The Trail Less Traveled

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. (May 11) -- It is clear that Democrats Leslie Maxwell and Carrie Taylor have a lot in common as the two friends chat across the bar at Gibbie’s, a college-town pub with high-end Blue Moon and Magic Hat beer taps mixed in with working man’s standbys Pabst Blue Ribbon and Budweiser.

Maxwell, 23, just finished up coursework for a journalism degree at West Virginia University. She is serving beer to a thin crowd of Mother’s Day patrons.

Taylor, also 23, was one class ahead of Maxwell at their Putnam County high school, nearly three hours south of here by car. She wrapped up her masters degree in public administration this year while working in the state legislature. She used to work at Gibbie’s.

Despite word from political analysts that, because of his lead in delegates, Barack Obama has defeated Hillary Rodham Clinton ., both Maxwell and Taylor, like many of the 665,000 registered Democrats here, are enthusiastic about voting in Tuesday’s primary.

But the friends are separated by the essential question for Democrats.

Taylor plans to vote for Clinton. Maxwell already cast an absentee ballot for Obama.

“I think he’s locked it up,” Maxwell said. But that didn’t stop her from making the drive home to cast an absentee ballot.

“I believe that he can make some changes,” said Maxwell, who was born in South Korea and moved to West Virginia after being adopted.

She seems unfazed when one of her customers, a rough-cut guy drinking Rogue beer, exhibits the depth of his political acumen by telling a pair of newly met political reporters a joke that combines a racial epithet with a gender slam to denigrate Obama and Clinton in one quick turn of phrase.

Maxwell hopes that West Virginians, who favored Republican George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004 after giving Democrat Bill Clinton their five electoral votes in 1992 and 1996, will “overlook” cultural issues, including gun rights and abortion, that helped Bush win crossover support from Democrats.

Richard Brisbin, a political science professor at West Virginia University, said that if Obama is the Democratic nominee he will have to improve his standing with the working-class white voters who constitute the bulk of the state’s electorate.

Those voters are “a little out of touch with the culture and background that Barack Obama possesses,” Brisbin said. He said Democratic nominees John Kerry and Al Gore were hurt by their inability to connect with rural voters in a state where the biggest city, Charleston, has barely more than 50,000 residents.

Because Obama is biracial and most West Virgnians have never had the opportunity to vote for a black candidate, he said, “the bar is higher” in the general election.