George Packer visits Virginia:
[M]y strong sense is that Obama’s hold on the country clubbers, the miners, and the truck-stop owners was always tenuous at best, and it’s gone. What can he do? What everyone in southern Virginia talks about—in tones of despair—is jobs. The Republican plan—tax cuts, then more tax cuts, then some more tax cuts—isn’t going to make a dent in the staggering unemployment numbers (unofficially, forty percent in Carroll County, according to Crowder). So Obama needs to find a way to put a jobs plan on the table—money to the states for infrastructure, say—and let the other party come to him or not. Then he’d have an argument he might be able to win, even here.
Weekly unemployment claims chart from Calculated Risk.
The Dish 