In his Saturday column, KC Star‘s Steve Kraske uncritically passes along this bit of speculation:

Connor states, point-blank, that the Missouri primary results suggest that Obama, who wound up carrying the state by 10,000 votes, will have trouble here in November if he’s the Democratic nominee. If he can’t win rural Missouri, Connor said, he can’t carry the state – period – come November.

“If Missouri is always right, then that means he doesn’t win the presidency,” Connor said.

Let’s be honest: Wheat’s loss was attributable, in part, to race. And Obama performed more poorly in some rural counties against Clinton than Wheat did against Ashcroft 14 years ago (OK, Clinton’s voters were voting Democratic).

So Obama appears to have had a slight edge over Clinton when it comes to one-on-one matchups with McCain. And maybe he can boost African-American turnout enough to patch over his deficit in the country.

Connor and Kraske are committing the cardinal sin of directly extrapolating general election predictions out of primary election results. They want to tell a story that Obama is the next Alan Wheat, based on no evidence other than the color of his skin and his performance outside of the big cities in the primary. But if you’re going to draw conclusions from the primary vote, you’re going to end up with a different story.

The story Kraske should be telling is how the Democrats managed to turn out more primary voters than Republicans, even when you leave out Kansas City, St. Louis City, and Boone, Jackson, and St. Louis Counties. Obama may have lost outstate to Clinton, but he outdrew Huckabee, McCain and Romney. By Kraske’s logic, the GOP should be just as worried about their presumptive nominee’s poor perfomance outside of St. Louis and KC.