I originally started drafting this diary last night, under the title "Analysis on Appalachia: The View from the Back of the Classroom." But NYTimes blogger Tim Egan has done a fine job of touching on some of the same themes today, so I want to work some of what he has to say in here.

Dissertations are surely on the drawing board this morning, as political scientists seek to deconstruct the Hillary phenonemon in West Virginia and now Kentucky, what it says about the general election, and more interestingly, why a state of reasonably similar demographics in Oregon voted so differently.

As Egan says: Enough with the hierarchal rankings of white Democratic voters.

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A few days ago, I opened the newspaper here in Cincinnati to see an astounding thing. There, standing on the steps of City Hall, was an amalgamation of groups that not too long ago would have been unthinkable -- the NAACP stood side-by-side with the Young Republicans, the Libertarians, the Greens and the radical anti-tax group called COAST in opposition to red-light cameras in the city.

The same groups first joined forces last year to oppose a tax levy to raise funds for a (desperately needed) new jail.

Leaving aside the politics of these positions, this display does point up an interesting possibility -- that the hardened positions that have defined our political boundaries, that the traditionalists depend on to define their views of the landscape, are at this point in time in a historic state of flux.

So I just got back from the store and thought I would check in to see what the Kos world looks like 90 minutes after John Edwards' endorsement.

But first, I went to Google News, where I ran into this storyfrom the San Francisco Chronicle's political blog.

Why, it's everybody's pal Lanny Davis, with his comments coming under the headline, "Lanny Davis: Will Superdelegates Change Their Minds?"

That would be one Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Here's the latest outrage, courtesy of tonight's appearance on O'Reilly's nightly sludgefest:

O'Reilly: "Can you believe this Rev. Wright guy? Can you believe this guy?"
Clinton: "Well, I'm going to leave it up to voters to decide."
O'Reilly: "Well, what do you think as an American?"
Clinton: "Well, what I said when I was asked directly is that I would not have stayed in the church.
O'Reilly: "You're an American citizen, I'm an American citizen, He's an American citizen, Rev. Wright. What do you think when you hear a fellow American citizen say that kind of stuff about America."
Clinton: "Well, I take offense. I think it's offensive and outrageous. I'm going to express my opinion, others can express theirs. It is part of just, you know, an atmosphere we're in today."

I had a realization as I was driving into work this morning that I think Pennsylvanians (and others) would be well-served to keep in mind when evaluating Obama vs. Clinton.

We are all ready for this primary season to be over with, and I'm sure none of us more so than the candidate and his top staff themselves.

I'm finding the popping up of this William Ayers/Weather Underground question to be quite relevant, as I picked up a book the other day called "Bomb Squad" (ironically written by two former staffers from Ted Koppel's "Nightline"). The book details a year in the life of the NYPD bomb squad, but also includes for perspective quite a bit of history on bombs in New York. That's where the revelations start to kick in for me as a child of the 1970s.

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That is what we have witnessed in the last 24 hours, and it is the reason why reactions have been so strong.

Obama has presented a case that is undeniably true. But because he is an outsider to the small-town Americans that he made the statement about -- and because Hillary views the parts of those groups who are Democratic as her base, and because the Republicans on the whole truly count on rural white America as a constituency they can take for granted based on identity politics -- the emotional tone of the response is completely over the top.

This is quite clearly a pivotal battleground for all that will happen between now and November.

The gambit is this: Can Americans get past the limitations of identity politics and trust someone who is not similar to them to work on behalf of their interests?

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I know the rules on diary length; however, sometimes there are snapshot moments that deserve a pedestal all their own.

The New York Times' political blog delivers one from today's Hillary press opportunity:

"I have continued to sound the alarm," she said at an airport press conference in Burbank, Calif. "Sometimes I feel like Paulette Revere: the recession is coming, the recession is coming..."

Does anything else need to be said? Saying she has "jumped the shark" doesn't quite do this justice.

Between the debut of the insipid 3 a.m. economic crisis ad yesterday and this quote today, this campaign has gone from tone-deaf to tone-dead.

Please, someone get the referee to step in and stop this travesty.

Paul Krugman's Friday column is out, and in it, as you might expect, he discusses the economic proposals brought forth by the candidates this week.

