THE MOUNTAIN EAGLE....WHITESBURG, LETCHER COUNTY, KENTUCKY..THURSDAY, JULY 31, 1975
Can presidential candidates face mountain issues?
By JAMES BRANSCOME
The Appalachian states will elect the next President of the United States. They will also determine through their primaries who will be the Democratic nominee.
Those statements are, of course, speculative but no more so than most of the guessing that passes for political analysis on the 'op-ed' pages of the daily newspapers. So, we're entitled to our own unsyndicated divining.
Without getting bogged down in geography, the mountain coalfields alone will have five preferential primaries next year in which to choose among the horde of Democrats who fancy themselves capable of lobbing the first bomb, vetoing the most bills, and taping their every utterance--all talents that seem to have become standard fare for the office in one variation or another after the electorate and presidents discovered that bureaucrats, not presidents, have really run the country ever since the passage of the Civil Service law in 1883.
But charade or not, mountain folks have an unequal chance to decide whose wife, dog, swimming pool, and belly scars the county will have to live with for the next four years.
Assuming that no frontrunner skunks everyone else through the New Hampshire and Florida primaries, the field will then be left open for the Democratic candidates to argue that no clear consensus will have merged until they have all had a chance to test their strength in the South and Midwest against each other and particularly against George Wallace. That raises the prospect that delegate bagging and media courting will last all the way to at least the West Virginia primary, which in 1960 made the decisive choice between Kennedy and Humphrey.
The varied political history of the mountains and the mountain states makes these areas unusual testing grounds for candidate-picking. This is especially true when gut issues and not glamour are what the race is all about, as may be the case this year if Kennedy decides to forego the campaign. The region constantly swaps parties and voting patterns, as evidenced by Bill Brock's defeat of Albert Gore in Tennessee, Wendell Ford's defeat of Marlowe Cook in Kentucky, and Arch Moore's defeat of John D. Rockefeller IV in West Virginia.
The matter goes even deeper than that, however, West Virginia has the most highly unionized labor force in the country; North Carolina, the least organized Eastern Kentucky has a Republican district right beside a Democratic one, as does the Blue Ridge of North Carolina. There is a moderate Byrd in West Virginia and an apple butter Byrd in Virginia.
But on top of that, the mountain sections all, have one thing in common;
the largest concentration of unemployed, underemployed, non-middle class voters in the United States. And, with few exceptions, they also share a history of little grass roots action to pick a candidate whose platform matches the region's needs.
Participation in politics as a means of social change is a highly arguable proposition, especially in a region where power is concentrated in the economic and governmental institutions in a way it isn't in the rest of America. Corporate executives, Tennessee Valley Authority board members, and Forest Service bureaucrats don't have to be elected to office.
Yet the political process is the only alternative available to those social change advocates in the region whose other approaches in the last decade have produced about as much "social change" as one scoop out of an abandoned hen house.
Anyway, the politicians are headed toward the mountains, and we might as well prepare to demand something from them rather than having to endue the usual slop that the speech writers and the media pour out every time they campaign down this way.
North Carolina could prove an interesting primary. There, favorite son, Terry Sanford will be trying to prove that he can beat George Wallace on home turf. Sanford, the president of Duke University and an avid golfer, at the most exclusive resort in the Blue Ridge, will tee off a campaign claiming that he, not Wallace, is the friend of the little man.
Guessing the outcome of a primary in the North Carolina mountains is hazardous business. That section is home for both Sen. Sam Ervin and Gov. James Holshouser, the latter a right-winger from Boone who is close to setting a record for incompetence in an office that has never amounted to much in that state. Come to think of it, Sen. Ervin's only claim to merit before Watergate was that he had read the Constitution and could tell pretty good jokes poking fun at the moonshiners over in Avery County.
North Carolina somehow has gained a national reputation as a liberal state. I presume that the reason is that an inordinate number of New York Times reporters, including columnist Tom Wicker, claim to have been born there. Regardless, the animosity the mountain folks feel toward flatlanders could be capitalized upon by someone other than Wallace if the effort is made.
With the abolition of the winner-take-all primaries in the Democratic races, sectional differences like those in North Carolina give agrarian reformers like Fred Harris a chance to pick up a few delegates. Resort developments, high property taxes, dams, and the Forest Service are major issues in that area that only the Wallaceites may be astute enough to spot.
Sanford claims already to have Virginia sewed up with the support of Henry Howell, a perennial candidate for office on the liberal ticket. He may have a chance in the Old Dominion where primaries are not allowed, but it may be another matter in Kentucky, where the party establishment loves him like they did Muskie in 1972. Having the established politicians behind him killed Muskie. But Sanford may not make it to Kentucky, because he may be beaten by either Wallace or Jimmy Carter of Georgia in his home state.
The West Virginia primary takes on added significance next year because of the United mine Workers reforms that allow the miners to have a say in which Democrat they will endorse. The candidates, including Texas millionaire Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, have already been courting the union hierarchy. Whether the new leadership will resist the pressures of the Washington kingmakers to whom it owes some favors for its own elections )such as Joseph Rauh, a liberal big wheel in party circles, who did much of the legal work that made the union reform possible) remains to be seen. With every vote in the primaries now counting for the convention regardless of the state winners, miners in West Virginia--a total of about 40,000--may not vote the straight union ticket.
The revival of the Ku Klux Klan in the mountains--an, area from which it has always been banned--suggests a frustration that folks want things done differently. Significantly, there appears to be little sympathy for Wallace in the mountains. That raises the possibility that the Democratic horde can be forced to run on the issues in the mountains.
It all seems important enough to write some more about, so beginning next week, I'll take a look at what one frontrunner, Sen. Henry "Scott" Jackson, is worth to the region. He has a 400 horsepower mouth on energy issues, but he seems to produce only putt-putt legislation.
