McConnell’s challenge in Kentucky

Danny Smith, who lives a mile down the road, chuckles when I ask him about the dog. “It’s creepy,” he agrees. Smith wears sweatpants, socks, and sandals — and that’s it. The coal miner’s ample belly bulges proudly into the brisk late-morning air on Wednesday.

“I don’t consider myself poor,” Smith tells me. Smith is unemployed. He lives with his wife, his daughter, and his granddaughter in a house that’s probably about 600 square feet. “I consider myself middle class.”

Smith raises his family on about $1,200 a month in Social Security disability payments. He went on disability after suffering a stroke. “I lost use of my left hand,” he tells me, failing to make a fist. “My left leg has diabetes. I’m in bad shape.” He rattles off these maladies in an oddly upbeat tone. He doesn’t complain — because he knows a lot of people who are worse off.

Per capita income in Menifee County is $14,853, according to the Census Bureau, compared to the national per capita income of $53,142. The average American earns in a week when the average Menifee resident earns in nearly a month. And there are 12 counties in Kentucky poorer than Menifee.

So how does a conservative Republican like Mitch McConnell win in a state with so much poverty?

Mostly, he talks about coal. “In Eastern Kentucky we’ve lost 7,000 coal mining jobs during the Obama years,” McConnell says. The “war on coal,” he says, has caused “a depression in Eastern Kentucky.” Eight counties in southeastern Kentucky have double-digit unemployment.

Smith, in Menifee County, shares this sentiment. “When Obama took office, first thing he did was attack the coal industry.” Smith says “coal mining gives people jobs” and laments that “Obama doesn’t care about the poor people — about the mountain people.”

Don Cooke is also an unemployed coal worker. He’s at Kentucky Christian University on Wednesday for a McConnell rally. He squarely blames Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency for the loss of his job. “They care more for a mayfly than they do for a human life,” he says of federal regulators.

Blaming Obama for killing coal jobs is one thing, but what should Washington’s role be in the safety net? “Get out of it,” Cooke says. “All these social programs — everyone’s on the draw.”

Cooke says he puts together odd jobs — enough to disqualify himself from unemployment benefits, but not enough to pay the bills. So he’s spending down savings.

Rep. Thomas Massie agrees. “The safety net should be churches and charitable organizations,” the Republican congressman tells me after the McConnell rally.

Holly, a thirtysomething self-described libertarian ,told me at a bar in Covington, Ky., that she spent time on disability for an immune system disorder. She says she got off as soon as she could. “I couldn’t justify being on disability and having a cellphone.”

“A lot of people abuse it,” she says of federal disability benefits. “It breeds dependency.” This is a standard Republican view: Federal programs for the poor are destructive, wasteful, and unfair.

In many states, Republicans feel less political motivation to court poorer voters. Black voters in large cities are often written off as unpersuadable, immutably Democratic. In Kentucky, the poor people are more demographically Republican: rural whites. This makes poverty a more complex issue for Bluegrass State Republicans. Take Rep. Hal Rogers, with whom McConnell was touring coal country on Tuesday. Rogers is, in Tea Party parlance, a porker — an unabashed dealer in earmarks for his district, the poorest in the country. Rogers argues they need the federal money. One man’s wasteful earmark is another man’s jobs program.

To keep his seat this year, McConnell needs to win Rogers voters — the “Mountain Republicans,” as University of Kentucky politics professor Stephen Voss labels them.

Although McConnell leads a Tea Party-infused party in Washington, you can see a bit of Mountain Republican in him. For one thing, he has spoken in D.C. of “our shared responsibility for the weak.” That’s hardly Ayn Rand stuff.

You also see it in McConnell’s personal fondness for pork. He opposed the GOP earmark ban, and his 2014 radio ads focus on the hundreds of millions in federal funds he has brought into the state. Many of his earmarks have been aimed at helping Kentucky’s poor–grants for rural dentistry, out-of-work coal miners, and poor veterans.

McConnell also finds himself in an awkward place on Obamacare implementation. He vows to kill the law, but he’s afraid to criticize its actual state-level implementation. Look around rural Kentucky and you can see why.

“That’s the one thing that Obama did that I really like,” Smith says of the state’s Obamacare-driven Medicaid expansion.

Kentucky is a beautiful state, especially in the fall. It’s also a complex state, as evidenced by its congressional delegation, which includes both the libertarian-leaning Massie and the Mountain Republican Rogers.

McConnell has to find a way to bridge the parties of Rogers and Massie in his re-election bid next month and — provided he wins — next year on Capitol Hill.

Timothy P. Carney, the Washington Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Sunday and Wednesday on washingtonexaminer.com.