West Virginia Blue
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With Tony Doukoupil's incendiary Newsweek.com article about Governor Joe Manchin's "hillbilly image" scrub-away campaign now having generated almost 700 comments and the national press's having had a field day with justice for sale issues in West Virginia this week, it's obvious that the Mountain State's reputation for everything from sordid, quasi-Third World backwater politics to its quality of life is under assault again, not unlike the way it was after the May 13 primary, when the national and international press had an orgy over presumably retrogade racial attitudes in West Virginia specifically and Appalachia generally.
My take on that troubling question is that many West Virginians were alternately repelled and confused by Obama's Otherness. Meaning, yes, his exotic biography, perplexing name and bi-racial heritage. But it also reflected widespread uneasiness here with what he symbolized, with the core demographic elements of the change forces coalescing in this country and culminating in the qualified mandate Obama received in November.
More specifically, though, Obama's in-your-face emergence was startling in a year they were prepared to come back home and vote for Hillary after their long dalliance with Bush.
They wondered: Who are these "elites" in Cambridge, Berkeley, Charlottesville, Madison and Chicago's North Shore who've hijacked the party (again?) in a year the Democrats have their best shot at retaking the White House (and, more important, the national agenda) since 1992, if not 1976?
Add to that the (to them) disturbing bloc voting in urban areas and Southern states with large black populations, and working-class (ie, non-college-educated) Appalachians were asking, "Do we get screwed yet again?"
The pervasiveness of that attitude found its best expression most recently in a blog post on Hippie Killer's indispensable Fifth Column by the excellent and extremely articulate "Cyberpaw," who wrote:
It's just black-eye after shun-brand, after pillorying after public shaming for us, isn't it? It just never lets up.
When I think I see some headway for my home state; some path to a better future, some Cornpone Corleone like Manchin [swaggers] in, or the most compromised judge since Pontius Pilate ends up on the front page of a major newspaper. Then some flatheaded reporter goes twenty miles up the holler and takes pictures of some tribe of Jukes and calls it "Appalachian culture."
The worst part is that wound is, for the most part, self-inflicted. During the election, I can't tell you the number of people who I had respect and even love for who repeated that obnoxious joke about Obama repainting the "White" house (har har har.) Or who told me that they were voting McCain (despite being Democrats) because "all the blacks will get revenge" if Obama wins.
Yet, "hillbilly" West Virginia Appalachians ain't dumb. They know their own self-interest when they see it, and when they don't. Their bottom line sense of who's for'em and who's again'em's been shaped by an entire history of exploitation by elites economic, social and cultural, as the late John O'Brien documents in his seminal book, At Home in the Heart of Appalachia.
And it was the opposite of their perceived self-interest that they saw in the Rise of Obama.
For he represented, and was being carried to power by, a wave of demographic changes--educational, ideogical, economic--that they found confusing if not downright threatening.
Taking a hard look at the new coalition forming in American politics, they didn't see their reflection in the mirror. (For a granular view of the core demographic elements of the first new realignment in American politics since 1980 and the second one since 1932, see John Judis's must-read piece in The New Republic, America the Liberal.)
The case has been made (by state native and influential liberal writer Michael Tomasky) that "West Virginia didn't vote like a Deep South state last fall," but this data newly assembled the great Nate Silver is sobering.
Analyzing post-election data based on income groupings, Silver shows that if the election outcome had been confined only to voters with an income of less than $20,000, only four states still would have preferred McCain to Obama: Idaho, Wyoming, Utah...and West Virginia.
Yep. Among the poorest voters, Obama fared better in Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas (the only state to give Hillary a bigger margin of victory in the primaries than West Virginia) and Oklahoma than he did here.
Looking at the CNN exit poll data, which Tomasky correctly used to make his argument, it still needs to be noted that Obama carried no significant groups other than Democrats overall (69 percent) and managed a 50-50 split with state voters aged 18-24 (McCain carried handily in the white 18-29 demographic, 54-45).
(Here are the numbers Tomasky astutely used: Nationally, Obama lost white working-class voters by a 12 percent margin, and by 16 percent in West Virginia. Among white working-class men, Obama lost by 16 percent nationally and 18
percent in West Virginia. Among women, he lost by 7 percent nationally and 14
percent in West Virginia.)
