Obama's 'Appalachian Problem'? It's Not So Easy

editor — Fri, 16 May 2008 12:25:53 -0700

Above are photos taken by Andrew Stern in Letcher County, Kentucky. The older picture above was taken nearly 50 years ago. Stern recently returned to Eastern Kentucky and took the other photos in this slideshow. See Editor's Note on the next page.

Once again the American media’s compulsion to entertain rather than to understand has projected Appalachia to center stage of national politics.

Hillary Clinton’s landslide victory in the West Virginia Democratic primary has provided yet another opportunity to reduce economic and political issues in Appalachia to time-honored tropes about cultural differentness. Within the past week, an embarrassment of journalists, bloggers, and late-night television hosts have turned Senator Clinton’s support among blue collar voters in West Virginia into a confirmation of the white “otherness” of Appalachian culture rather than an expression of fundamental (and more complex) issues of class, gender, and race or even political organization in the Mountain State.

One correspondent, Jonathan Tilove, has even suggested that Senator Barack Obama has an “Appalachian problem” that goes beyond race to the peculiarities of “Appalachia’s whites and the Scots-Irish who settled there and forever branded its culture.”

Popular stereotypes and misreading of Appalachian history have long provided a convenient excuse to ignore Appalachia or to justify public and private attempts to bring the region into the cultural mainstream. Thus, the argument is offered that Clinton’s appeal in Appalachia should not be taken too seriously since mountain voters represent those “other whites” whose heritage has led them to be suspicious, pugnacious, and a little less civilized than the Anglo-Puritan whites of the Northeast.

By Ron Eller

Obama's 'Appalachian Problem'? It's Not So Easy