Bellwether State Fervently Seeks Choice Who Can Win in the Fall

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ST. LOUIS — They are used to picking the president around here, and more than ever, it seems, they want to extend their winning streak to the primaries.

For a century, voters in Missouri have proven to be a nearly perfect gauge of the nation’s thinking on presidential candidates, swaying from Democrats to Republicans and back again, but always (besides a certain election in 1956) voting in general elections for the candidate who ultimately wins the nation.

But far more than pride over some old record can be heard in the fervor with which people here from both parties spoke this past week about the primary this Tuesday. Again and again, they told of their desire to vote for someone who is not only able to manage the country’s economic slump, its immigration policy and its war, but who is also capable of something far more immediate and pragmatic: winning the White House come November.

“I am looking for the Democrat who will actually pull that off,” Dan Shelton, 55, a federal employee, said as he ate lunch in downtown St. Louis. “I am interested in someone who is electable — now it is a matter of figuring out who that really is.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/01/us/politics/01missouri.html?th&emc=th