The West Virginia primary is in full swing today, and the past few days have seen an escalation in verbal hostility towards the state that I frankly find unacceptable and despicable.

This election will not be won on swoons of hope, courage, and change* but on realpolitik. Senator Obama may want to try to “raise the bar” of the discourse by defining the terms of the discussion (Victor Davis Hanson: Obama Rules) but I think that the so-called Obamamania will be gone long before the general. Senator Clinton knows the realpolitik and was vocal enough to talk about it. The oft-maligned quote on how she has the votes of working-class whites is not to be taken as a racist sentiment. The fact that she said it was an act of miscalculation on the level of the Dean Scream, but it is the hard truth.

With Sen. Clinton projected to win by a 40-point spread in West Virginia, Sen. Obama has conceded the state days before and has moved on to Oregon. He is also trying to act from a position of power by denying Sen. Clinton battle: he keeps on talking about McCain, McCain, and more McCain, but he isn’t rid of her yet and he shouldn’t act it. The problem lies in the very abandonment of this small, but lost, battlefield. By ceding West Virginia, Sen. Obama has demonstrated that it is okay to pooh-pooh their participation in the primary process. If he wins the nomination, he will have to court the voters of this state. He can not simply assume that the West Virginians will vote for him just because he has a “D” at the end of his name.

Let me repeat a conclusion from a previous post: The ugly disdain for undesired voters is the Democrat behavior that has haunted them, election after election. With the anti-Appalachian bigotry in full swing (Instapundit: May 12, 2008), Sen. Obama and his supporters are beginning to prove that his campaign offers nothing more than what they denigrate the most from Republicans: four more years of the same.

*- A facetious digression: I have this image of President Bush at a press conference tossing mock stimulus checks at the camera screaming, “America, here’s your change!”