He passed me a picture of his three little children, a son and two daughters. “I want my family to know that they have a future here in this state, because this is a great state,” he said. “I’ve lived my entire life here. West Virginians are proud people. We take pride in our faith in God. We take pride in our family. And we take pride in our jobs. We take pride in the fact that we’re hard workers.”
Then he got to the heart of the matter. “I just—I just want to know how you can say you’re going to put a lot of coal miners out of jobs and then come in here and tell us how you’re going to be our friend, because those people out there don’t see you as a friend.”
“I know that, Bo,” I replied. “And I don’t know how to explain it other than what I said was totally out of context from what I meant.” I badly wanted him to understand. I didn’t have a prayer of convincing the crowd outside, but maybe I could make him see that I wasn’t the heartless caricature I had been made out to be. I said how sorry I was and that I understood why people were angry.
“I’m going to do everything I can to help,” I told him. “Whether or not people in West Virginia support me, I’m going to support you.”
Bo looked at me and pointed to the photograph of his children. “Those are the three faces I had to come home and explain to that I didn’t have a job,” he said. “Those are the three faces I had to come home to and explain that we’re going to find a way; that God would provide for us, one way or another, that I was not worried, and I had to try to keep a brave face so they would understand.”
He said that earlier in the day he had picked up his young son from school and suggested they stop to get something to eat. “No, Daddy,” his son replied, “I don’t want us to use up our money.” It was hard to hear that.
After the meeting ended, I went off to the side with Bo and Lauren. I wanted to let them know I appreciated their candor. Bo told me how he leaned on his Christian faith in a difficult time. It was everything to him. I shared a little about my faith, and, for a minute, we were just three people bonding over the wisdom of the prophet Micah: “To act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.”
Bo was a proud man, but he knew he and his community needed help. Why, he asked, weren’t there more programs in place already to help people who were ready and willing to work to find good jobs to replace the ones that had disappeared? Why wasn’t there anywhere for someone like him to turn? I told him about my plans to bring new employers to the area and to support small businesses like his wife’s. They weren’t going to solve the region’s problems overnight, but they would help make life better. And if we could get some positive results, people might start believing again that progress was possible. But I knew that campaign promises would go only so far. As we drove off for Charleston, I called my husband. “Bill, we have to help these people.”
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* * *
How do we help give people in rural counties such as Mingo and McDowell a fighting chance?
The most urgent need right now is to stop the Trump administration from making things a whole lot worse.
I hope by the time you read this, Republicans will have failed to repeal Obamacare, but that’s far from certain. Trump’s health care plan would have devastating consequences in poor and rural areas, especially for older people and families who rely on Medicaid. And at a time when opiate addiction is ravaging communities across rural America, Trump and Republicans in Congress proposed scrapping the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that insurers cover mental health services and addiction treatment. It alarms me to think about what this would mean for the recovering addicts, family members, doctors, counselors, and police officers I met in West Virginia and across the country who were all struggling to deal with the consequences of this epidemic.
Beyond health care, Trump wants to eliminate nearly all federal support for economic diversification and development in Coal Country. He’s proposed shutting down the Appalachian Regional Commission, which has invested more than $387 million in West Virginia alone, helped create thousands of jobs, and supported community efforts such as the Williamson Health and Wellness Center. Appalachia needs more investment, not less; more access to fast, affordable, and reliable broadband for businesses and homes; more high-quality training programs that do a better job of matching students to jobs that actually exist, not just providing certificates that look nice in a frame on the wall but don’t lead anywhere; and incentives such as the New Markets Tax Credit that can attract new employers beyond the coal industry and build a more sustainable economy.
Trump’s promises are ringing increasingly hollow. After the election, he took a lot of credit for persuading the air-conditioning maker Carrier to keep hundreds of manufacturing jobs in Indiana rather than moving them to Mexico. Since then, we’ve learned it was essentially a bait and switch: Carrier received millions in subsidies from taxpayers and is still shipping out 630 jobs anyway. That kind of bait and switch shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s followed Trump’s career.
Trump also promised to reopen coal mines and revive the industry to its former glory. But despite what he says, and what a lot of people want to believe, the hard truth is that coal isn’t coming back. As Trump’s own director of the National Economic Council, Gary Cohn, admitted in a moment of candor in May 2017, “Coal doesn’t even make that much sense anymore.” Politicians owe it to communities that have relied on the industry for generations to be honest about the future.
The entire debate over coal unfolds in a kind of alternative reality. Watching the news and listening to political speeches, you’d think coal is the only industry in West Virginia. Yet the truth is that the number of coal miners has been shrinking since the end of World War II. During the 1960s, fewer than fifty thousand West Virginians worked in the mines. By the end of the eighties, it was fewer than twenty-eight thousand. The numbers have gone up and down as the price of coal fluctuates, but it’s been twenty-five years since the industry accounted for even 5 percent of total employment in the state. Today far more West Virginians work in education and health care, which makes protecting the Affordable Care Act vital to protecting West Virginian jobs.
