Today, Richard Cohen visits Hazard, Kentucky to profile Trump supporters.  The long and short of it seems to be that eight years of Obama's Environmental Protection Agency pushing the country away from coal asn an energy source has destroyed Eastern Kentucky's economy.  No doubt that, along with low oil and natural gas prices, have taken their toll on the region.  Though we all know, really, that regions and countries who base their economies on natural resources are especially prey to boom and bust cycles, Obama has taken disporportionate blame here.

Still, Hillary Clinton did gaffe about putting coal miners out of work and, as Cohen reports:

Hazard, set in the mountains of eastern Kentucky, is a once bustling town with its guts wrenched out. On Main Street, the skeleton of a mall that burned down last year presents its charred remains for dismal contemplation. Young people with drugged eyes lean against boarded-up walls on desolate streets. The whistle of trains hauling coal, once as regular as the chiming of the hours, has all but vanished. So have the coal trucks spewing splinters of rock that shattered windshields. In the age of cheap natural gas and mountaintop removal mining, a coal town is not where you want to be.

To which my first reaction was, "these people should, to the extent possible, move."  I don't write that lightly.  I know it's easier said than done.  Were I to design a system, economic prospects would be a secondary, rather than primary concern in the choice people make about where to live.  But our system has always expected flexibility in this regard. We expect people to seek out communities where they can make a living.  So maybe the government should help people do that by giving tax credits and even grants to job seekers willing to move for employment.  I'd rather convince President Hillary Clinton of that than President Donald Trump.

A few paragraphs later:

“Trump’s going to get us killed, probably!” he [local, Steve Smith] ]told me. “But I’ll vote for him anyway over Hillary. If you vote for Hillary you vote for Obama, and he’s made it impossible to ship coal. This place is about dried up. A job at Wendy’s is the only thing left. We may have to move.”

So, this is the non-racial component of "Make America Great Again," which is really, "I want the president to bring back to prominence an industry that has collapsed.  I'm not sure what Trump thinks he can accomplish here, though.  You can, of course, bring back the U.S. coal business by requiring the federal government to purchase coal at above market prices, if even just to stockpile it.  But I can't imagine either party in Congress going for such a blatant giveaway that it can't even be called Keynesian.  It wouldn't work, anyway.  Nobody is building coal-powered power plants these days.  There is no growth here.  Demand will dwindle well before the coal supply runs out. The future is natural gas and renewables.  Basically, Cohen's subjects want a big coal bailout, but they think they're conservative.

He was awaiting his son, in court on a drug charge for the painkiller Percocet. A retired operator of heavy equipment for the Road Department, Bush said his son did nothing, “just a few odd jobs.” He continued: “Obama’s probably never known hardship. He and Hillary don’t get it. At least Trump don’t hold nothing back: If he don’t like something, he tells you about it.”

Now, all empathy to the guy here, but this is just backwards.  He's voting for Trump and his complaint is that Obama has never known hardship.  When Trump was a kid, he was chauffeured by Cadillac while working his paper route.

If anything, the complaint here should be against both parties and out drug abuse laws.  We find out a paragraph later that his son has failed a drug test and is "locked up," for it.  There are few details given of the case, but if his son is being locked up for a victimless crime, this guy should be voting for Gary Johnson.

Clinton will likely win while losing Appalachia and that's probably the best thing for Appalachia.  I hope Democrats remember we have an obligation to use government effectively to help people in transition to move, change skills or at least not suffer the changing whims of the economy.  I know we're nowhere near there yet, but a living wage program would actually end these problems before they even began, then nobody would have to move if they didn't want to.