In this election season 2008, the coal mining industry has given almost twice as much to Hillary Clinton’s campaign as it has to Barack Obama’s. Those contributions came almost all in the form of individual contributions. Most of that money came, as it does every election season, from two states: Kentucky and West Virginia.
In those states, coal giants such as Arch and Massey Energy have been able to bust unions, pollute streams and relocate entire neighborhoods. They conduct massive public relations campaigns to fill the impoverished people dependent on the coal industry with fear that they'll lose their jobs. They have also controlled elections, and will try to do so again. So it’s important, heading toward the November election, to correctly diagnose the problem in those states.
Barack Obama doesn’t have a hard-working people problem. He doesn’t have a white-people problem. He doesn’t even have a hard-working-rural-poor-backwater-undereducated-white-people problem.
Barack Obama has a coal problem.
Facing a bruising fight over climate change, the coal industry is on the political offensive this election year to ensure that no matter who wins in November, so does coal.
Billions of dollars in corporate profits are at stake for the companies that mine, ship and burn the nation's most abundant domestic fuel.
—Matthew Brown, Associated Press, February 27, 2008
We’ve been hearing over and again how white people won’t vote for Barack Obama, except when they do, which is actually most of the time. Hard-working Americans, white Americans, caucused for Obama in Iowa and Minnesota (my home state – yay), went to the polls for him in Wisconsin and Oregon, lined up for him in Missouri. Eighty-three percent of Obama’s support on Tuesday came from white voters, and he won at least half of the undereducated white vote.
White voters only came out in droves for Clinton in those two biggest coal states, the ones in which the fish in the rivers have been rendered inedible by mercury, and where people die in higher-than-average numbers from lung disease. It’s likely Clinton would have won these states anyway. The question is why she won by such gaping maw-like margins.
Whether it's obvious or not, coal had something to do with it. It doesn't matter that the United Mine Workers have endorsed Obama; many coal-state voters have no shot at a union job, and have been inculcated since adolescence to hold unions suspect. It does matter that people like Don Blankenship, the CEO of Massey Energy, wants no Democrat in office, ever.
In the Wall Street Journal, Deborah Solomon writes that from 2004 to 2006 Blankenship "poured $6 million of his own money into political advertising campaigns, battling Democratic judges and fighting high taxes." Also in Solomon’s article:
In 2004, Mr. Blankenship personally bankrolled a bruising $3.5 million campaign to unseat longtime state Supreme Court Justice Warren McGraw, a Democrat. He poured about $2.4 million into a group called And For The Sake Of Our Kids. The group ran television spots accusing Mr. McGraw of "letting a child rapist go free to work in our schools." The ad referred to a Supreme Court ruling that allowed a convicted sex offender to remain on probation and work in a Roman Catholic school as part of his rehabilitation.
Blankenship then bankrolled Mr. McGraw's Republican challenger, Brent Benjamin, and sent letters to businesses across the state seeking $1,000 donations. Benjamin won 53 to 47 percent, becoming the first Republican challenger to win a state Supreme Court post since 1928.
Still, politics has proved a fickle mistress for Blankenship: In 2006 his political fortunes dried up, and all but one of his hand-picked legislative candidates lost; the single victor faced an opponent confined to a nursing home. (For a detailed account of Blankenship's dealings, read Michael Shnayerson's Coal River.)
Blankenship has no doubt learned a few things since then.
-Hey, undecided Democrats and Independents: If you want this painfully long primary season to continue and to make not one bit of difference with your votes, cast your ballots for Hillary.
--reader’s letter to the Charleston Gazette, May 9, 2008
So far, Obama has not turned his back on coal the way some of us who care about the future of baby walruses wish he would. He’s been a consistent supporter of the greenhouse-gas huffing coal-to-liquid technology, the process by which you may one day be able to fill your tank with a shredded Appalachian mountaintop. This could be explained in the same way an anti-nuclear Obama supporter justified his measured support of nuclear power: If Obama doesn’t become president, he has to go back and run in his nuclear-powered state (Illinois has 11 reactors) – which also happens to be, to some extent, a coal state. It would be political death for him to come out strongly against either of these industries now.
But Massey’s Blankenship knows that no Democrat will be as friendly to coal as any Republican. Coal money has consistently gone two-to-one or even three-to-one for Republicans, who will be far likelier to favor industry over the health of the planet. Once in office, it would be unconscionable for Obama not to encourage the EPA to do what the EPA ought to have done by now: Impose reasonable, meaningful caps on carbon-dioxide and mercury emissions sufficient to protect our health and climate.
At the very least, a Democratic president would be more likely to hold the coal mining industry to health and safety laws. According to USA Today, of the $9 million in fines leveled since 1999 for safety violations that killed miners, the coal industry has paid only a little more than a quarter.
What the coal industry wants for America is not a Democrat that its executives hope might, just might be friendly to their lawless agenda, but no Democrat at all.
It would be all speculation and no hard evidence if I suggested here that Big Coal had a hand in keeping Clinton's campaign alive in the coal states (I do suspect it; I just can't prove it). It's less speculative to say that the protracted contest worked in Big Coal's favor by making it appear that a black man can't win Kentucky, as if Hillary Clinton can, splitting classes, races and genders. It's not speculative at all to imagine that Blankenship and his cronies will fight an Obama presidency with all they got. And they got a lot.
"Groups funded by the coal industry ran ads in Appalachian swing states in the last two presidential elections warning voters that supporting Democrats would lead to further job losses in their communities."
–Alex Kaplun, Greenwire, March 25, 2008
So what can Obama do to win over these states and evade the Big Coal juggernaut?
Here's one thing he can't do: Take on a running mate like Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, however marvelous she is. Sebelius shoved two big new coal-fired plants slated for Kansas off the drawing boards in March, citing her concerns about pollution and climate change. He can't run with Al Gore, either: Bush won West Virginia in 2000 by portraying himself as friendlier to coal than Gore was, which is probably the most honest and self-aware thing Bush has ever done. Once in the White House, he promptly put a coal-company manager in charge of the Mine Health and Safety Administration. Tragically, we all saw where that led.
But Obama can imitate those Democratic lawmakers who won their posts against Blankenship's high-rolling avatars in 2006: Get down on the ground and let people know who he is. Fan out into the communities, link up with the unions, and offer real alternatives to mountaintop removal -- alternatives that employ people, not machines. Launch an all-out effort to strip away Big Coal's populist mask, and inspire people with the possibility of a better, healthier, safer future. Do, in other words, what Obama and his campaign do best.