It would be preposterous to infer from those results that West Virginia is racist, but it's equally delusional to conclude that racial misgivings weren't significant last fall in West Virginia, either, especially when the poorest group of voters in this state cast their lot more with Idaho than Mississippi, Oklahoma or Alabama.
But, until proven otherwise, I don't believe working-class West Virginians specifically and Appalachians generally won't vote their self-interest, especially when they see that Obama's policies don't represent "the revenge of the blacks."
In other words, health care.
And here are the stark facts when it comes to health care distribution and income in West Virginia: according to the West Virginia Center for Budget and Policy, only about 25 percent of West Virginia workers make at least $35,000 and have employer-supported health insurance.
Tomasky says that West Virginia can be in play for Obama in 2012 if health care reform's been enacted in the meantime.
And Obama, as Silver also points out, is now shoving his green chips to the center of the table on that very issue.
Tomasky's caveat is that if the Obama administration also moves aggressively on carbon cap policies, the showdown in West Virginia will pivot along Democrat "here's what we've done for you lately" lines versus Big Coal's inevitable "Obama's a job/economic development killer" line of attack.
Sounds about right to me, and it looks today that that's where we may be headed. And if those pushes come to shoves, it'll be interesting to see on which side of the fault line the Blue Dog/Underwood Democrats of this state, like Governor Manchin, fall.
Now, here's my challenge to Tim Kaine and Democratic National Committee: if it's true that the DNC will be attempting to consolidate its 2008 gains and Howard Dean's 50-state strategy by focussing on "swing states," where better for President Obama to come when he leaves the Oval Office to stump for health care reform than West Virginia?
Because, if Obama can carry West Virginia four years from now, it's over.
The "we're still a center-right nation" meme? Fini.
And it will mean the results of 2008 weren't the most significant political realignment in this nation since 1980, they were the most significant and lasting since 1932.
I thought Appalachia was what right wingers like to call the "REAL America." So, why does Bill O'Reilly hate Appalachia and its people - the people that Jim Webb writes about in "Born Fighting" - so much? Here is some of what O'Reilly had to say:
I submit to you that the culture in Appalachia harms the children almost beyond repair... There's really nothing we can do about it," O'Reilly told Sawyer.
She had a different view, of course. She said, "The great opportunity is the information economy... These kids are as smart as the kids in India."
"Sure," O'Reilly agreed. "But their parents are screwed up. That's the thing... Kids get married at 16 and 17. Their parents are drunks. I'm generalizing now. (Gee, ya think?) There's a lot of meth. There's a lot of irresponsibility. There's fear to go. Look, if I'm born in Appalachia, the first chance I get, I go to Miami. Because that's where the jobs are. But they stay there. And the cycle of poverty for 200 years - boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And I don't want to sound hopeless about it but I think it IS hopeless."
Last election, we noted that poor whites--in the form of Appalachians--are one group you can still get away with insulting in otherwise "polite company." Bill O'Reilly is picking it up right where many others left off.
Via, the always worth reading Al Giordano highlights James Wolcott's winners and losers of 2008. In addition to Al in the winners column was Nate Silver of the indispensible FiveThirtyEight.com. Here's how James Wolcott described Nate and his work in 2008:
No shiny arrow shot swifter and loftier from obscurity to quotable authority than Nate Silver, whose FiveThirtyEight.com site became the expert sensation of the election season. (Five hundred thirty-eight is the sum of electoral-college votes up for contention.) Crunching poll numbers until they sang with clarity, Silver, a managing partner and sabermetrician at Baseball Prospectus and a former Daily Kos diarist, made many of the old pros look as if they were stuck in the previous century, milking cows. Not only did his disciplined models and microfine data mining command respect, his prognostications hit the Zen mark on Election Day. "This uncanny accuracy is the equivalent of dropping a penny from the top of a 50 story building and landing it in a shot glass," John Cole wrote at Balloon Juice. "This is sick accurate." Silver also became an instant cable-news savant, his geek-genius glasses and owlish mien worthy of a Starfleet sub-adjutant whose quadratic equations coolly foil an attack from a Romulan vessel while the senior officers are frantically poking at their touch screens.
