Senator Barack Obama lost the Ohio Democratic primary by 10 percentage points and the West Virginia primary by a whopping 40 points last spring - a sign, to some Democrats and political analysts, that many whites in the Rust Belt would not vote for a black man for president. Yet here was Governor Sarah Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, on Sunday, taking a bus tour along the Ohio-West Virginia border - a white, economically depressed region where the Republican ticket, it turns out, is struggling to prevail. And on a weekend when racial issues flared once more in the presidential campaign, race was also on the minds of many voters here, who said they were wary of a black president even if he might be better for them economically. "What you hear around here is, would you rather have a black friend in the White...
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