Why I Love West Virginia!

There has been much discussion about what the primary votes this Tuesday actually meant. As if primary votes could ever be applied to a larger indication of the public mood. When Ned Lamont won the Democrat primary in Connecticut in 2006, that was reported to mean that the voters at large hated President Bush. Bear in mind that only the Democrat voters of Connecticut were voting in that particular election. What it meant was that the Democrat voters, and only the Democrat voters of Connecticut wished to send a more liberal Senator to Washington D.C. in order to represent their State's business. During the general election of that year of course, Joe Lieberman destroyed Ned Lamont, and alas the good people of Connecticut sent their conservative Democrat Senator back to Washington to represent their wishes.

If I had a dollar for every time in my life, "conventional wisdom," turned out to be jaw droppingly wrong, I would be paying Warren Buffett's tax rate and promising not to pimp out my secretary in order to score political points for a liberal politician who seeks to argue through anecdotal stories. Yet, undaunted by the stench of failure at every conceivable turn, we see a plug and play narrative being substituted for actual thoughtful analysis during every election cycle. This decades narrative, they want liberals and conservatives to seek some middle ground in order to push forward an agenda that is made up entirely of the liberal talking points, no matter how many conservatives get elected by promising to put a complete stop to this lunacy. It does not even matter how many of those Democrats who do win elections do so by promising to be conservatives and govern as Republicans once elected. (The last sentence is somewhat of an early jape meant for the good people of Indiana. Representative Joe Donnelly is already running as a Democrat who will do whatever he can to sound like a Republican for the next 6 months. Please just take one moment to remember what happened the last time we elected a whole bunch of Democrats promising to be Blue Dogs. We got landed with Obamacare and Dodd Frank, and are now facing the prospect of ratifying the LOST Treaty.)

The Loss of Richard Lugar in Indiana means nothing more than the Republican voters in that State are tired of being represented by a law maker who more aptly represents the values held by the Democrats in his State. Its context and scope go no further than that. It means that the Tea Party, at least in terms of Indiana is no where near the demise so gleefully reported in the main stream media. There is one primary however that should send chills down the spine of every Democrat operative and kingmaker.

The Democrat voters in West Virginia, 41% of them anyhow, have sent a signal that even made the BBC news. What's remarkable to me about this are two things. I have known a few people from Britain over the years, and I had a hell of a time trying to explain to them exactly where and what West Virginia was. There are even people in our own country who believe it to still be a part of Virginia. So, when my native state makes the national news of a country where probably most of its inhabitants will have difficulty believing that it really does exist, that is something. The other thing is that what happened in West Virginia's primary hardly made our own news cycle. Richard Lugar's unremarkable loss, that made the news. North Carolina being the 32nd State out of 32 so far to state unequivocally that they do not want people of the same sex getting married, that made the news. West Virginia's Democrats opting to vote for prisoner 11593-051 rather than an incumbent President, well that's page 25 story material for sure.

There's more to this though. Prisoner 11593-051 is not even a West Virginia resident, definitely not a favorite son. He is from New Mexico, and is serving a lengthy prison sentence for extortion, and a more serious form of assault through intimidation. He has no campaign platform, and due to travel restrictions was not in fact able to do any campaigning.

When Lyndon Johnson ran for reelection in 1968, he dropped out of the race because he failed to win New Hampshire by a large enough margin. New Hampshire was not even the first state. It was simply felt by the apparatchiks at the time that it did not bode well for an incumbent to face that level of dissension from his own party. That the Democrats in West Virginia have stated very loudly, "we are not certain if we would rather have Barack Obama, the current President, or a convicted thug be our President," points to some real trouble in paradise. It is just another one of those small signs which run counter to the Obama shoo in narrative. Maybe by itself it is small potatoes, but coupled with Hillary Clinton's planned skipping of the convention in North Carolina, many of his former donors keeping their collective purses closed, Several former endorsers refusing to associate their names with his this time around, and dear leader may be facing a tougher time than conventional wisdom realizes.

There are some dynamics of note here. I am not certain of the actual demographics at play here, but just from having lived there, West Virginia may be the only State in the Union to have a majority of voters who belong to a union. It may be the only State in the country that is entirely dependent upon the coal industry for its economic basis. It may be the only State in the country that has had a President declare that he intended to bankrupt their entire economic viability, and then attempt to follow through on that promise. Other states produce coal, but West Virginia is tiny. Coal is pretty much all West Virginia has, and she is our nation's top producer of bituminous coal, and the nation's second leading producer of energy, with not one drop of oil or liter of gas to be found anywhere in the State.

West Virginia is that canary in the coal mine so to speak when discussing the ravages of the Green Fairy. The good citizens of that State are not bitter clingers to guns and Bibles, but really upset at a President who has told them that they must sacrifice having groceries on the table in order to promote his Marxist agenda. They have seen the devil in the details, and have declared that a convicted felon with zero moral fiber would be better suited to improve their lot in life than the Harvard educated supposed, "Constitutional Scholar," who has accused them of being selfish for wanting to work to support themselves. Go figure. Cross Posted at Musings of a Mad Conservative.