Lucia Graves is a pathetic hack who dismisses the votes of desperate, poor WV voters in her column

[JonLeibowitz]

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:

Hillary Clinton may have lost West Virginia by a landslide. The truth is, she doesn't need it

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:

The white, male voters of this coal-mining state left us in no doubt of their support for Bernie Sanders. But among every other demographic, Hillary leads

This headline is factually untrue, as CNN's exit poll confirms:

He also beat Clinton among women 52% to 38% and also among independents, by nearly 40 percentage points.(2)

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.

TWIN BRANCH, W.Va. — When people visit with friends and neighbors in southern West Virginia, where paved roads give way to dirt before winding steeply up wooded hollows, the talk is often of lives that never got off the ground.

“How’s 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. Shrader’s. 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.

“It’s like he’s 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, ‘Ain’t that a shame: I’m 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:

Mr. Blankenship, however, was also defiant and told Judge Berger, “It’s important to me that everyone knows that I am not guilty of a crime.” (4)

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