Greetings from North Carolina. I spent yesterday following Bill Clinton around small towns in the western part of the state — he hit six of them, not counting two church visits. Today, he’ll go to nine.

Clinton tells crowds about New York and Washington media types “who think that all of the superior people would obviously not be for Hillary,” and how they believe he’s been banished to the countryside. He tells them about a New Yorker story in which the writer jokingly — or not jokingly — suggested that the next thing he’ll do is take Wal-Mart greeters to the polls. “Now, that fellow thought he was putting me down,” Clinton told the crowd in Morganton, North Carolina. “And I thought, he’s given me a good idea!”

Clinton has a few facts wrong — actually, the story quoted a Clinton campaign source making the Wal-Mart remark — but he is generally right about those pundits who think he embarrassed Hillary one too many times and had to be sent out to the provinces, where he couldn’t do any harm. From my new article:

But the fact is, at this point in the campaign, these are the most important places in the world for Hillary Clinton. If she is going to do well in North Carolina, if she is going to put a scare in Barack Obama in a state he should win pretty handily, it will be because of Morganton, population 17,310, and a lot of other places like it. So let the commentariat lament, or laugh, about Bill being sent out into the sticks; for Hillary, the sticks are where the votes are. Just look at the electoral map of any state she has won, with Barack Obama winning a few big counties and Hillary taking the rest. “We started having these front-porch rallies in Pennsylvania, as soon as it got warm enough to do it,” Clinton tells the crowd, “and in every place I did a front-porch rally, on Election Day, Hillary got more than 60 percent of the vote in those counties.” Bill isn’t on the outs in the campaign. He’s on the cutting edge.