2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumLucia Graves is a pathetic hack who dismisses the votes of desperate, poor WV voters in her column
All to diss Bernie's cause and promote Clinton-style neoliberalism using factually-incorrect identity politics to ignore the issues entirely: exploitation of rural communities, extreme poverty, education access, a broken criminal justice system.
Her latest piece(1) is titled:
In a way, this title is peak establishment politics: it is the candidate who "needs" a state, not the state nor its population which are to be represented by the politician. But let's hear what she has to say first; the subtitle is:
This headline is factually untrue, as CNN's exit poll confirms:
But amazingly, this isn't the worst part of her column; she does not discuss, and perhaps is unaware of, entrenched poverty in rural West Virginia. That is, labor has not benefited in a fair way from the successes of coal over the past century as compared to the coal industry. The NYT did a story on McDowell County in 2014(3), "50 Years Into the War on Poverty, Hardship Hits Back". This should be required reading for anyone commenting on the West Virginia primary.
Hows John boy? Sabrina Shrader, 30, a former neighbor, asked Marie Bolden one cold winter day at what Ms. Bolden calls her little shanty by the tracks.
He had another seizure the other night, Ms. Bolden, 50, said of her son, John McCall, a former classmate of Ms. Shraders. John got caught up in the dark undertow of drugs that defines life for so many here in McDowell County, almost died of an overdose in 2007, and now lives on disability payments. His brother, Donald, recently released from prison, is unemployed and essentially homeless.
Its like hes in a hole with no way out, Ms. Bolden said of Donald as she drizzled honey on a homemade biscuit in her tidy kitchen. The other day he came in and said, Aint that a shame: Im 30 years old and carrying my life around in a backpack. It broke my heart.
McDowell County, the poorest in West Virginia, has been emblematic of entrenched American poverty for more than a half-century. John F. Kennedy campaigned here in 1960 and was so appalled that he promised to send help if elected president. His first executive order created the modern food stamp program, whose first recipients were McDowell County residents. When President Lyndon B. Johnson declared unconditional war on poverty in 1964, it was the squalor of Appalachia he had in mind. The federal programs that followed Medicare, Medicaid, free school lunches and others lifted tens of thousands above a subsistence standard of living.
But a half-century later, with the poverty rate again on the rise, hardship seems merely to have taken on a new face in McDowell County. The economy is declining along with the coal industry, towns are hollowed out as people flee, and communities are scarred by family dissolution, prescription drug abuse and a high rate of imprisonment.
Sanders' response is to say simply that while his environmental policies may harm the West Virginian economy, the government has an obligation to financially assist these communities and get them back on their feet. It is a LBJ approach to the problem. Clinton's approach includes her now infamous statement about putting coal miners out of work. I think that statement is unfair to her, but still she only commits to 'not wanting to forget' about them. Hardly encouraging!
In short, I do not believe these voters are stupid, or misinformed. When Bernie talks about CEOs receiving a different standard of justice than the neighborhood kid with a drug problem, this resonates. Why?!? Give this a listen (after the Blankenship sentencing[4]):
&feature=youtu.be
What is this voter upset about (and what does the local media miss, and evidently Lucia Graves as well) ? Well, here's what the NYT reports about this sentencing:
Now you tell me: which candidate is a person like this going to respond more to?
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In conclusion, Lucia Graves is a hack shilling for Clinton using transparently false "data" to pretend as if an entire state with systemic problems didn't just reject Clinton's candidacy. Meanwhile, she ignored a perfect opportunity to detail some of the above problems in West Virginia which may have been on voters' minds. Journalism is supposed to inform, not just provide a horse-race description. I can always look at the scoreboard after the race is over if I wanted that.
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(1):http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/may/10/hillary-clinton-west-virginia-lost-bernie-sanders-democratic-primary
(2): http://www.cnn.com/2016/05/10/politics/west-virginia-nebraska-primary-highlights/
(3): http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/21/us/50-years-into-the-war-on-poverty-hardship-hits-back.html
(4): http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/07/us/donald-blankenship-sentenced-to-a-year-in-prison-in-mine-safety-case.html
Eko
(7,281 posts)didn't count somehow.
JonLeibowitz
(6,282 posts)Eko
(7,281 posts)Eko
(7,281 posts)with the most votes of the state with the most desperate, poor people not count with you. W VA is bad, Mississippi is worse and Clinton won that by a landslide.
Eko
(7,281 posts)Sucks doughnut.
