UNION, W.Va. — Cows and horses grazing in the hills here don’t appear to care much about politics of Washington, D.C., five hours’ drive and light-years away. Neither do people in Union. Front-page headlines in the two local newspapers, Mountain Messenger (price 35 cents) and the West Virginia Daily News (price 30 cents) focus on the West Virginia State Fair, hydrant flushing in Lewisburg, and a town hall meeting with Rainelle Mayor Andy Pendleton.
When I buy groceries at Ashley’s Food Pride, around the corner from the courthouse, four people bag my groceries, and one man wheels the cart to the car and loads them in. I count five different kinds of cornbread mix, ranging from yellow to white to buttermilk.
There are cafes and a Dollar Store and a courthouse and a jail. The Vanilla Bean Cafe gives unlimited free refills of iced tea and allows customers to use the Internet at no charge.
I’m staying in a picturesque log cabin with mice, a leaky roof, a DVD player that doesn’t work, Internet and cell phone connections that do, sporadically, and a trickle of a shower, because water is pumped from a well. Plus, three horses, two dogs, and some cats.
The owner, age 61, who I’ll call Jack because he doesn’t want his real name used, tells me that he’s a country boy, and knows how to survive. He’s saving because he doesn’t believe that Social Security is going to be there for him. “The way the economy is going, we’re looking like Greece.”
Gasoline is pricey. “Anytime I fill up my truck, it’s more than $100.” Fortunately, Jack says, we have substantial supplies of natural gas, so that we don’t have to be dependent on Arab oil.
Not many of the presidential candidates appeal to Jack. “A lot of the promises President Obama made didn’t hold up,” he told me. He’s for Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, because that’s his sons’ favorite candidate.
West Virginia is doing better than the nation as a whole in terms of jobs. In June, the latest data available, unemployment was 8.5 percent, compared with the U.S. average of 9.2 percent. July’s data will be released on Friday.
People in Union don’t bother Washington. They don’t tell us how to run our lives down to the minutest detail. If only Washington treated Union — and thousands of communities across America — with the same benign neglect.
Obama has been taking a bus tour around America saying he’s been learning about their problems.
In September, Obama will give a major speech on jobs. Presumably it will be about jobs across America, in big cities and small communities like Union, W.Va. — except that no one in Washington has heard of Union, W.Va.
Obama will doubtlessly say that Washington laws, and regulations, and spending are necessary to get America back to work. He’ll call for an infrastructure bank costing billions of dollars in government funds. It’s hard to see how an infrastructure bank will help Union.
We’ll be waiting for his speech, but all indications are that he’s going to suggest bringing more of Washington to America.
But Union shows no signs of government stimulus or Troubled Asset Relief Program bailout funds. People work hard and manage for themselves.
Speeches are the last refuge of politicians who can’t do much else to solve problems. No one in Union is giving a speech about jobs or how to create them across America. People just get to work. Perhaps we should follow their example.
Examiner Columnist Diana Furchtgott-Roth ([email protected]), former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor, is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.
