From Spying on the South (Tony Horwitz, 2019) pp34-5
Orphy Klempa was a Wheeling native of Slovak descent and the son of a tavern keeper. He’d bolted roofs in coal mines, worked at factories, and risen to become a carpenters’ union leader, three-term state legislator, and chairman of the local Democratic Party.
Which was why he now sat alone in the party headquarters, at a desk with three phones, none of them ringing. “If the polls are right, we’re going to get our asses kicked on Tuesday,” he said, propping his cowboy boots on his desk. West Virginia wasn’t known for cowboys, but Klempa wore the boots, he said, “because they’re about the only clothing I can buy that’s still made in America.” He expressed other views that were conservative by national Democratic standards. Klempa was pro-life, a gun owner and NRA member, and proud of having worked across the aisle with Republicans in the state legislature.
But that middle ground had caved in, and blue-collar West Virginia-staunchly Democratic in the twentieth century—had turned strongly Republican in recent elections. Klempa blamed some of this rightward turn on race. The state was 95 percent white, and even the waning Democratic base was so unenthusiastic about Obama that it had given 41 percent of the vote in the 2012 presidential primary to a jailed felon, Keith Judd.
Klempa added, however, that cultural issues, including “guns and gays,” weren’t the hot issues now. “It’s jobs, or phony promises of jobs. The other side is kicking coal dust in people’s eyes so they can’t see reality.” Klempa had served on an energy commission in the legislature and knew his fossil fuels. The reality: West Virginia’s high-sulfur coal had been under siege for decades, due to reduced demand, competition from natural gas and Western strip mines, and pollution controls dating to the 1960s. Thousands of jobs had also been mechanized, for more than half a century. The industry now accounted for about 3 percent of the state’s employment and revenue-much smaller than in sectors like tourism and hospitality.
“Washington’s waging a war on coal?” Klempa scoffed. “It’s a joke, like having a war on midgets.”
But coal remained such a potent symbol and powerful lobby that politicians paid ritualistic homage to it, like the football players patting carbon on their “Mantrip” to the Mountaineers’ stadium. In ads, the stat’s governor took “dead aim” at climate change legislation with a scoped rifle, blasting a hole in it. A Senate candidate dramatized her defense of coal and “our way of life” (a phrase that echoed antebellum defenders of slavery) by pulling a switch to cut off the White House lights.
“It’s sad, the world’s moving on,” Klempa said, “but we’re stuck in this mine shaft.”
One of the phones on his desk rang for the first time in an hour. He grabbed it: a wrong number. Klempa had a long call list, mostly union members, but found it increasingly hard to compete with the internet, cable TV, and talk radio. “When I was coming up, folks watched network news and talked politics at the beer joint or barbershop or union hall, he said.
“Now everyone’s in the car or at home, tuning in their favourite rants. We’re just shouting past each other.”
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