via MAL Contends

Madison, Wisconsin - Salon has a piece by Mike Madden explaining the importance of Wisconsin's primary and probing why this perfectly composed demographic state for Hillary handed her a 17-point thrashing on Feb. 19.

Why did Obama do so well with Wisconsin's white working class, but not with Ohio and Pennsylvania's?

So well-received was Obama's victory here that many secular progressives were smitten with whimsical rumination of metaphysics. But Madden reasonably attributes the win to Wisconsin's progressive history.

Writes Madden:

... 'I think Democrats do have questions about whether or not [Obama] is going to be able to reach out and successfully win over the kind of blue-collar voters that Democrats need to win in order to take the White House back in November," Clinton strategist Howard Wolfson reiterated on CBS's 'Face the Nation' on Sunday.

Updated - An afterthought on Pennsylvania.

Pennsylvania is a quasi-Democratic machine state. Thus one expected the machine-backed candidate, Hillary Clinton, to do well with the most established demographics there: Whites and older citizens.

No doubt then that Hillary's expected win on Tuesday (nine points) and her turning-the-tide spin generated a round of media ridicule and explicit reference to the Pennsylvania machine-state status, minimizing the significance of the Clinton victory. Not what happened.

As Chuck Todd: (Hardball, April 7) had put it, "...Pennsylvania is a machine state. You know it‘s a machine democratic state. It is an old school machine state and she has the entire machine behind her, other than the Casey family. She‘s got the state party officially behind her."