This gives me a chance to revisit one of Nate's posts where he revisited Obama's so-called "Appalachia problem" that other lesser lights had claimed existed. Silver found it was based less off race than familiarity with the candidate:
I think the most telling example might be South Carolina, which Obama did not campaign in because of any particular demographic strengths, but merely because it happened to enjoy an early position on the primary calendar. In that state, Obama did 4 points better than John Kerry among white voters, even though he didn't really visit the state after January. (Interestingly, it did not seem to matter whether Obama visited a state during the primary cycle or the general election; merely spending time on the ground there was what counted.)
The question, really, is to what extent Barack Obama's underperformance among certain types of white voters was a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you're not asking for somebody's vote, you're usually not going to get it. This may be particularly true if you're a black person and the voter is a rural Southern white person.
But that doesn't necessarily mean that the voter is hellbent against you. I tend to think that racism runs along a spectrum. Many, or perhaps even most white voters are a little bit racist, but for relatively few is race a complete deal-breaker. Many of them will vote for you if you're actively soliciting their votes, and they've had time to grow comfortable with you. If Obama had been targeting Georgia's or West Virgina's electoral votes as actively as he sought Florida's or North Carolina's, might he have won them? I don't know, but I think he'd have had a fighting chance.
Those of us who know West Virginia, from Gov. Joe Manchin on down, said if Obama had campaigned here, he would have won here. Certainly he would have had a better chance. But others in the blogosphere would rather stick with their superficial narrative of villifying those of us in West Virginia instead of looking past their preconceived stereotypes.
There's a zombie narrative infesting the minds of otherwise reality-based denizens of Blogtopia.
Obama's "Appalachian Problem" began in the minds of DailyKos front-pages. They promulgated forth, using devious zombie-mind-tricks like beautiful maps, shifting arguments and flowery prose, a false--yet deviously attractive--narrative: the problem for Obama isn't any of the usual subgroups the Right demonize, it's the only subgroup left for the otherwise politically correct to pick on--not just poor whites, but the poorest of ignorant poor whites here in Appalachia.
Oh, and what a target-rich environment us overly stereotyped Appalachian hollow-dwellers are!
Zombie narrative death spikes
First, as a reminder for those of us who know an Appalachian-American when we see one, but still have difficulty remembering the boundaries of Appalachia:
The Federal Government defines the
Appalachian Region as "a 200,000-square-mile region that follows the spine of the Appalachian Mountains from southern New York to northern Mississippi. It includes all of West Virginia and parts of twelve other states: Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, Mississippi, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia."
More formally:
Now, on to the fact-rich diaries that dissect Obama's electoral strengths and weaknesses. (Please... as you are reading these, note the absence of any correlation between Appalachian geography, demographics, or... well... anything.)
There's a lot of bunk being thrown this week about Obama under-performing in the Appalachian Region. Unfortunately, the Reality-Based community is missing one important piece of reality: the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas are not part of Appalachia.
As a public service, I do hereby provide (as we have posted before on this blog), the generally accepted definition of Appalchia:
The Federal Government defines the Appalachian Region as "a 200,000-square-mile region that follows the spine of the Appalachian Mountains from southern New York to northern Mississippi. It includes all of West Virginia and parts of twelve other states: Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, Mississippi, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia."
Update: By way of comparison... here's the NYTimes map.
Since 1983, coal companies have had to follow a stream buffer zone rule, which said their mining could not disturb areas within 100 feet of streams. When the Bush administration first proposed to end this stream buffer zone last year, over 40,000 citizens responded their outrage to the Office of Surface Mining, Reclamation, and Enforcement.
Disregarding this remarkable opposition, the Bush administration has moved the proposed change to the EPA, which now has 30 days to review the change, and must issue a written statement that the new regulations would comply with the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts.
If this ruling is passed, the Appalachian coal fields, the backbone of our first American frontier -- and the very place that gave birth to abolitionist, labor and civil rights triumphs, Black History Month, literary naturalism and the first Nobel Prize for Literature to an American woman (Pearl Buck), the godmother of muckraking journalism, and a treasury of music -- and the focus of the swing states of this election, will brace itself for the most brutal strip mining campaign in our history.
I've never denied racism won't play some role in how some people vote, but I believe it's been overblown, not just in Appalachia but nationally. And the constant scapegoating of Appalachia as "too racist" to vote for an African American could certainly become a self-fulfilling prophecy by leading people to ignore the real reasons why Sen. Hillary Clinton succeeded in Appalachia. If Barack Obama campaigns here, which he really didn't do in the primary (getting outspent 3-to-1 and outstumped 10-to-1 is a big reason why he did not do well here in the primary) he'll win here.
