I am in rural Virginia, watching Barack Obama give a speech larded with references to pigs. "You don't fatten a hog by weighing it," he says, explaining why he opposes excessive testing in schools. "You can put lipstick on a pig, [but] it's still a pig," he says, referring to John McCain's supposed habit of tarting up stale policies with fresh rhetoric. Some hacks in the audience think he is calling Sarah Palin a pig, since Mr McCain's running-mate often makes a joke about a four-legged mammal and lipstick. That is obviously not what he meant, so I ignore it.

When the speech is over, I drive to Whitesburg (pictured), a small town in Kentucky. It is dark and the road through the mountains twists and turns like a worm on a fish-hook. I drive slowly. As I climb higher into the Appalachians, a thick fog rolls over my car. I slow down even more. By the time I arrive, all the restaurants are closed. I dine on a dodgy sandwich from a petrol station.

I'm writing an article about rural voters. Whitesburg is home to the Centre for Rural Strategies, a think-tank with its finger on the bucolic pulse. I eat a huge breakfast with its director, Dee Davis, and his colleague Marty Newell. They tell me the town is enjoying a boomlet because of high coal prices, and that young arty people are moving in because of Appalshop, a subsidised arts and media centre. But the area is still poor by American standards, and has a big problem with prescription-drug abuse. "We have seven pharmacies for a town of 1,500," says Marty. "You think we need that many?"

A sign outside Whitesburg says the population is "1,534 friendly people plus two grouches". The number of grouches appears to have been updated recently. Clearly, someone is keeping track.

Two bright young Appalshoppers named Mac and Natasha show me around. They support Mr Obama, but their neighbours admire John McCain and adore Sarah Palin. She has five kids, she shoots and skins her own food, she's not embarrassed to be Christian and she talks like a regular gal. "I've enjoyed listening to her," says a local café owner in a Smith and Wesson shirt. He adds that Obama really put his foot in it with that "pig" comment. Half the people in town are convinced it was aimed at Mrs Palin.

Rural white Americans are the only ethnic group it is socially acceptable to mock. Tell a hillbilly joke at a smart dinner party and everyone will laugh. Tell a joke involving a racial slur directed at African Americans and you will never be invited again.

Snobbery directed at poor whites has political consequences. At a private gathering in San Francisco, Barack Obama said that poor whites "cling" to their guns and religion to cope with their bleak lives. Probably no one in the room disagreed with him.

But people in Appalachia find this attitude condescending. Many figure that if Ivy League Democrats despise them, they are hardly likely to look out for their interests, so they vote Republican. Even Appalachian Democrats find the coastal condescension annoying. Natasha, who was at the Democratic convention this year, was irked to meet people there who laughed at her accent.

Dee Davis shows me a story from a Kentucky newspaper. Otis Hensley, a local politician, saw two girls with their grandmother at a grocery store in Harlan county. "Ma'am, do you want to trade them girls for a good fattening hog?" he asked. This is apparently a joke he makes several times a day. It's just the sort of thing people say round here, says Mr Davis. But the girls' father, who presumably did not grow up in Kentucky, did not find it funny. He had Mr Hensley arrested for trying to solicit "illegal sexual activity".

Picture credit: ConspiracyofHappiness/flickr

(This is an instalment of a correspondent's diary from the campaign trail, published on Economist.com.)