I'm writing this post because I just want to say to the hard-working white people of West Virginia that way too much has been made of my years at Wellesley College and Yale Law School. You've never heard of them? Oh, right. They're not in the Big East conference and not BCS eligible.

I know that the fact I went to "elite" schools can rub folks like you--only 17% of whom are college graduates--the wrong way. It can be a real burr under your saddle. It can make you feel useless as tits on a boar. So let me tell you in the pure Appalachia dialect of my Scotch-Irish forebears -- them schools never larned me nothin' I couldn't figger out myself behind a pair of mules bustin' sod.

So whenever some other Democratic presidential candidate who's won a handful of states that don't have nearly as many sewage treatment plants named after Senator Robert C. Byrd (pause for on-line applause) as West Virginia does starts talkin' down to you folks about bein' bitter and clingin' to your guns, you just repeat the message I saw on a man's sleeveless T-shirt in Wheeling yesterday:

My wife--yes. My dog--maybe. My gun--never!