DemocratSinceBirth
(99,710 posts)Out of the ten states with the highest rates of poverty, nine have already voted and Clinton has won seven of them:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_poverty_rate
JonLeibowitz
(6,282 posts)I challenged the scary "white male" trope that Graves employs. The point is that Graves is a hack.
msanthrope
(37,549 posts)Clinton won MS....greater poverty, but more ethnically diverse.
Bernie does well in racially homogenous states with white men. Nothing that happened in WV disproves that.
JonLeibowitz
(6,282 posts)msanthrope
(37,549 posts)That's just a fact. How you choose to characterize that particular information is up to you.
JonLeibowitz
(6,282 posts)msanthrope
(37,549 posts)Bernie. No t sure how that helps you.
1StrongBlackMan
(31,849 posts)I would say Sanders' W. VA win is more easily, and IMO, more accurately understood as ...
The same voters that preferred the white woman over the Black man (in 2008), prefer the white man over the white female (in 2016).
And, when you factor in trump ... they will prefer the "uber-AMERICAN" white male over the Jewish Socialist man AND the white woman.
NCTraveler
(30,481 posts)For people new to the process. It can also fill their heads with garbage.
JonLeibowitz
(6,282 posts)I never denied that demographics didn't play a role. Certainly Bernie never really broke through with the AA community. That doesn't mean other races can't have legitimate reasons to vote the way they do. Reasons that deserve more attention from our leaders and columnists than "candidate X doesn't need these people, let's ignore all the reasons that may have affected how they voted and move on to the general"
mmonk
(52,589 posts)Doctor_J
(36,392 posts)Rec
Jitter65
(3,089 posts)should not be forgotten. She honored them and their sacrifices early on and has been proponent for holding mine owners accountable. Her plan to address their issues was drafted in early 2015 an published in Nov of 2015. It was largely ignored by the media and the Sanders camp but her gaffe comments in explaining it were not ignored...they were pumped 24/7 and heralded by BS supporters as proof that Hillary doesn't care about the poor or struggling workers...but Bernie does. Never ending falsehoods about Hillary always win the day and voters predisposed to not liking her because they believe the false hype buy into it.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)Not only Hillary, the entire country needs West Virginia. The Kennedys understood and put into action plans to make life better for ALL Americans.
-- Eugene V. Debs
mcar
(42,298 posts)that's a legitimate statement to make. But when some person says something unkind about one state, it's a terrible, awful thing that means that HRC is a terrible, awful person?
JonLeibowitz
(6,282 posts)Nice try at a straw man though!
I suggest you re-read the OP
amborin
(16,631 posts)YouDig
(2,280 posts)Hillary wins a state, and it doesn't matter because it's too Southern/Northern/red/blue/whatever the excuse is.
Good news is, in the end all the delegates from all the states count, and Hillary has a lot more of them than Bernie.
jwirr
(39,215 posts)the campaigns of those Democrats and more. I also benefited from all those programs that they are trying to get rid of now. And it is particularly heart breaking that it is all happening again.
What is wrong with the greedy people of this nation that they can set back and watch this happen when they could be doing something? But it is not just the greed - it is the elected officials of those states that ignore the problems.
The one hope I see is that the people of this southern state saw fit to reject the establishment and vote for Bernie. I do not know what needs to be done to fix this newest mess but I do not think that status quo is going to be it.
Tarc
(10,476 posts)JonLeibowitz
(6,282 posts)Saying she "doesn't need them" is offensive, heartless, and cruel. Democratic politics is supposed to be inclusive.
Waiting For Everyman
(9,385 posts)The first job she lists on LinkedIn is in 2010:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/lucia-graves-9355a614
Here's her Twitter:
https://twitter.com/lucia_graves
She also writes for Glamour Magazine.
This is an over-promoted, overpaid nitwit who knows NOTHING about the real world. We have to be careful what we take as legitimate writing. A lot of it is just crap, mechanically spewed out by these fresh out of school know-nothings who are only interested in making connections for their next undeserved rung up the ladder. There is a more famous older writer by the same name, so they might be related.
She should be ashamed of herself, but clearly she isn't. For what it's worth, Twitter did a pretty good job of taking her to task for this article, which I was glad to see. Of course, she brushed it off as comments from "BernieBros".
JonLeibowitz
(6,282 posts)She said that the "Bernie Bros" attacking her only proved her point about white male anger. Or something.
Shows she has NO idea. The people in West Virginia aren't on Twitter trolling Guardian columnists. They're just fucked. She is so out of touch.