But whether he wins or loses here will have many reasons and not the superficial ones claimed by those who stereotype Appalachia.
No doubt the unpretentious, politically incorrect Mr. Biden will make a strong impression on white, working-class voters. The only hitch in this plan is that there's plenty of reason to think that Mr. Obama's race is not the insurmountable detriment to his candidacy that a lot of anxious observers believe it is.
The theory that race is holding back Mr. Obama's candidacy rests on a pretty simple premise. Adherents argue that the Democratic candidate ought to be effortlessly leading by double digits in the polls at this point - and that his failure to do so can only be explained by latent racism among older voters.
After all, this thinking goes, the Republican president suffers from abysmal approval ratings, and even half-witted voters should be able to see that Mr. Obama is a superior candidate to Mr. McCain, were their views not clouded by race.
These are flawed assumptions, however. While it's entirely possible that Mr. Obama's race is costing him some support, it's also true that the electorate that voted in the last two presidential elections was almost symmetrically divided between the two parties. It would defy the laws of politics if, at this early stage of the campaign, moderate Republicans and conservative independents were to reject Mr. McCain (a candidate many of them preferred back in 2000) simply because they don't like George W. Bush.
snip
It would be naïve to suggest that race won't figure in the election. But the danger for Democrats is that dark prophesies of prejudice could be self-fulfilling.
Ever since 2000, a lot of so-called progressives have proudly displayed a healthy contempt for less-educated white voters who cast ballots in defiance of their "economic self-interest," as Thomas Frank argued in "What's the Matter With Kansas?" (The widespread acceptance of Mr. Frank's thesis is how John Kerry largely escaped the scorn that is ritually visited upon losing Democratic presidential nominees; the members of his party directed their exasperation at the voters instead.) But surely caricaturing a large subset of voters as ignorant has made those voters even less inclined to pull the lever for the Democrats this time around. All this talk about racism isn't likely to help.
Unfortunately that exact caricaturing is what has taken place on some of the big blogs when it comes to Appalachia.
Via an email, the Charleston Gazette carries an excellent column by the Rev. Matthew J. Watts:
I would like to come to the defense of some of my fellow poor and hardworking white West Virginians in Appalachia and rural West Virginia. These hardworking West Virginians have been the brunt of jokes by political satirists and subject of intensive ridicule, analysis and scrutiny by political pollsters and pundits.
The sin for which they have been lambasted and excoriated is that they told the truth to news reporters and pollsters as they exited the voting booth on May 13. The truth was that race was a significant factor influencing some of their voting decisions(emphasis mine for those bigoted against Appalachians - Carnacki) for the Democratic presidential nominee. Some went as far as to say that they did not vote for Barack Obama because of his race.
Why are we criticizing these hardworking patriotic West Virginians for telling the truth? It is that in this politically correct world in which we live today, long gone are the days when truth telling is a virtue? Would we prefer a politically correct "white lie" over the naked inflammatory truths? George Orwell once wrote that in a world of mass deception, the truth sounds revolutionary. Had these voters told the reporters and pollsters that they did not vote for Obama because he was too young or too inexperienced or that they strongly disagreed with him on some major policy issue, they would have escaped the wrath of the political pundits and the press, and they would have safely avoided being labeled backwoods, uneducated and unenlightened racists. But they had the courage to tell the truth because they had nothing to lose. What they may not have understood was that to have the courage to act like a free person and speak the truth in America is almost anathema.
The Appalachian rural and hardworking poor voters in West Virginia have much more in common with blacks than they realize. As quiet as it has been kept, most blacks had great reluctance in voting for Obama when he first announced his candidacy. The reason was because we simply did not believe that he had a chance to win. We were not particularly interested in throwing our vote away on another symbolic presidential bid of a black candidate.
I've heard that from other African Americans too. Obama's poll numbers among African Americans before the primary voting began were lower than Clinton's.
Therefore, hardworking poor West Virginians should not be criticized, nor should they feel ashamed of their reluctance to initially vote for Obama because they had a viable alternative in Clinton, whose policies represented their best interest. Furthermore, the Clintons are extremely popular in West Virginia and there was no compelling reason for hardworking white voters in West Virginia to have any allegiance to Obama.
