The New Republic

I wondered what my girlfriend was talking about this morning. I had not seen the results. Yeah, our illustrious blue-dog Manchin got elected running an ad where he shot a copy of Obama's proposed cap and trade (I think) with his gun. Obama threatened coal, and coal is king in WV. I'm not sure Obama could get rained on in WV if he were dying of thirst.

- GSpinks

May 9, 2012 at 12:22pm

Democrats have the Big Tent, after all. We don't kick out gays, immigrants, women, minorities, religions, conservatives, moderates, or liberals. If conservatives get huffy about Democratic policies like Civil Rights, they're free to leave the tent if they want to, but we don't kick them out. It is sad, however, that West Virginia is moving away from the party that preserves their Unions, into the party that destroys Unions.

- AllanL5

May 9, 2012 at 12:23pm

Apparently Mr MacGillis has forgotten that most immutable of electoral observations: As West Virginia goes, so goes the nation.

- Tristan

May 9, 2012 at 1:44pm

Thanks for the great link to the Charleston Observer commentary. I have no expectation that any group of people would want to face up to inconvenient facts, but it seems to me that both West Virginia Democrats and Democrats elsewhere who cannot understand what is in those West Virginian voters' water have to face up to some salient facts. For the typical Democratic voter, one cannot expect most West Virginia voters to embrace candidates who are pro-environmental regulation on matters related to coal (at least anything meaningfu, and certainly not anything beyond regulations in place 20 years agol) and, more importantly, Democrats who come from the urban, education and/or technocratic environments that most West Virginians believe are incompatible to their culture and livelihood. Obama hits the triple whammy, which is why he does so poorly there, but John Kerry and Al Gore hit at least a double whammy, which is why they also lost a state that had otherwise gone to Democrats in all but landslide Republican years. At this point, so long as environmentalists are a core national Democratic constituency, and a Democratic nominee needs to embrace meaningful environmental policies in his or her platform, Democrats cannot expect to win West Virginia in Presidential elections. Hillary Clinton would undoubtedly done better than Obama in West Virginia in 2008, but most electoral observers think she still would have lost because of her mainstream Democratic views on environmental issues. As for West Virginia Democrats, they need to face up to the fact that their elected officials -- who are still overwhelmingly Democrats, but this goes for Republicans as well -- are stringing them along with regard to coal mining and its future for the state. Most of the voters expect the preservation of jobs in the coal mining industry and hope for a resurgence in those jobs. The fact of the matter is that the jobs will not increase, and will in fact continue to decrease, due to the fact that coal is a finite resource which is being steadily extracted from West Virginia hills by nearly all available means and because coal companies have continued to improve mechanization and, thus, eliminate labor costs for the past 60 years and will only continue to do so. Short of banning mechanization in the coal mining industry by Federal law, there is nothing that can be done to keep coal mining jobs from steadily decreasing in West Virginia, to say nothing of bringing jobs back. And no amount of opposition to Cap & Trade, EPA regulations or other matters would do much to stop this trend.

- wildboy

May 9, 2012 at 2:13pm

But, that said, it's always useful to have some black guy you can blame for it all.

- ironyroad

May 9, 2012 at 2:59pm

True, Irony. But before the black guy came along, they could blame white guys from Massachusetts with hoity-toity accents and mega-rich wives. Or white guys from Tennessee who talked about global warming and rued the fact that CO2 emissions from coal-burning plants were raising sea levels and drowning polar bears. They will keep blaming any guys -- black, white, brown, yellow or purple -- who don't pretent that coal should be the nation's foremost energy source and that the industry should be employing 150,000 miners in West Virginia the way it did back in the days of John L. Lewis. The bottom line is that West Virginians want to be lied to by their elected officials in specific ways that go beyond those in which voters generally want to be lied to about the economy, taxes and American exceptionalism.

- wildboy

May 9, 2012 at 4:58pm

"This state had 125,000 miners just after World War II, but mine owners installed huge machines that eliminated 110,000 miners in this state." And if they loosened the rules any further, the companies would just buy bigger machines and pollute faster. They certainly wouldn't hire too many more people. And as it is, mountain top removal mining uses far fewer miners, and dropping the mountain tops into the river valleys next to the mountain pollutes quite a lot already. It would be a shame if the voters of West Virginia so forgot their history of abuse at the hands of mining companies, to become complicit in enabling even MORE abuse.

- AllanL5

May 9, 2012 at 5:17pm