It may just be a quirk of this drawn-out primary season, but as a native of the great Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, I’m happy to see some attention finally being paid to the state’s political complexity.

Here’s a NY Times piece about Barack Obama trying to learn to speak Pennsylvanian by bringing his celestial rhetoric down to the earthy reality as experienced by blue-collar industrial workers (or, more to the point, former industrial workers). Obama has been traveling the state with Senator Bob Casey, Jr., son of the late Governor Robert Casey, who, famously, fell out with the Clintons over abortion during the 92 election.

This piece from CBS news does a pretty good job dispelling the caricature of PA as “Pittsburgh on one end, Philadelphia on the other, and Alabam in the middle” (a cliche, as the article points out, that can be traced to a characterization offered by the ragin’ Cajun James Carville). The idea of liberal big cities swimming in a sea of red-state conservatism is a vast oversimplification. Indeed, as the piece points out, the Philly suburbs are one of the last preserves of that fast-disappearing species the Rockefeller Republican, while the PA heartland, including many small once-industrial towns, is full of socially and culturally conservative blue-collar workers who would hardly fit in at a meeting of the Club for Growth.

In fact, the split between Bob Casey, Sr. and Bill Clinton, which in most accounts is invariably painted as the “conservative” Casey versus the “liberal” Clinton, is in many ways almost the opposite. While Bill Clinton was moving the Democratic Party to the right on nearly every major issue (crime, welfare, trade, foreign policy), Casey was an unapologetic New Deal liberal who crafted a statewide health insurance program for children. However, Casey also believed that the Democrats’ mission of protecting the most vulnerable members of society should extend to the unborn, which, in our typical political narrative, forever brands him as a “conservative.”

Wheter “Casey Democrats” will turn out for Obama remains to be seen, but it’s still nice for PA to have its moment in the sun.