I met a man named Bernie Allen at a rally for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) in the small town of California, Pa.

He was from Eighty Four, Pa., just a few miles away.

Yes, a man who lives in a place called Eighty Four went to California, and it was all in a relatively small area in southwestern Pennsylvania — which, by the way, is also sometimes known as “Pennsyltucky.”

Anyway, Allen was a big supporter of Clinton.

Why?

For one thing, he was noticeably unhappy with Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) when it came the subject of bitterness.

“By categorizing people who live out here in Pennsyltucky, that we cling to our guns and our religion — that’s the farthest thing from the truth,” Allen told me.

But Allen’s biggest problem with Obama wasn’t elitism, or condescension. It was trust.

“He’s a good salesman,” Allen said. “He’s selling everybody a bill of goods about how he is going to change all these things, but he has no experience to say how he’s going to get there.

“I could tell you I’m going build you a house, and I’m going to do everything you want,” Allen continued. “I’m going to put everything in it just the way you want it. And then you give me your money, and you find out I’m not a carpenter.”

Washington County, where Allen and 206,000 other people live, is a little whiter than the rest of Pennsylvania — according to the census, it’s 94 percent white, while the entire state is 86 percent white.

It’s a little older than the rest of Pennsylvania — 17.1 percent of its residents are over 65, compared to 15.2 percent of the rest of the state.

And it’s a little less educated — 18.8 percent of its residents over the age of 25 have a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared to 22.4 percent for all of Pennsylvania.

Washington County went for Hillary Clinton over Obama, 71 percent to 28 percent. Some parts of the county were well over 80 percent for Clinton.

Now, to be elected president, Obama doesn’t have to win every place in the country that’s like Washington County. But he needs to win some of them.

And he won’t if he can’t convince voters that he is a carpenter.

Right now, he doesn’t seem to be trying.

“The white working class has gone to the Republican nominee for many elections, going back even to the Clinton years,” Obama’s top aide, David Axelrod, rationalized recently on NPR. “This is not new that Democratic candidates don’t rely solely on those votes.”

Solely on those votes? Nobody ever said that. The problem is, Obama is not getting enough of them.

Clinton knows that, and so does her husband. “She carried 61 of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties because of people like you and places like this,” Clinton told an audience in small-town North Carolina Wednesday.

Back in California, I asked Bernie Allen if he would vote for Obama if Obama wins the nomination.

“I will not,” Allen said.

He won’t vote for John McCain, either, Allen told me, which leaves him in a quandary.

“There’s such a division in the Democratic Party, whoever gets the nomination, I feel, the other half of the party is not going to come through for them,” Allen said.

The eventual Democratic nominee for president will need to win Pennsylvania to win the White House. If the nominee is Obama, what can he say to Bernie Allen to undo the damage that’s been done?

York is a White House correspondent for National Review. His column appears in The Hill each week.
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