It was too good to be true. Not that I ever thought Hillary was going to go away quietly (what in her career would suggest that course of action?) but I did think she might move aside and let the gentleman do his thing with a little bit of class. But now she is comparing Florida to Zimbabwe, blaming her defeat on sexism and misogyny and saying that Obama can’t woo white working class voters.

Well maybe he can’t — in Kentucky and West Virginia. And frankly, I wish he had spent more time in those states trying to convert those crackers before the primaries because he’s going to need them before the general election. But the WWCV in Oregon liked him just fine and anyone who thinks there are no rednecks in Oregon haven’t spent much time there. Right outside of Ashland, the site of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and one of the best organic restaurants on the west coast are pockets of dogpatch as derelict as any in Alabama. And a lot of those folks voted for Obama.

Maybe Obama’s problem is, as Sam Stein suggested in the Huffington Post, more geographic than socioeconomic. West Virginia strikes me as more of a backwash than Oregon; the poorest pockets of the state are like the land time forgot and I have literally been afraid to stop in some towns there lest the locals come out and eat me. Oregon, on the other hand, has that liberty-loving, California-hating gene deep in its DNA — but its also got Nike and its longtime advertising agency, Wieden + Kennedy; it’s got Reed College and the legacy of Ken Kesey. It’s got a whole weird dimension that I like to think is a lot more like America than, well, West Virginia and Kentucky.

Not that I think Obama could, or should, write those states off, especially the former. But it in my fervent hope that his new jack candidacy speaks to a country that is ready to get outside of the holler, a country tired of being locked in the old sandtraps of the past. America may not look like Oregon, either — I hate any state that claims to represent the rest of us — but maybe the dream of this candidacy is best reflected in the promise of the west, all that majestic beauty and natural resources, still mostly unspoiled. Give us mountains to match our man.