HIllary's Hillbilly FIrewall Made of Racial Prejudices?

I can’t believe I missed this one, but the editor of the Washington Examiner is saying Hillary Clinton has a hillbilly firewall in Appalachia. Democratic Appalachia has long been friendly turf to the Clintons, but the WE says this time the support may have much to do with Obama’s skin color.

Sadly, he’s right. But the calculus is more complicated than that. First, many machine pols, and Appalachian politics is all about machines, remember fondly the good ol’ days of Bill Clinton and his KY allies, Guvs Brereton Jones and Paul Patton. It’s easy for them to look back on these days of Frankfort and DC plenty and think that these times might be resurrected. Secondly, there’s the cultural calculus. It’s always hard to separate dislike of a race from dislike of culture, but suffice it to say, a Chicago pol named Barack Obama isn’t as in tune with hillbillies as Bubba Bill Clinton who spent 20 years courting voters from the Ozarks. Then there’s coal. Bill Clinton’s ‘fur it’, Obama, near as we can tell, is ‘agin it’. He talks about banning strip mining, she won’t even condemn mountain top removal and stumps on clean coal.

But I think there’s something more basic at work here. For the past 6 years I’ve been married into a family of Yellow Dog Democrats. Being a politically outspoken Republican from the Old 5th Congressional District (a district that’s voted Republican since shortly after the Civil War and Whig before that), I’ve had more than my share of arguments. I can tell you that above all else the Democrats want to win. Those Dems who vote in primaries know that John McCain is going to be tough to be beat, and that this is their chance to get the party back on the ground it was on when the first Clinton took it away from the Dukakis-Mondale crowd. They’re not at all anxious to see their party turned over to a man who sits in the pews while his pastor raves about God damning America.

Originally Posted at Cyberhillbilly Blog