I felt kind of bad for the woman who said that; she knew she'd made a gaffe right away and tried to point out that she lived in "fake" Virginia too. Certainly not a Bachmann, anyway.

By the way, add to Acorn, "spread the wealth around," Fannie & Freddie, and Bill Ayers Joe's quote about "Obama will be challenged"...and for that matter, his interview with a local TV anchor, from which Fox News has extrapolated that an Obama administration will censor the media (yes, Republicans are decrying the Democrats cutting off media access; this isn't just the pot calling the kettle black, it's the pot calling the kettle a pot).

Despite the shameful behavior that Crowley documents in another column, Obama will carry Virginia and we will redeem ourselves.

It takes a special kind of stupid to talk about "real Virginia" in the first place. If you mean the parts of the state that are not urban or suburban, then you're talking about a slim minority of the state to begin with. For another, the non-metropolitan parts of Virginia are not monolithic. There's upland and lowland, there's town and country, plus there's the bottom tip of Delmarva. We've got parts of the commonwealth that are closer to the Mississippi than to the Atlantic, and there are meaningful cultural divisions along at least three different axes in "real Virginia," such that any attempt to cleave metropolitan VA away from rural VA will also piss off a fair portion of the rural voters you're targeting.

The only people who really respond to the "real Virginia" bullshit are people on the outer fringe of suburban VA, whether that's Prince William or Suffolk, where people like to pretend that they're not really living in anybody's suburbs. That's a thin slice of the Virginia electorate -- the suburban redneck-wannabes -- and it's a slice that votes GOP anyway.

Further, the "real Virginia" thing echoes several centuries of cultural alienation felt by the mountain communities versus the politically, economically, and socially dominant rural lowland communities. And these western Virginia highlanders are exactly the communities the GOP needs to reach and hold if they're to maintain a majority in the commonwealth. If you stand anywhere east of the mountains in the commonwealth and talk about "real Virginia," you're using language that risks talking down to the mountain residents, and a Republican has to win them overwhelmingly to compete statewide.