Across the country, Americans have more than twice as many jobs producing solar energy as they do mining coal. And think about this: since 2001, a half million jobs in department stores across the country have disappeared. That’s many times more than were lost in coal mining. Just between October 2016 and April 2017, about eighty-nine thousand Americans lost jobs in retail—more than all the people who work in coal mining put together. Yet coal continues to loom much larger in our politics and national imagination.
More broadly, we remain locked into an outdated picture of the working class in America that distorts our policy priorities. A lot of the press coverage and political analysis since the election has taken as a given that the “real America” is full of middle-aged white men who wear hard hats and work on assembly lines—or did until Obama ruined everything. There are certainly people who fit that description, and they deserve respect and every chance to make a decent living. But fewer than 10 percent of Americans today work in factories and on farms, down from 36 percent in 1950. Most working-class Americans have service jobs. They’re nurses and medical technicians, childcare providers and computer coders. Many of them are people of color and women. In fact, roughly two-thirds of all minimum-wage jobs in America are held by women.
Repealing Obamacare or starting a trade war with China won’t do anything to make these Americans’ lives better. But raising the minimum wage would. It would help a lot. So would a large program to build and repair our bridges, tunnels, roads, ports, and airports and expand high-speed internet access to neglected areas. Strengthening unions and making it easier for workers to organize and bargain for better pay and benefits would help rebuild the middle class. Supporting overstretched families with paid leave and more affordable childcare and elder care would make a huge difference. So would a “public option�
�� for health care and allowing more people to buy into Medicare and Medicaid, which would help expand coverage and bring down costs.
The other thing we should be honest about is how hard it’s going to be, no matter what we do, to create significant economic opportunity in every remote area of our vast nation. In some places, the old jobs aren’t coming back, and the infrastructure and workforce needed to support big new industries aren’t there. As hard as it is, people may have to leave their hometowns and look for work elsewhere in America.
We know this can have a transformative effect. In the 1990s, the Clinton administration experimented with a program called Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing, which gave poor families in public housing vouchers to move to safer, middle-income neighborhoods where their children were surrounded every day by evidence that life can be better. Twenty years later, the children of those families have grown up to earn higher incomes and attend college at higher rates than their peers who stayed behind. And the younger the kids were when they moved, the bigger boost they received.
Previous generations of Americans actually moved around the country much more than we do today. Millions of black families migrated from the rural South to the urban North. Large numbers of poor whites left Appalachia to take jobs in Midwestern factories. My own father hopped a freight train from Scranton, Pennsylvania, to Chicago in 1935, looking for work.
Yet today, despite all our advances, fewer Americans are moving than ever before. One of the laid-off steelworkers I met in Kentucky told me he found a good job in Columbus, Ohio, but he was doing the 120-mile commute every week because he didn’t want to move. “People from Kentucky, they want to be in Kentucky,” another said to me. “That’s something that’s just in our DNA.” I understand that feeling. People’s identities and their support systems—extended family, friends, church congregations, and so on—are rooted in where they come from. This is painful, gut-wrenching stuff. And no politician wants to be the one to say it.
I believe that after we do everything we can to help create new jobs in distressed small towns and rural areas, we also have to give people the skills and tools they need to seek opportunities beyond their hometowns—and provide a strong safety net both for those who leave and those who stay.
Whether it’s updating policies to meet the changing conditions of America’s workers, or encouraging greater mobility, the bottom line is the same: we can’t spend all our time staving off decline. We need to create new opportunities, not just slow down the loss of old ones. Rather than keep trying to re-create the economy of the past, we should focus on making the jobs people actually have better and figure out how to create the good jobs of the future in fields such as clean energy, health care, construction, computer coding, and advanced manufacturing.
Republicans will always be better at defending yesterday. Democrats have to be in the future business. The good news is we have a lot of ideas to help make life better in our modern economy. As you saw earlier, I proposed a whole raft of them in my campaign. So even as Democrats play defense in Trump’s Washington, we have to keep pushing new and better solutions.
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On that trip to West Virginia, I spent some time with a group of retired miners who were concerned about losing the health care and pensions they had been promised for years of dangerous labor, often in exchange for lower wages.
One retiree told me a story that has stuck in my memory ever since.
Many years ago, when he first went into the mines, he told his wife, “You’re not going to have to worry. We’re union. We’ll have our health care, we’ll have our pensions, you won’t have to worry about nothing.” But quietly, he still worried about his neighbors who didn’t have the same benefits.
