Every Wednesday at 4.30pm they come: a small steady human trickle rolling down a ravine in Prestonsburg, western Kentucky, toward the Town Branch church. They come in pick-ups, on foot, alone and with families. Some stop for just a few minutes. Others linger. They come for food and warm second-hand clothes. They come because desperation in this part of America has become a routine part of life.
More than a quarter of the families in Prestonsburg live in poverty; half of the children in Floyd County, where it is situated, are on food stamps. This Appalachian coal mining area has never been rich. But no one can remember when it has ever been this poor either. It sits on the old Route 23 — the country music highway of which Dwight Yoakam (a Floyd Country native) sang in Readin’, Rightin’, Route 23. It was the road that took people north to factory jobs in places such as Detroit and Cleveland and “the good life they had never seen.” Now those cities are broke and there’s nowhere left to go.
“We’re getting more and more people coming here as time goes by,” says Tom Price, who helps administer the church’s Feed My Sheep pantry. “The bottom’s just fallen out of it all.”
He blames it on President Barack Obama.
“Is there a direct correlation [between Obama’s victory and the region’s bad times]? I don’t know. But I do know a lot of people are hurting,” he says.
A week may be a long time in politics. But a year has not been enough for the Democratic president to meet the expectations of his candidacy, deal with the situation he inherited or defuse the barbed charges of his detractors.
For many the change that Obama promised when he was inaugurated a year ago tomorrow has ended up being a change for the worse. Unemployment is rising, house prices are falling and unpopular wars are still raging. After 100 days only Ronald Reagan had higher approval ratings for his first few months in office than Obama. But as his first year draws to a close, nobody has had lower ratings at this stage since Dwight Eisenhower.
Keith Bartley, Floyd County’s Democratic chairman, says one key reason why Obama is such a tough sell here is because of the effect of his cap and trade policy on the coal industry. Lieutenant Governor Daniel Mongiardo, the Democratic frontrunner in Kentucky’s senatorial race later this year, says he would not want Obama to come and stump for him on the campaign trail, particularly because of his environmental policies.
“With some of the positions he has taken, especially on coal, no. He certainly can’t come into eastern or western Kentucky and help. Nor would I want him to,” he says.
But the disenchantment goes beyond one region or one industry. The official narrative of Obama’s inauguration — the fairytale most of the US media told itself and that the international community wanted to believe — was that after a rancorous campaign a divided country came together to celebrate the historic election of its first black president.
The reality was always quite different. The editor of the Grayson County News Gazette in Leitchfield, a small town 370km west of Prestonsburg, recalls that the day after the election much of the area wore somber faces. The week Obama was elected, gun sales across the country leapt about 50 percent compared with the same period the year before.
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