It is not one of his better efforts, as he makes little attempt to disguise his pro-Hillary bias.

RenaRF has a great diary this morning that lays out the many sins of the sinister Clinton campaign.

Additionally, within the last 24 hours, we've seen a breakthrough in the all-powerful media narrative, as reporters have fallen in love with the framing of Hillary "pulling a Tonya Harding" as her prime strategy going forward.

There's a prominent school of thought out there this morning that both praises Obama's speech of yesterday for what it said, but also wonders about its effectiveness for achieving the desired political means.

Glenn Greenwald does a fine job in giving voice to this argument on Salon.com:

The entire premise of Barack Obama's candidacy is built upon the opposite assumption -- that Americans are not only able, but eager, to participate in a more elevated and reasoned political discourse...
Will George Bush's ranch hats and Willie Horton's scary face and Al Gore's earth tones and John Kerry's windsurfing tights inevitably overwhelm sober, substantive discussions of the fundamental political crises plaguing the country? Obama's insistence that Americans are hungry for that sort of elevated debate and are able to engage it -- and his willingness to stake his campaign on his being right about that -- has been, in my view, one of the most admirable aspects of his candidacy.

I would argue there is a key distinction to be made here, and it has to do with timing.

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This may be the first step in helping to communicate to his followers that Obama is not going to continue to lay down and allow Hillary to attack.

Posted this afternoon on the NY Times political blog:

"She’s made the argument that she’s thoroughly vetted, in contrast to me," Mr. Obama said. "I think it’s important to examine that argument because if the suggestion is somehow that on issues of ethics or disclosure or transparency that she’s going to have a better record than I have and will be better able to withstand Republican attacks, I think that’s an issue that should be tested."

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Apologies for not being able to post more, but I have a meeting to run off to.

But new numbers published this morning based off of weekend polling done by the University of Cincinnati's Ohio Poll show Hillary in pretty good shape for Ohio for tomorrow.

They have it at 51.3 for her compared to 42.3 for Obama.

McCain has a wide margin on the Republican side.

You can get data on the poll here: http://www.uc.edu/...

One of the worst aspects of politics in recent years has been the use of inference against a backdrop of negative campaigning.

Bush and others in his crowd, of course, have been the masters of this technique. Their refinement of the dog-whistle messaging techniques have taken this kind of campaigning to a whole new level.

With her back against the wall, Hillary Clinton found the temptation of going this route a little more than she could handle when "60 Minutes" came to talk to her, and there's a cynical calculation involved in why she went this route when she did.

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I mean, really, what is it with this country? You've got Dubya vs. Gore in 2000 and it's so close that it takes weeks to reach (the wrong) conclusion. Then we go with Dubya vs. Kerry in 2004, and it comes down to handfuls of voters in a few key counties in a couple of states deciding the outcome.

Now we've got this Obama-Hillary thing going on. I'm in Ohio, and the polling in the last two days here and from Texas -- the two states that are supposed to provide a potentially decisive moment on Tuesday -- suggests we are once again in about a 50/50 situation.

Are we being punished? This inability to find a clear-cut outcome on the biggest races might be symptomatic of something, but I'm not sure how to read it. The "End Times" folks or Nostradamos probably could interpret it in some depressing manner, but I'll pass on that.

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Just doing an end of day look-around on the Web, and found this account from ABC of Obama's stop today in New Mexico to be pretty interesting:

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The end of the Cold War, while a very good thing for the world at large, was a problem for America.

We are an "Us vs. Them" society. We crave an enemy. Once the Evil Empire was evil no more, we did not know what to do. And them some among us did.

Lacking for external enemies, they concocted schemes to direct the nation's appetite for conflict inward. The domestic sins identified in the conservative/Reagan agenda could now be given a full hearing. Lo and behold, this realization also arrived with its own poster children, Bill and Hillary Clinton.

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I am an Obama supporter, but this isn't a diary about him per se. Rather it is about my observations of how I see the landscape as a middle-aged man living in middle America, and why what I see in my own life and from those around me tells me that the time is now for a candidate who has what Obama offers to us.

As they used to say on "The Tonight Show" placards during breaks late in the show, "More to Come"...