In 1992, he decided to vote for the first time in his life. He wanted to vote for Bill. When his friends at the mine asked him why, he said the only reason was health care. “You’ve got health care; what are you worried about?” they asked. But he was adamant. “There are other people that don’t have health care,” he would say. And when Obamacare was finally passed, he thought it didn’t go far enough.
Now some coal companies were trying to take away benefits that had been promised long ago. The security he had assured his wife was rock solid was now in jeopardy.
“People need to worry about one another,” he told me. “We are our brother’s keeper, and we need to worry about other people. Me, personally, I have faith; I know God is going to get us through it. But we need to be worrying about our brother.”
Most of the folks I met in places like Ashland, Kentucky, and Williamson, West Virginia, were good people in a bad situation, desperate for change. I wish more than anything that I could have done a better job speaking to their fears and frustrations. Their distrust went too deep, and the weight of history was too heavy. But I wish I could have found the words or emotional connection to make them believe how passionately I wanted to help their communities, and their families.
Where there’s a will to condemn, evidence will follow.
—Chinese proverb
Those Damn Emails
Imagine you’re a kid sitting in history class thirty years from now learning about the 2016 presidential election, which brought to power the least experienced, least knowledgeable, least competent President our country has ever had. Something must have gone horribly wrong, you think. Then you hear that one issue dominated press coverage and public debate in that race more than any other. “Climate change?” you ask. “Health care?” “No,” your teacher responds. “Emails.”
Emails, she explains, were a primitive form of electronic communication that used to be all the rage. And the dumb decision by one presidential candidate to use a personal email account at the office—as many senior government officials had done in the past (and continued to do)—got more coverage than any other issue in the whole race. In fact, if you had turned on a network newscast in 2016, you were three times more likely to hear about those emails than about all the real issues combined.
“Was there a crime?” you ask. “Did it damage our national security?”
“No and no,” the teacher replies with a shrug.
Sound ridiculous? I agree.
For those of you in the present, you’ve most likely already heard more than your fill about my emails. Probably the last thing you want to read right now is more about those “damn emails,” as Bernie Sanders memorably put it. If so, skip to the next chapter—though I wish you’d read a few more pages to understand how it relates to what’s happening now. But there’s no doubt that a big part of me would also be very happy to never think about the whole mess ever again.
For months after the election, I tried to put it all out of my mind. It would do me no good to brood over my mistake. And it wasn’t healthy or productive to dwell on the ways I felt I’d been shivved by then-FBI Director Jim Comey—three times over the final five months of the campaign.
Then, to my surprise, my emails were suddenly front-page news again. On May 9, 2017, Donald Trump fired Comey. The White House distributed a memo by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein that excoriated Comey for his unprofessional handling of the investigation into my emails. They said that was the reason for firing him. (You read that right. Donald Trump said he fired Comey because of how unfair the email investigation was to . . . me.) Rosenstein cited the “nearly universal judgment” that Comey had made serious mistakes, in particular his decisions to disparage me in a July press conference and to inform Congress that he was reopening the investigation just eleven days before the election. Testifying before Congress on May 19, 2017, Rosenstein described Comey’s press conference as “profoundly wrong and unfair.”
I read Rosenstein’s memo in disbelief. Here was Trump’s number two man at the Justice Department putting in writing all the things I’d been thinking for months. Rosenstein cited the opinions of former Attorneys General and Deputy Attorneys General of both parties. It was as if, after more than tw
o years of mass hysteria, the world had finally come to its senses.
But the story quickly fell apart. On national television, Trump told NBC’s Lester Holt that the real reason he fired Comey was the FBI’s investigation into possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence. Or, as Trump called it, “this Russia thing.” I wasn’t surprised. Trump knew that, for all of Comey’s faults, he wouldn’t lie about the law. He had insisted that there was no case against me, despite Republican (and internal FBI) pressure to say there was, so when he confirmed the FBI’s Russia investigation to Congress in 2017, I figured he was on borrowed time.
Still, it was incredible to see Comey go from villain to martyr in five seconds flat.
To make sense of this, you have to be able to keep two different thoughts in your head at the same time: Rosenstein was right about the email investigation, and Comey was wrong. But Trump was wrong to fire Comey over Russia. Both of those statements are true. And both are frustrating.
As painful as it is to return to this maddening saga, it’s now more important than ever to try to understand how this issue ballooned into an election-tipping controversy. A lot of people still don’t understand what it was all about; they just know it was bad. And I can’t blame them: they were told that over and over again for a year and a half. For most of the general election campaign, the word email dominated all others when people were asked to name the first word that came to mind about me.
Right off the bat, let me say again that, yes, the decision to use personal email instead of an official government account was mine and mine alone. I own that. I never meant to mislead anyone, never kept my email use secret, and always took classified information seriously.
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