John Judis nailed it in his New Republic analysis: It is indeed a political relaignment, the first since 1980, which was the first since 1932. Judis also makes a cogent case for an emerging progressive majority in America's post-industrial society.
So, this is the first part of the answer to the question: What's wrong with West Virginia? And remember, West Virginia once was a reliably Democratic state in any year other than a Republican landslide.
Update: This Charles M. Blow New York Times blogblog. West Virginia didn't matter, as he astutely said last May.
I’m being quoted here and there as saying, apropos of Obama’s defeat in WV, that non-college-educated whites tended in significant numbers to see him as emblematic of changes they fear and feel threatened by. I also see the liberal Charleston, WV, Gazette editorial this morning fretting over the fact that the state has joined Dixie just as Dixie is breaking down (we nailed NC and VA, almost got MO…how sweet is that?).
Well, what are those changes? I call them demographic, educational and class-related. Read Judis and think of that beautiful red-to-blue map the New York Times published yesterday, showing the national voting shift from 2004 to 2008.
This is where WV and southern Appalachia are as a region in the context of the first true political realignment in America since 1980.
The Judis analysis also makes the case that the nation has rejected the conservatism of Bush/Rove/Palin and that there is an ideological paradigm shift going on, this one from the center-left, the way Reagan’s was from the center-right.
I’ve long said (and mentioned it in a column in Britain's Guardian) that Obama does indeed see himself as a “messiah” but not the one of the right-wing narrative that the (pre-Palin) McCain humorously and effectively exploited: he sees himself as the figure who represents a paradigm shift in American politics on the center-left the way Reagan represented a paradigm shift from the center-right in 1980.
(FWIW, here's where I've written about Obama as "messiah" and race as a political factor for Obama in West Virginia and elsewhere in southern Appalachia.)