he said. “People nationwide see that [our population is] 3 percent African-Americans, and they think ‘bigots.’”

Rupp said Kennedy could make grand speeches like Obama, but he was willing to roll up his sleeves and meet with common folk.

“I haven’t seen Obama come off that pedestal [here],” Rupp said. “If he would’ve, he would have gotten 10 points [more votes]. This was a missed opportunity for Obama to play JFK. The state was not his demographically, but he could have emphasized some concrete issues. He didn’t take it.”

Rupp said Obama’s state campaign also made some logistical errors, such as not touting his support for “clean-coal technology” enough and not hiring enough West Virginians to help survey the state’s unique political landscape.

Looking to November, the state — which is overwhelmingly Democratic but supported President Bush in 2000 and 2004 — might already be lost to Sen. John McCain, whose maverick style and military background will likely play well in a state that ranks among the top per capita for military service, Rupp said.

“The Republicans have [a] tailor-made candidate for the state,” he said, adding that Clinton’s expected landslide victory might leave a tainted atmosphere for Obama in the general election.

“Party officials are desperately making a bid with him: ‘Don’t write it off,’” Rupp said of West Virginia’s five electoral votes. “They’re really worried this state’s lost.”

Ahead of Tuesday’s primary, a record 76,519 West Virginians — mostly Democrats — cast early and absentee ballots, the AP reported. On Tuesday, Deputy Secretary of State Sarah Bailey told the AP that all the polling places opened fine and there have been no reports of anything going wrong.

After polls close at 7:30 p.m. ET, Clinton will speak at a rally at the Charleston Civic Center while Obama will campaign in Missouri, a bellwether state for the November election.