But with Clinton out of the race, hardworking poor West Virginians must now ask themselves which of the remaining two candidates has policy positions closest to Clinton's. That answer is easy: Barack Obama.
The Rasmussen Poll taken June 3 when Clinton was still in the race showed Obama was gaining ground. His high unfavorables had more to do with lingering bitterness felt by many Clinton supporters even at such progressive sites as MyDD. Those Democratic and independent voters are already coming home to the Democratic nominee.
The second criteria that hardworking poor whites should consider in choosing their presidential candidate should be their own current plight. Furthermore, they should consider aligning themselves with those who share the same plight. When one examines the political, economic, educational, judicial and social landscape, there are two groups that share the same lot. What groups have the least political power? What groups are at the bottom of the economic ladder? What groups have the highest unemployment rate? What groups are at the bottom rung of the educational ladder? What groups are over-represented in courts, jails and prisons? What groups have the least access to quality, affordable health care and housing? The answer to all of those questions is hardworking, poor whites and blacks.
Both groups face the same challenges in West Virginia, and it is high time for them to come together and form a political alliance to advance their mutual self-interest. We don't have to necessarily like each other. We simply need to recognize that we are bound together by a common thread called destiny. The bottom line is this: Poor whites and blacks may have come over on different ships, but we are both in the same boat now.
The very first place Obama came to begin the general election campaign was Appalachia. Obama's campaign is considering making West Virginia one of the five states that have voted Republican in the presidential races to put more emphasis on. I think Obama should. I agree with Rev. Watts that many West Virginians would realize Obama is more in line with their interests than John McCain, who is going to do to the middleclass and poor who vote on social conservative issues the same thing George W. Bush did. He's going to use them, abuse them, and give them nothing.
Obama's the better candidate for middleclass and lower income voters. His tax plan gives tax cuts to the middleclass as opposed to McCain, who after proclaiming himself a "mavererick" is following Bush's plan to give the rich all the breaks at the expense of the rest of us.
It's an excellent column by Watts. Read it all the way through to the end for a great analogy.
Home is an invention on which no one has yet improved.
A man defending his home is worth 10 invaders.
There is no place like home.
Home is home, be it ever so humble.
These phrases may have graced our ears 3,592 times, but ponderings on the meaning of home mean a little bit more to those of us in Appalachia these days.
Mountain Mondays will be a weekly celebration of our mountain home in Appalachia.
You see, in many ways, Appalachia isn't what it used to be. We have lost more than 1 million acres of land, along with 1000+ of miles of our once pristine streams, and 90% of our traditional coal jobs to mountaintop removal mining. This barbaric practice has reduced much of our home to rubble, and further damaged our perennially struggling local economies. The jobs are gone. The people are leaving. The water is toxic. And they are blowing up the mountains themselves.
But the face of Appalachian resistance to "Big Coal" is changing...
Carnacki has a diary on the recommend list on DailyKos right now. The diary, Late train on a hot day, started here and finished tonight on DailyKos. Well worth your time to read the rest of his story. It can be read by clicking here.
Al Cross, of The Rural Blog of the Institute of Rural Journalism and Community Issues and columnist for the Louisville Courier-Journal:
Journalists from around the world continue to write about Barack Obama's "Appalachian problem," based on his single-digit percentages in some Central Appalachian counties and exit polls showing that more than a fifth of white Democratic voters in Kentucky and West Virginia said race was important to their vote and more than four-fifths of those voters supported Clinton.
...
Such stories imply that race was the main reason Obama lost the two main states of Central Appalachia. They ignore the fact that he made only one campaign stop in each of them, that Hillary Clinton's lunch-bucket speeches spoke more to local needs than Obama's high-flown rhetoric, and that the Clintons had strong followings in both states while Obama was not well known. As I said in my fortnightly column in The Courier-Journal yesterday, if Obama asked one of the black mayors of overwhelmingly white towns in Kentucky, "They might tell him that when folks know you, they're willing to vote for you. When you're a silhouette or a cartoon, they're not even listening."
Prof. Andra Gillespie, a political scientist at Emory University, expert on racial politics in
The Guardian:
The difficult truth is that Appalachia is unusual mostly because many people here are willing to openly talk about what some of their fellow citizens are secretly thinking. In exit polls of the recent primaries in Kentucky and West Virginia, one in five Democrats confessed to pollsters that race was a factor in their voting choice. 'West Virginia and Kentucky were just more honest than other parts of the country. A lot of other people know it's not socially acceptable to mention that sort of thing,' said Professor Andra Gillespie, a political scientist at Emory University and expert on racial politics.
