Charles Edwards, a 95-year-old former coal miner and farmer, travelled with his family for three-and-a-half hours from his home in Union Hall, Virginia, to attend the launch of Barack Obama's general election campaign.

Edwards spent more than half his life suffering the indignity of discrimination. Speaking after Obama's speech, Edwards recalled coming off a nightshift in the coal mines of West Virginia and ordering ham and eggs in a restaurant. "The waitress said she did not serve coloureds in the restaurant and told me to eat in the kitchen. I said 'keep the food' and walked out," he said.

That is why he travelled to see Obama, why he was so delighted when he won the Democratic nomination against Hillary Clinton on Tuesday night and why he hopes to see him make it to the White House. "It is time we got a black president. I was afraid it would not be in my lifetime," Edwards said.

The election is Obama's to lose. The mood in the country is strongly anti-Republican, and the party is more divided than the Democrats. Many conservatives are saying they will not support the party's presidential candidate, John McCain. Many believe Obama is an inspirational speaker - and that McCain is not - and has a powerful organisation behind him, efficient in getting votes.

But there are five months to go, and the Republican attack machine will be much nastier than Clinton's campaign team. Will Michelle Obama make an unguarded remark? How close were his links to extremist groups such as the Weathermen? And, above all, how racist is America?

Obama, for the launch of his campaign on Thursday, visited the Appalachian mountain region that has been the most resistant to him: predominantly white, working-class, and a stronghold of the Republicans. The Appalachian states had the highest ratio of voters in the country who admitted to having voted for Clinton, rather than Obama, on race grounds.

He held the first public meeting of the campaign in Bristol, a small town that straddles the Virginia-Tennessee border and styles itself as the birthplace of country music. Over the next two weeks, he will continue to target areas such as these that proved so unproductive for him in the race with Clinton and that he needs to win in the general election: Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida.

Obama fought an unusual campaign to win the nomination, going for states that the Democrats do not normally bother with. His team say he is going to repeat that for the November election, competing in 50 states rather than just the swing ones. He will have the funds to do that. Robert Gibbs, Obama's communications director and a long-time adviser, watching Obama from the sidelines in Bristol, said: "We will compete heavily in the traditional swing states like Florida and Ohio. But we have shown we can bring into play more than just the traditional states." And one of the targets is Virginia, which has voted Republican in the presidential election for more than 40 years.

"Our strategy on John McCain is to boil it down to a single theme of change versus more of the same, a turning point versus McCain-Bush," Gibbs said, adding that Obama would not make the age difference an issue. McCain is 71 and Obama 46, Obama does not have to mention the gap: it will be obvious every time they stand together, whether in the town hall meetings McCain proposed in the next few months or the three debates in autumn.

Although Iraq, Iran and other foreign policy issues will dominate the campaign, Obama will concentrate, as he did in Bristol, on domestic concerns: introduction of universal healthcare, which is popular, and tax increases for those earning more than $100,000(£50,000), which is risky.

Politicians do not like spontaneity. But Obama showed in Bristol he can handle it. It was Edwards who inadvertently tested him. His daughter stood to say her father was 95 and had travelled a long way to see him. Edwards then rose to his feet, went to the podium and gave Obama his walking stick, which he had made himself, as a present.

Obama was initially unsure. He said how well Edwards looked for his age. He looked at the stick, and described it as beautiful. Still struggling, he mumbled about how it looked like maple. And then he found the poise that may yet see him win. He waved the stick about, dancing about. If members of Congress tried to block his healthcare bill, he would take the stick to them, he shouted. "I'll whoop em! That's right. I'll have that stick," he said.