Nobama Country, Even Over Our Dead Bodies

Eastern Kentucky in the Appalachian mountains contains some of the poorest counties in America.  They are overwhelmingly poverty-stricken, overwhelmingly on government assistance programs, and overwhelmingly white.  But they hate Barack Obama with a passion here, and it has everything to do with the fact that America's first black president wants to help them and backs the programs to do just that, but people like Jim Feltner will never give him credit in places like in Wolfe County.

A victim of two heart attacks, he lives off disability checks, and $105 a month in government food stamps.

Feltner voted for a previous Democratic president, Bill Clinton, but now says: “I will vote for anybody against Obama.

“I don’t care who runs against him, I’ll vote for him. I don’t care if it’s a Democrat, a Republican, an Indian, a Pakistani — even a Frenchman!”

The first reason is coal. He accuses Obama of dooming this mining region of the Appalachian mountains with environmental regulations.

Since 2011, 30 percent of the mining jobs — around 4,000 — in the region have vanished. Competition from natural gas is another factor in the decline.

“Here’s what he said about the coal business: ‘Go ahead, build your coal-fired energy plants, we will shut them down,’” Feltner alleged.

“Is that something for a president to say?,” he added. “He’s got a problem with the poor people.”

Got news for you Jim, coal in Kentucky is on the way out anyway.  Natural gas is king now, and it doesn't matter that coal companies ravaged the area, destroyed the environment, and cut corners to that coal miners died, trapped underground.  It's all the black guy's fault because he clearly hates poor people.

The same aversion to Obama is heard in Jackson, 13 miles down the road.

Eric Miller, 28, with bad teeth and an accent as thick as his tattooed arms, says he does not care about politics. He voted once, but can’t remember for whom. But one thing is clear: He does not like Obama.

“I guess Democrats just worry about money in their pocket, what they and their friends are doing. They’re not worried about us small people,” Miller said.

“The Republicans, they are the ones that know … raised up like we have, you know. Know what it’s like, what we need, what shouldn’t been taken away,” Miller added.

“If there weren’t government programs, it would be a ghost town,” Miller said. He gets $380 on the sixth of every month, and with that he has to support himself and his girlfriend.

The money is loaded onto credit cards that are accepted at certain stores, just for food, although there is a black market in which goods thus bought can be exchanged for cigarettes and painkillers.

The bitter racist contempt for the President here is heart-rending, but nobody should be surprised.  The same Republicans that Eric Miller praises would cut those programs in a heartbeat if they had their way, but they've convinced Miller and thousands like him that the Democrats are the bad guys  Surely Miller qualifies for Medicaid and help under the Affordable Care Act, but don't you dare tell this asshole that, he won't believe a word you say and will vote for Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul to take the same programs he counts on away from him.

So why is Barack Obama, who supports food stamps and whose Democratic allies in Congress tried and failed to stop a Republican-backed cut in the program, so deeply unpopular?

Racism is a taboo subject that simmers just under the surface of many a conversation here.

Jackson is 98 percent white, and the region has checkered past. In late 2011 a church further to the east triggered an uproar by barring mixed race couples.

But Bryant says voters’ main motivation when they go to the polls are coal and social issues: abortion, guns, and same-sex marriage, which he labels “the three biggies.” This is conservative Christian country.

But convincing the poor to vote against their self-interest has been the GOP specialty for 35 years now.  Nothing's more demonstrative of the modern GOP than a 98% white county with a crippled economy and half the people on food stamps complaining that Democrats hate poor people.

Welcome to Nobama Country.