Ruy Teixeira, a fellow at the Century Foundation, the Center for American Progress and the Brookings Institution, author of "Why the White Working Class Still Matters" and coauthor of "The Decline of the White Working Class and the Rise of a Mass Upper Middle Class.":
Salon: So what does it mean then, when a white voter tells a pollster that race was "important" in choosing one candidate over another? How many answers are contained in that answer?
Teixeira: I think if we clarify what the question actually was it helps clarify how much it might mean. The question was, was it one of several factors, the most important factor or not a factor, right? The larger group was the people who said it was one of several important factors and basically they lumped the most important factor folks in with the several important factors, so that can be a little deceptive. So what does it mean when somebody says it's one of several factors they considered? Does that mean they otherwise would have voted for Obama but they're racist [and] they voted for Hillary? I think there are a lot more benign interpretations and positive answers to that question. It's certainly the case that whites who responded who said it was one of several factors were likely to favor Hillary over Obama, but I think you have to be careful about the interpretation you make about that relationship.
...a lot of it's cultural overlay on the race issue and in fact, people tend to label anything that's correlated with race about race where it actually could be about lots of other and broader things. And in particular the Democratic Party has a sort of image in certain areas of the country among certain voters, particularly downscale voters, that's somewhat unfavorable. There's a certain cultural distance there, a sense of an elitism in the national party that Obama probably connects to in their minds. And they felt that Hillary connected less clearly to that. So is that race or is it culture or is it both?
Sean Wilentz, Princeton University historian, contributing editor at the New Republic, author of "The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008.":
At some level, this all becomes sheer speculation. We don't have individual voters saying why they voted this way particularly, it's all aggregates, and you have to try to put it together. But I do think that to the extent that the media line about Clinton's racist voter support has tended to be, at least among the pundits that I've read, concentrating on, particularly in the Rust Belt states, and particularly among, there are euphemisms for it, low-information voters, we all know what that means. The data don't support that contention. That's all. And why upper-middle class voters would suddenly be turned to Hillary, I don't know. It could be any number of things, but I think it's sheer speculation to say it's based on Jeremiah Wright or racism or anything else.
...Appalachia is the exception. Because they're voting for lunch-bucket issues. They always have. And to a certain extent for national security but that's not the issue here in this primary. They went for Hillary not for the racial issues, they went for here for the reasons they said they did.
I think it's a question of perception. I think the perception is that, this is actually holding this Sirota theory intact, you can hold that intact, but you can't then assume that all the whites in Appalachia are Southern racists. Which some people have assumed.
...But I don't think that it's driving it. There's no empirical evidence that it's driving it, that's for sure. Whereas, West Virginia has, going back to the New Deal, probably going back to the Civil War, when it became West Virginia ... This is the least racist part of the South. But it was historically rather poor, when mining got going -- I won't give you a lecture on American history. But this is the part of the South that has been least driven by race among white voters, rather than the most.
Dee Davis, president of the Center for Rural Strategies:
The legions of pseudonym-laden online posters who follow in political punditry's wake are less restrained in describing the shortcomings of Sen. Clinton's Appalachian supporters. They suggest it has to do with her voters being racist, toothless, shoeless, and prone to marrying their cousins. In short, they characterize these "special" Democrats in much the same terms they used in quieter times to describe Republicans.
... When the country needs iconic war heroes like Alvin York or Jessica Lynch, mountaineers fill the bill. If, periodically, this rich nation needs people to pity, poverty-stricken hillbillies make excellent poster children. And if backers of the Democratic Party's presumptive nominee need to explain why their preferred candidate is not connecting with downscale, rural voters -- a demographic that was once key to Democratic electoral success -- Appalachia can again answer the call. Obama supporters and members of the media can place the blame for his poor fortunes not on the candidate or his message, but on the moral failings of those benighted mountain people.
However, the unnerving truth for the erstwhile party of Jefferson may be that Appalachia, for all its legend and lore, is not that different politically from the rest of the small-town and rural parts of the country where 60 million of us live.
...Yet there is plenty in the numbers to give Obama heart, starting with the 9-point deficit that he and Kerry have in common five months out from the general election. When Kerry was down 9 in rural counties, he had a commanding lead nationally....
