Okay, we all know that a cable news talking head’s job on election night is to blather on continuously so that the viewer doesn’t get a chance to say "oh, damn, I’m missing Deadliest Catch." It doesn’t matter whether what they’re saying is right, or even whether it makes sense. The point is to prevent dead air, keep the moving maps and flashy graphics going, and keep the viewer’s hand off that remote.

So we all know that most of them don’t know what the frak they’re talking about, don’t know what they don’t know and don’t really think that learning anything about what they’re talking about is in their job description. That’s why we have "conventional wisdom." Conventional wisdom, the standardized MSM narrative, exists so that talking heads (and, alas, even the typing heads) can fill air time and column inches without actually having to acquire real facts and conduct real analysis of those facts.

We all know that. It’s part of the standard blog critique of the MSM. (And yes, I’m aware of the irony inherent in the existence of a standard blog critique of the MSM’s tendency to have a standardized narrative. But that’s another diary.) The lack of any actual knowledge of what the frak they’re talking about has been nowhere more evident than in the way the CNN talking heads talk about "white blue collar workers" as if they were some uniform, monolithic opinion bloc. The way, that is, that they think people who make less than $50,000.00 per year in Appalachia are interchangeable with people who make 50,000.00 or less per year in the Great Lakes or the Pacific Northwest. (Just fyi and btw: in most counties in Eastern Kentucky, if your family income is $50,000.00, you’re doing pretty damn good.) That’s nowhere more apparent than that smoke that comes out of the talking heads’ ears when they cogitate on the fact that Obama does pretty well among whites with household income of 50K or less once you get out of Appalachia and the Deep South.

Last night, however, I got slapped in the face, slapped really hard, by how little these people actually know about what they’re talking about. It was when John King was playing with that giant touchscreen map thingee of his to analyze the Kentucky returns, late last night while they were filling space before the Oregon returns came in.

Some of you may know that I was born and raised in Kentucky before I moved to NC. As it happens, this a-bornin’ and a-raisin’ occurred smack-dab on the line on the topo maps where the rolling hills of the Bluegrass begin to roll up higher to become the foothills of the Appalachians. So I have a foot in both worlds—and, trust me, they’re very different worlds. I know the Commonwealth well. It’s in my heart. It’s still, in some sense "home" to me, decades though its been since I left. I know it so well, in fact, that I am intimately familiar with the location and arrangement of all its 120(!) counties and its two largest cities, Louisville and Lexington.

So imagine my surprise when John King zooms in on Kentucky on his high-tech map long about 10:30 last night and they’ve got Lexington in the wrong county. Lexington is in Fayette County. Indeed, Lexington, quite literally, is Fayette County—the city and county governments merged decades ago. According to the ace fact-checkers at CNN, however, Lexington is located in in Woodford County, the county to the immediate west of Fayette.

Mistakes like that do not go unnoticed by Kentuckians. Some are amused by the proof of the damn-foolishness of outsiders. Most are irritated because those outsiders don’t think the state is even important enough for national figures to know the bare minimum there is to know.

But, I digress.

Having zoomed in on his incorrect map of the Commonwealth, Pretty Boy John blathered on about the results of the election, pointing out that Obama only won Louisville and Fayette County—"a tiny county(!)" to the east of Lexington. Yep.  He just flat ut dismissed the second most populous county in the state as tiny and insignificant and moved on.

Here’s the thing. It’s not just that the map was wrong. Though, I mean, c’mon, people it’s the Twenty First by damn Century and you can’t get a geographically accurate election map going for your supposedly authoritative election coverage? It’s not just that King was wrong, although he did have a full week between elections to learn a little something about the place. It’s not even the fact that King didn’t even wonder why it was that, contrary to all expectations and all prior patterns—which was, of course, what he was purportedly talking about—Obama lost one of the state’s two actual urban centers (not counting the Cincinnati subburbs up north since its not Kentucky’s urb they’re subbing).

No, the thing that really slapped me in the face was the shocking dissonance between the knowledgeable air with which he confidently conveyed his misinformation, the knowing air of "I’ve done my homework and I’m sharing the boon of my knowledge with you good folks at home," and the quite evident fact that he, in fact, did not actually know what the frak he was talking about.

And there, in a nutshell, is the basic job qualification, the baseline function, of a cable news show talking head. They don’t know have to know what the frak they’re talking about. They don’t have to know that they don’t know what the frak they’re talking about. They most definitely don’t have to care that they don’t know what the frak they’re talking about. The point is simply to have a stream of noises issuing from their mouths that sound like knowledge so continuously that you don’t hit the "last" button on the remote and find out if Phil’s health is finally cracking and whether the Cornelia Marie will make its quota for this red king season. (For god’s sake, don’t tell me!!!! I’ve got it DVRed.)

None of this is an exactly a newsflash. We all know it. Most of us have complained about it. However, there is an important point lurking in here—one of those things that are so blindingly obvious that you can be blind to its importance. One of those trite truisms that you can forget because trite truisisms become trite truisms by being so true and so important that people said it over and over again until they lose track of their importance.

All politics are local.

This doesn’t mean, as many seem to believe, that winning requires politicians to pander to every regionalistic gripe in the Union. What it does mean is that, in U.S. presidential politics, every political race in every state is different because every state is different. Every state requires its own strategy. Class distinctions are important within each state, but the voting behavior of working class whites in, say, South Carolina, may be somewhat different from that of working class whites in North Carolina and very different from that of working class whites in Oregon.

Which is why Obama didn’t spend any time in Kentucky, despite all the people who think he should have. Every hour of a candidate’s time is precious. Every day a candidate spends in one place has an opportunity cost. Every hour Obama spends in the Commonwealth of Kentucky, which he cannot win, is an hour he could have spent making it more likely that he will win, say, that bigger, and actually winnable, Commonwealth next door (Virginia, that is). And, of course, every hour he spends in a state he cannot win feeds the CW narrative about his "trouble with white working class voters," blind, as that CW is to the fact that all politics are local and less-affluent white people in Oregon are not interchangeable parts with less-affluent whites in Kentucky.

I want Obama to run a 50 state strategy because it will pay long-term dividends for the Party and because it will tax the Republicans’ under-funded efforts to hold on to their strongholds. I want him to go to Kentucky and West Virginia—and indeed, ideally do it on a bus with John Edwards on the blue highways connecting Pike and Mingo counties, though the logistics of that trip would be daunting and it would cause stroke-inducing (but unnecessary) worry for the Secret Service detail. However, I want him to do that because it will make him a better president, not because there’s a snowball’s chance in hell he can change enough minds up there to affect the Electoral College math.

Because the truth is, we are not going to win West Virginia and Kentucky. And it doesn’t matter. Obama does not have to win the so-called white blue collar voters of West Virginia and Kentucky to win the election. He has to win them in several other states, but—and here’s the part that will get those the talking head in to ear-smoking "Norman coordinate" mode—whether he wins them in Oregon or Iowa or Minnesota, or even in North Carolina and Virginia, has nothing to do with whether he wins them in Kentucky or West Virginia.

Why? Because every state is different. Every state is its own race. Things you do to try to win over blue collar voters in West Virginia may actually hurt you with blue collar voters in Minnesota.

Contrary to myth (or Terry McAlluffe, to the extent there's a difference these days), there is no mystical chord that causes us to magically win other states if we win West Virginia, or lose the election if we don’t. That’s just talking head blather, a confusion of correlation and causation spewed by people who don’t know or care what the frak they’re talking about because their only real purpose is to keep you from checking in on how the Hillstrand Brothers and the crew of the Time Bandit are holding up under that hurricane force Bering Sea gale.