As usual, the Rude Pundit comes right out and says it about Obama’s chances today in Indiana:

Ah, fond memories of living in a town northeast of Indianapolis, of car rides past homes that that flew the Confederate flag on poles on their front lawns (and this was in a medium-sized city, not a small burg), of towns with black populations so disenfranchised and isolated that they are practically invisible, of migrant workers regularly abused by employers when violence wasn’t being committed against them by townspeople. And that’s not even to get into how flat and gray and ugly most of the state is for most of the year, after harvest and before planting season.

When a large swath of a state is populated by people from the Appalachian region who migrated northward for factory jobs decades ago and then those factory jobs dry the heck up for the most part, what you are left with is a bunch of resentful crackers looking to play “where’s the scapegoat?”

By all means go and read the whole screed, but bear in mind that I had to look hard to find an obscenity-free passage as long as the one above. And even then I had to make a substitution, since the word “heck” has never made it out of the Rude Pundit’s computer. What he really wrote, I am sorry to report, was “*uc*”.