If Hillary Clinton means to hold on to her 10 percent chance at the Democratic nomination, she will have to sweep through Appalachia like an Ohio River flood.
And she may well do it, because long after all her other strongholds have fallen, she has kept the poor, often overlooked folks in between the north and south. It’s her final firewall — the hillbilly firewall.
Her husband, now looking appropriately like the crooked sheriff of a coal camp county, won them over 16 years ago with his winking skulduggeryand by defeating the coalition of blacks and Northern white liberals that dominated the Democratic Party for so long.
She’s kept Appalachia and the other hillbilly holdouts with shopworn union rhetoric and an organization that has laid in wait since the day she and Bill departed the White House. (Leave the cat, take the china.)
But more importantly, the color of her opponent’s skin and his foreign-sounding name have reminded Appalachian party bosses of that old black-liberal Democratic coalition that almost sent them the way of their cousins in the Deep South, where Republicanism now reigns.
Of the remaining 566 Democratic delegates to be won, 352 will be awarded from Appalachian states. The western parts of Pennsylvania (April 22) and North Carolina (May 6) along with West Virginia (May 13) and Kentucky (May 20) will take on outsized importance in the weeks to come.
Add in the Scots-Irish fellow travelers from southern Indiana (May 6), and the hillbilly firewall lays claim to some of that state’s 72 delegates too. Clinton already won Tennessee and her husband’s native Arkansas for 67 delegates on Super Tuesday, so she might very well wrap up a backcountry sweep seven weeks from now.
After a long wait for relevance in the Democratic Party, its least appreciated and most faithful members will have something to say about its future.
It’s something Bill knew when he was strutting around in Beckley, W.Va., on Wednesday talking about clean coal technology and a modern-day Works Progress Administration for areas hard-hit by job losses.
But it was in Parkersburg, W.Va., that he hit his greatest rhetorical heights, snarling at the “elites” of the party for pressuring his wife to bow out gracefully and suggesting that those who don’t want to get “beat up” in an ugly campaign ought not go into politics.
“Let’s just saddle up and have an argument. What’s wrong with that?” he cried.
As one of those same Scots-Irish hillbillies, I can guarantee you that few in his audience probably thought there was anything wrong with that at all, a good fight being the foundation of our culture.
So if Hillary Clinton is to be saved, as improbable as that may now seem, it will be by the same folks who launched the traveling medicine show that her and her husband’s political career has been.
Hillary had to trade the privileged world of Wellesley, Yale and Capitol Hill she pushed so hard to get into for the western reaches of the hillbilly realm with her husband. Georgetown, Oxford and Yale put together couldn’t make him palatable to the Episcopalian, Eastern establishment.
After a long, hard slog, she made it back to Washington as the first among ladies. Despite some antics on her part that would have tarnished even a dirt-floored cabin, she held on.
She might have run for the Senate in 2000 from Florida, Nebraska or Nevada, but she wasn’t leaving again. Nothing less than New York would do. Not after what she’d been through.
But like something out of a Robert Penn Warren story, Hillary will have to make one more trip through the hollers to try to claim her prize.
What cruel indignities politics visits on its participants, especially those with more ambition than decency.
Chris Stirewalt is the political editor of The Washington Examiner.
He can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].