Surprisingly, Obama has already achieved the same standing in the polls that Kerry enjoyed when things were going well. And for Obama, this comes after weeks of relentless news coverage of his ex-preacher and after the senator's own costly "those people" moment when he was caught at a private fundraiser using broad stereotypes to characterize small-town and rural voters. (They are bitter. They cling.)
What our polling also shows is that rural communities are experiencing measurable economic distress, especially with the out-of-control price of fuel. Rural voters express concern over the mounting cost of healthcare and of the Iraq war. They are also measurably displeased with the country's direction. On the issues, there is clearly prime territory for Obama to seize....
How Obama fares in rural America may, in the end, have to do with whether he shows up. In politics not showing up and losing are kissing cousins. Obama made three visits to West Virginia. In Kentucky, he limited himself to appearances in the state's two biggest cities, Louisville and Lexington. He didn't come to my part of the state, or try to make any friends in rural areas.
Prof. Ron Eller of the University of Kentucky, author of "Miners, Millhands and Mountaineers: The Industrialization of the Appalachian South":
Newhouse News correspondent Jonathan Tilove even suggested that Sen. Barack Obama has an "Appalachian problem" that goes beyond race to the peculiarities of "Appalachia's whites and the Scots-Irish who settled there and forever branded its culture."
Popular stereotypes and misreading of Appalachian history have long provided a convenient excuse to ignore Appalachia or to justify public and private attempts to bring the region into the cultural mainstream. Thus, the argument is offered that Clinton's appeal in Appalachia should not be taken too seriously since mountain voters represent those "other whites" whose heritage has led them to be suspicious, pugnacious and a little less civilized than the Anglo-Puritan whites of the Northeast.
Sen. Barack Obama could not possibly succeed among these highly individualistic, uneducated and unrefined mountain whites whose ancestors resisted slavery and Southern nationalism during the Civil War. This independent spirit, suggest the pundits, will lead the hillbillies to vote for Scotch-Irish Appalachian John McCain, born in Appalachian Mississippi.
Such characterizations of Appalachia not only obscure the historical diversity of the region and project a static view of human culture but also ignore most of the recent scholarship on Appalachia that contradicts the idea of Appalachian "otherness" and attributes its history and economic problems to political struggles that have shaped the rest of the nation.
Far from being the repository of Scotch-Irish culture, ignorance born of geographic isolation or backwardness nurtured by anti-modernism, contemporary Appalachia is a much more diverse and historically complex place....
For blue-collar voters in Appalachia, economic concerns, not Appalachian identity, shaped their decisions at the polls. Job insecurity, rising food and gas prices, and uncertain access to health care and education turned Appalachian voters toward the more working-class message of Hillary Clinton, especially among women who occupy the center of the modern mountain economy. Perhaps because of the race issue, Obama conceded West Virginia to Clinton, who was able to use the local Democratic political machinery to her advantage.
How the media loves its hillbillies.
Makes me wanna holler: The hand-wringing aftermath of the recent presidential primaries in Appalachia -- from western Pennsylvania, North Carolina, West Virginia and Kentucky -- says more about the media's prejudice and misperception of the Mountain South than any insights into the voting ranks and their racism or religious narrowness....
Take hillbillies, on the other hand. Dating back to the 1850s, when George W. Harris created the character of Sut Lovingood, the "durn'd fool" with his "brains onhook'd" from eastern Tennessee for a New York newspaper, the media has obsessed over hillbillies, as if they have cornered the market on provincialism or racism in America. From bloggers on the liberal Daily Kos to untold television interviews, this same obsession has reared its ugly head in one commentary after another, blinding the writers from any historical truths about Appalachia. ...
In West Virginia (and Kentucky), on the other hand, disregarding the fact that the Clintons have had a several decades-long relationship with southern Democrats in West Virginia, that Bill Clinton's folksy southern accent still goes down among the aging electorate like molasses, that Sen. Barack Obama ran a poor operation and did very little campaigning in the state and mainly invoked his Illinois coal state credentials in an anachronistic pitch for votes, the media preferred to dwell on the region's perceived legacy of backwardness. In truth, Obama blew it in Appalachia; Hillary reaped the rewards of the Clinton legacy.
Still, most reporters, exclusively interviewing older voters, went out of their way to find the most outrageous examples to confirm their hillbilly-biased pronouncements.
