Pool Report from the Obama Campaign in West Virginia

The Pool – From Murads' at 35th Street, established 1946, a sports bar

Barack Obama arrived at 1:40. Georgia was up on Xavier by a surprising 11 points. Temple was playing Michigan State. Kansas, one of the candidate's picks for the final four, was crushing Portland State.

As Obama was entering, someone asked how he like West Virginia.
“Second time I've been here,” he answered. “We had a great time the first time.”
He added, “Of course we'll be back. We plan to win.”

Obama stopped to talk to Derek Buzzard, 30, a burley paralegal with a shaved head and earrings, the kind of white worker he's supposed to have trouble with.
“I just came to catch a game on TV,” Buzzard said. “I think he might be able to do it. I like him.”
He joked with Kenna DeRaimo, a legal secretary with the federal public defender's office, saying they both had names you had to repeat and spell out.
“The girls are going to be jealous because they came to hear your speech, and I didn't and here you are,” she beamed.
Later, she told your pooler she had not decided whether she would vote for Obama or Clinton. “I go back and forth. It's really hard between the two of them.”

Debbie Dean, 46, a nurse, sat seriously with the candidate, discussing her work in an endoscopy lab, where West Virginians with insurance come for colonoscopies and other screenings and where the uninsured never show.
Then he sat down with a group of men, mostly white, watching the games on a bank of television sets. They talked basketball for awhile. Obama conceded he had picked Arizona over West Virginia tonight, a confession that earned him some good-natured ribbing. Asked about the politics of his picks, he denied any ulterior motives, even with his pick of Pitt in the final four.
“They're peaking at the right time.”

Over chicken wings and water, the audience pressed him on his bracketology.
“When you get back to the hotel, I don't watch the games. I watch Sports Center,” he said, “because you definitely don't watch a bunch of news,” he added, gesturing to the pool. “I don't want to watch myself.”
Then he added another confession:
“I'm fishing for a few votes around here. At least I can show off my basketball knowledge.”
Offered a wing, he took one reluctantly, then offered, “That's a pretty tasty wing. I don't know if the hot sauce is all that hot.”

Asked where he was heading next, he stumbled before the pool saved him by offering up Beckley, which he promptly called Bentley.
He offered up some parenting advice: “The older they get, the more fun they are.”
Asking if the guys had any issues to raise, Brock Bradley, 28, mentioned gas prices, prompting an Obama riff on conservation and green jobs.
“The only way to do it is to lower demand, and prices will go down,” he said.
Then Jeff Lynch, 48, offered up that he was from Michigan (Mount Pleasant, north of Lansing, to be specific) and asked, “When am I going to get to vote for you in Michigan?”
Obama didn't mince words.
“Probably in the general election. A redo vote is very complicated,” he said, discussing the problems of Democratic and independent voters who participated in the Republican primary and would be barred from the revote.

Lynch was agreeable with your pooler. “They set forth a group of rules, and we violated the rules. No, it doesn't upset me at all.” Promising to vote for the Democratic nominee in November.
After posing for more pictures and autographing the empty NCAA brackets on the bar's placemats, Obama made his way out at 2:15.
Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.V.), who tagged along, expressed confidence Obama could win the state.
“He's got almost two months,” he said. “We're all by ourselves May 13. And I think people like him. I think people like president who they feel comfortable with.”
Roger Murad, the bar's owner, chimed in, “He seems like he's just a simple, regular guy. I think he's going to win. He just needs to visit more. You don't see her in my place.”

From Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post congressional writer