Kos wants to celebrate coal miners losing their health insurance.
Because election.
If you know anything about the culture and politics of coal country, this election result would not be surprising. Sadly, Democrats haven’t shown much concern for Americans who live outside urban areas. The new Senate minority leader said it during the campaign. And Hillary Clinton made this quite clear when she stuck her foot in her mouth at a town hall during the primaries.
Yes, I know. She promised to replace them with wonderful clean energy jobs. But manufacturing workers have heard a lot of the same horse shit for decades. Working class voters are well aware that “repeal and replace” means the same thing coming from a Democrat’s mouth as it does from a Republican’s mouth. You’ll repeal to make your satisfy your base and replace comes much later, if at all, and only if the big dollar donors are satisfied.
Think this comment didn’t hurt her? Democratic elected officials didn’t even want her around.
When officials in Logan, West Virginia, were contacted last week about hosting Hillary Clinton for a local rally, it didn’t take long for them to respond with an answer: Hell no.
“Bill and Hillary Clinton are simply not welcome in our town,” they wrote in a letter to the office of Sen. Joe Manchin, whose office had inquired about the availability of local facilities. “Mrs. Clinton’s anti-coal messages are the last thing our suffering town needs at this point. The policies that have been championed by people like Mrs. Clinton have all but devastated our fair town, and honestly, enough is enough. We wish them the best in their campaign, however we again state they are not welcome on our city’s properties.”
While Clinton might have the support of much of West Virginia’s political establishment in Tuesday’s Democratic primary, the Logan letter reveals the depth of some of the opposition to her candidacy. It’s sparked to some degree by a remark that continues to haunt her in coal country, two months after she made it in a March town hall.
The electioIn 2008, she won almost 67% of the vote—240,890 votes—in the Democratic primary. She carried every single county. In 2016, she won 86,914 votes, less than 36%. This time, Bernie Sanders carried every single county.
<INSERT STANDARD LOYALIST REPLY ABOUT RACISM>
Some of you will need to sit down for this.
Barack Obama did better than Hillary Clinton in WV in both of his general election runs. He got more than 42% of the vote against McCain in 2008. He slipped to 35% against Romney in 2012. Hillary got only 26.5% in 2016. She received 63,000 fewer votes in the 2016 general election than she received in the 2008 presidential primary.
Hillary Clinton lost. She took a lot of good Democrats like Russ Feingold down with her. If ridiculing people who have experienced great loss and have only a bleak future in front of them makes you feel better, so be it. But while you are sneering down your nose at the underserving class, remember that you are no better than this crowd.