Obama should listen to that point of view, rather than accept the conventional wisdom that he'll never get support in rural, white America, said professional pollster Del Ali of Research 2000 in Maryland. "It would be smart of him to visit, to go to Appalachia and say, 'What I'm offering is closer to your interests ... you've got nothing in common with trickle-down economics or oil companies; I care about you,'" Ali said. "I'm surprised he didn't do more of that before the primary."
MANCHIN: Well, you hear this, and I have heard this from West Virginia and Kentucky and these types states which we call Appalachia, but, you know, which we had a story in the paper today, which was this really something that a young African-American female staffer of Obama's was working in West Virginia and she was concerned because she didn't know, just what she'd heard. And her car broke down, and ... not only that help her fix the car, the family lent their car for her to continue on her campaigning. They got to know each other.
...
HEMMER: You know, as you talk about that, if Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee, can he win in your state in November, governor?
MANCHIN: I truly believe he can. I can tell you, the people in West Virginia are totally committed to change. We have to change the direction of this country for this -
HEMMER: What does it mean when Hillary Clinton wipes him out by 41 points two weeks ago?
MANCHIN: Well, I mean, listen, first of all, Bill Clinton is a very, very popular ex-president in West Virginia, who is still beloved as she is very popular, and she - the whole family worked extremely hard here. It's just campaigning that paid off, it was pressing the flesh, you know, and face to face.
... He spent quite a bit of money, but they enjoyed the time and also the relationship they've had with the Clintons. It had nothing to do with race. And people keep talking about that. It's just so wrong.
Just in case you've been under a rock or distracted by yellow teeth today, you may have missed the news that Barack Obama launched his formal campaign for the general election today in my backyard of southwest Virginia. I didn't get to attend the events as I found out too late to get tickets (they were gone in a few short hours) but I've spent the day following the news, watching it live on a local TV station, reading numerous blogs, and receiving photos from people who were there.
As I'd expected, Appalachian Virginia proved that it's populated by gracious people who were as excited as those in any other region to be in the presence of '44.'
Proud of my people? You bet! Photo credit to Ed Stout - and Jack for sending it to me!
WASHINGTON, DC - Acting as Co-Chairman of the Appalachian Congressional Caucus, Congressman Nick Rahall (D-WV) hosted a press briefing in our Nation's Capital today to highlight the promising findings of the Appalachian Regional Commission's (ARC) recently completed study on the Economic Impact of Completing the Appalachian Development Highway System (ADHS).
"The Appalachian Development Highway System has played a key role in boosting the economy of my home state of West Virginia, linking formerly isolated communities to markets throughout the Nation and beyond and helping to create new jobs and brighter economic opportunities," said Rahall. "This report provides strong evidence to support those of us who are working to provide the necessary funding to complete this system and achieve the full measure of potential it has so long promised."
The ADHS is the first highway system authorized by Congress for the purpose of stimulating economic development. Once completed, the 3,571-mile near-interstate grade highway system will connect 31 corridors into an integrated network linking the 13 Appalachian states to national markets and trade flows.
According to the study, the completion of the ADHS will provide:
Regional Economic and Job Gains: Completing the ADHS is projected to create 80,500 jobs, $3.2 billion in wages, and generate over $5 billion in increased regional economic activity by 2035.
National Efficiency Savings: Nationally, savings in travel time, and fuel and non?fuel operating costs, and increased safety are estimated to grow to $5.1 billion annually by 2035.
Enhanced Global Competitiveness: ADHS completion will enhance the future economic competitiveness of the national and ARC regional economies by providing additional capacity for the national transportation system, which will better link the region to the global marketplace.
"We have seen the impact in my home district in southern West Virginia, where the completion of Corridor G several years ago, for example, has resulted in new businesses, with new jobs, and new homes -- and a renewed sense of hope -- sprouting up all along that route," said Rahall. "That public investment led to impressive private-sector growth, and that is what a sound government investment ought to do."
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Just in case you've been under a rock or distracted by yellow teeth today, you may have missed the news that Barack Obama launched his formal campaign for the general election today in my backyard of southwest Virginia. I didn't get to attend the events as I found out too late to get tickets (they were gone in a few short hours) but I've spent the day following the news, watching it live on a local TV station, reading numerous blogs, and receiving photos from people who were there.
