William Saletan of SLATE is doing a series of articles on the battleground states, and his three-part take on West Virginia is worth a look. (One, Two, Three)
Saletan tries to make fun of “how Washington liberals think of West Virginia: a third world neighbor,” but despite his best efforts (and his best efforts are quite good) he winds us exemplifying that disdain (with references, for example, to “bad teeth,” “a dental nightmare,” “Tiny buildings just big enough for a toilet seat are tucked away in people’s back yards. Huge satellite dishes stand out front,” etc.)
Although Saletan offers some shrewd observations (bad news for the Democrats would be West Virginians continuing their habit of voting to re-elect Republican incumbents; worse would be their reconsidering why they usually vote Democratic in the first place), his own Washington liberal sensibilities can also lead him to make connections that seem bizarre, at least to me. Consider, for example, this interesting description of a Kerry supporter he spoke to in a gas station:
Eric prefers Kerry but calls him a bloodless flip-flopper. Bush’s “views suck, but at least he has some passion behind them,” Eric scoffs. Eric says he could make more money on welfare than he does at his job, which offends his work ethic. He excoriates the “politically correct” assault on masculinity. “The world would be a better place if everybody was packing some heat,” he argues. If terrorists hijack a plane while he’s on board, he warns, “There’s gonna be some Muslim ass gettin’ trashed.”
It might seem odd to you that this fellow is supporting Kerry, but not nearly as odd, I think, as Saletan’s comment:
Eric, whose features look distinctly Latin-American, conveys no irony as he talks about trashing Muslim ass.
Well call me dumb, but I don’t see the irony either, unless Saletan means to imply that all ethnics (or even people who look like ethnics) are fungible.
Now consider Saletan’s conclusion from his sojourn in wild, wonderful West Virginia, which to me seems to pass right by an unobserved elephant (or, I suppose, donkey) in the china shop:
To a Washington liberal, these sentiments sound like the final nail in Kerry’s coffin. But they aren’t. They’re Kerry’s opportunity, and he knows it. He has made outsourcing and unfair foreign trade practices the centerpiece of his trips to West Virginia. You don’t win this state as a Democrat by resisting its nationalism or its anti-welfare ethic. You win by channeling that nationalism and that ethic into economic issues. If you can’t run against Bush for killing Iraqis, you run against him for spending our money on them
Kerry has made it plain that he stands for whatever he thinks will get him elected, even if means flip-flopping back and forth repeatedly, depending on the audience he’s trying to persuade.
I am optimistic that enough Americans are intelligent enough to see through this blatant snake-oil salesman.
West Virginia has suffered badly over the decades from the brain drain of smart people to other states. The white 8th graders of West Virginia scored much lower than the white 8th graders of any other state on the 2003 NAEP test.