From Mark Halperin's The Page I found this AP article written by Chet Brokaw: Obama, Clinton in Close Battle for South Dakota
Here's how it starts:
The voters of South Dakota look a lot like those who have favored Hillary Rodham Clinton in presidential primaries this year, but her rival, front-runner Barack Obama, has plenty of friends in high places in this rural state.
and later:
Straddling the line between Midwest and West, South Dakota is overwhelmingly rural with corn and soybeans in the east and rolling cattle ranches and the Black Hills in the west. The state is 88 percent white, consistently ranks last in the nation in annual average wages and has the eighth-largest percentage of residents older than 65. Clinton has handily won states with electorates like this, most recently Kentucky and West Virginia.
This is unbelievable! According to the by-line this story was filed from Pierre, South Dakota, so I'm assuming Mr. Brokaw probably knows where South Dakota is on the map, and the fact that South Dakota's neighbors are North Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado, Minnesota, Nebraska and Iowa.
You know what those states all have in common? Obama won them all, mostly by overwhelming margins. Not once is any of these states mentioned in the article. The rest of the article is mainly awe and amazement that Obama seems to be doing well and is endorsed by most of the big political figures in a state that "looks like West Virginia and Kentucky".
So I can only come to two conclusions:
- Chet Brokaw is the biggest idiot on the face of the earth and should be immediately fired from the AP, to think that South Dakota's closest comparisons are West Virginia and Kentucky.
- He has bought the Clinton line that "caucuses don't count", so since all of South Dakota's neighbors held caucuses, well, they don't count as comparisons! In which case he does not have enough independence from the Clinton campaign's lies to call himself a journalist.
Obama is going to win South Dakota handily for the very same reasons he won all its neighboring states:
- He plays very well in the upper midwest and rocky mountain regions, mainly in my opinion because he's very authentic
- Working class whites in South Dakota ARE NOT working class whites in Appalachia. Maybe someday some one in the media will figure this out
- This area HATES the Clintons. The 90's were not very good to rural communities, and the Clintons completely ignored the Democratic parties in states like South Dakota.