(nns) According to exit polls, Hillary Clinton won 67 percent of the white vote in West Virginia, America's third whitest state. Yet in early March, Barack Obama won 60 percent of the white vote in Vermont, the nation's second-whitest state. What gives? America is learning a lot about race this year, most recently that not all white voters are alike. There are enormous regional differences in how whites vote, differences with deep historical roots. Clinton's romp in West Virginia, and in all likelihood another in neighboring Kentucky next week, do not prove that Obama has a problem with white voters generally or that whites have turned on him in recent weeks. He is expected to win in Oregon on Tuesday _ it's 21st on the list of whitest states. His campaign noted Wednesday that he is doing better right now with white voters in national match-ups with John McCain than either Al Gore or John Kerry did in their campaigns against George W. Bush. But Clinton's West Virginia landslide does mean that Obama, for reasons that go beyond race, has a problem with Appalachia's whites and the Scots-Irish who settled there and forever branded its culture. As Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., argues in his 2004 book, ``Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America,'' the Scots-Irish are a particularly pugnacious people, self-reliant and hyper-individualistic, who place honor above profit. These are the people whose ancestors lived and fought along the brutal borderlands between England and Scotland, and later in Northern Ireland (they are the Protestants of Ulster). Unlike other British settlers, the Scots-Irish, Webb writes, migrated ``directly to the wilderness of the Appalachian Mountains, bypassing even the rudiments of colonial civilization.'' Frequently occupying the lower rungs socially and economically, they have always been the most likely to fight and die for their country, Webb writes. They don't cling to guns; they proudly pass them on to their young sons as a rite of passage Webb likens to a ``Redneck Bar Mitzvah.'' Webb's father gave him his first rifle when he was 8 and his first pair of boxing gloves when he was 6.(view source for full article)