That’s the title of a great song by my old pal Steve Yerkey, about the night Hank Williams died. Legend has it Hank’s driver kept going even after the singer had OD’d in the back seat of the limo: he was too scared to stop, even as Hank finally achieved satori:

In a Pure filling station
On a New Year’s Day
In a car that needed gasoline
He found the only peace of mind
He would ever enjoy
In a place he’d never ever seen

(The Blasters had their own take on this evening, called “Long White Cadillac”. Compare and contrast.) I thought of Steve’s song after Hillary’s victory in West Virginia the other night. I had been flying across the country, watching the results on CNN, at least with one eye (the other was trained on an old David Lodge novel and the Pistons closing the door on the Magic). Except here Hillary is both dead star and driver, the engine of her own self-deception. She is trying to rally superdelegates in the party, essentially arguing at this point that a lot of working class white voters not only like her better, they’re a little bit racist to boot. But the hard-hearted Dems can’t seem to rally around a campaign whose motto could well be “White Like You.”

And then along comes John Edwards, stealing what little thunder she had from her win by finally endorsing Obama. What took him so long? The guy got seven percent of the vote in WV, just for being on the ballot; do you think Obama would have had quite the shellacking he did if Edwards had endorsed him sooner? If the vote had been a little less lopsided in that state, I guarantee that there would have been less tongue-wagging about his disconnect with white voters.

Not that I think there is anything wrong with Hillary raising the alarm. It’s clear that Obama is going to need every arrow in his quiver to defeat McCain, and paying attention to Hillary’s base is something he can start doing today. Wear the damn flag pin, shoot some pool, have yourself another hush puppy. While racism is alive and well in the hollows of WV (and south Boston, and Staten Island, and countless other communities across the country), I think the GOP is going to need more than “He’s black, and his church is scary!” to steal this election. (It’s going to be increasingly difficult to say his church is scary AND he is actually a Muslim; at some point Republicans will have to choose a line of attack and disinformation and stick with it.) The big news yesterday concerned the Dems big win in Mississippi. This was supposed to be the playbook for ’08: link candidate to Obama and Rev. Wright then sit back and watch him self-immolate. Except it didn’t work. The Democratic candidate, Travis Childers, won among the same kind of rural white voters who turned away from Obama in WV, good old boys (and gals) with one or two sheets in the closet. It was the Republicans’ third defeat in a special election this year, and they are now running for cover. But there’s no hiding place down here.