Electing the president ... of West Virginia

Marsha Mercer
Published: May 18, 2008

WASHINGTON

Let’s declare Hillary Clinton the president of West Virginia and get on with life.

While Republican John McCain is out there portraying himself as an environmentalist who’ll also win the war in Iraq by the end of his first term, Democrats Clinton and Barack Obama are fighting over working men and women through a fog of retro racial politics. It’s weird.

Clinton won a landslide, 41-point primary victory in West Virginia. Nice work by a dead woman walking.

Shouldn’t she get something from her long slog?

As she and her husband told the voters there repeatedly, West Virginia is a state that needs a president. Why not Hillary?

OK, that’s a fantasy. But what does it mean to be a state that needs a president? It doesn’t sound like something you’d want on your license plate. It sounds condescending.

The idea seems to be that certain states need presidential intervention, but it’s not as though West Virginia hasn’t had its protectors. Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., is the master of federal aid to help his home state.

Being a state that needs a president is a curious bit of Clintonspeak that emerges in pockets of poverty and despair during primary season. It goes to the dream that the president can be the solver of problems. This is a dangerous notion because it’s not true. Unfortunately, history has shown this power more observed on the campaign trail than in the White House, especially since the days of FDR and LBJ.

Here was Bill Clinton on his rural tour in Ripley, W.Va., as reported by ABC News’ Sarah Amos:

“Hillary is in this race because of people like you and places like this and no matter what they say. And no matter how much fun they make of your support of her and the fact that working people all over
America have stuck with her, she thinks you’re as smart as they are.”

That seems to be damning with faint praise. In Madison, W.Va., he spoke about “the people who need a president” — to turn around the economy, help the middle class, give poor people a chance to move into the middle class, give children a better future and restore the United States’ standing in the world — and said they’d supported Hillary Clinton since “the get-go.”

Presidential candidates aren’t permitted to be anything less than sunny. Obama got in hot water last month when he said that Pennsylvanians who have faced hard times “get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Hillary Clinton retorted that she’s never seen any bitterness, just folks rolling up their sleeves to get to work.

Pennsylvanians “don’t need a president who looks down on them,” she said sternly. “They need a president who stands up for them.”

Critics jumped on Obama as elitist and out of touch. But he, speaking in Terre Haute, Ind., tried to explain why decades of broken promises by politicians contributed to the bitterness.

“For 25, 30 years, Democrats and Republicans have come before them and said, ‘We’re going to make your community better. We’re going to make it right,’ and nothing ever happens.

And of course they’re bitter. Of course they’re frustrated. You would be too. In fact many of you are…”

John Edwards, the champion of the working class, has endorsed Obama, a move that could help Obama with working people. Obama has adopted one of Edwards’ issues and now promises to cut
poverty in half in 10 years — in the entire country.

Bill Clinton told voters he’d rather be in West Virginia “than listening to that stuff I have to hear on television. I’d rather be with you.

There is a simple reason: You need a president a lot more than those people telling you not to vote for her.”

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