Bill Clinton talks coal in Prestonsburg
 Joseph Gerth, @Joe_Gerth 6:38 a.m. EDT May 13, 2016
Former President Bill Clinton spoke to supporters as he stumps for his wife and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton during a rally in Frankfort. Sam Upshaw Jr./The CJ
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Alley Little, left, and Ashley Hunter hold their signs supporting Trump outside of the Clinton rally in Prestonsburg, Ky on Thursday evening. May 12, 2016(Photo: Alton Strupp/The Courier-Journal)Buy Photo
PRESTONSBURG, Ky. Former President Bill Clinton braved what has become hostile territory for him and his wife, Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton, going deep into coal country Thursday in an effort to convince voters that she's not opposed to the industry.
He was met with shouts from unemployed coal workers and their families who had earlier stood outside the Prestonsburg Elementary School where he spoke, holding signs telling him to go home.
"I don't care if you boo or cheer. I'm glad you're here," he told the miners, who were allowed to stay throughout Clinton's remarks.
He laid out her plan to sink $30 billion into programs to train people and bring investment into economically distressed parts of the country.
Central Appalachia is a difficult region for Hillary Clinton as she tries to recover from comments she made in March that were seen in this area as advocating for the destruction of coal jobs, which are central to the region's economy.
As if to underscore what the speech would be about, Clinton was introduced on stage by former Gov. Paul Patton, who was a coal operator before he was elected governor.
Bill Clinton's speech, particularly near the beginning, was punctuated with loud boos from the back of the small grade school gymnasium, Clinton told the coal miners to bring it on, that people in America spend far too little time talking to people with whom they disagree.
He spoke for 25 minutes and while he urged those attending to vote for his wife in next week's Kentucky primary, Clinton acknowledged that many of them wouldn't.
It was his third event of the day after rallies in Owensboro and Frankfort as he headed toward the coal fields.
During the past 40 years, the coal industry has declined in Kentucky because of several factors, including low natural gas prices and narrow seams that make Eastern Kentucky coal some of the most expensive coal in the world to mine.
In the late 1970s, there were nearly 40,000 coal jobs in Eastern Kentucky, but by 2014, that number had dropped to fewer than 10,000. The steepest declines came in the 1980s.
Much of the blame in these parts are heaped on President Barack Obama who has pushed through new rules for coal-burning plants.
Lloyd Hall, who worked 23 years in the mines before he was laid off three months ago, said he came to protest and said he backed Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996 but that he's changed party allegiance and now supports Trump.
"It was Obama's war on coal and his politics. I don't agree with it," he said. "Obama has destroyed our livelihood here."
Hillary Clinton created a problem for herself in March, when speaking at a town hall forum in Ohio, when she said she was going to "put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business"
Those words came as part of an answer to a question about how to help miners adjust to a changing economy.
"We're going to make it clear that we don't want to forget those people," she said. "Those people labored in those mines for generations, losing their health, often losing their lives to turn on our lights and power our factories. Now we've got to move away from coal and all the other fossil fuels, but I don't want to move away from the people who did the best they could to produce the energy that we relied on."
She since apologized to a miner in West Virginia, saying that her words were "totally out of context for what I meant because I have been talking about helping coal country for a very long time."
That didn't help her last week in the West Virginia primary where U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders beat her 51-36 percent. Bill Clinton was trying to stop her losses in Kentucky, which he carried in 1992 and 1996.
Bill Clinton promised the crowd, of what the campaign said was 650 people, that if Hillary Clinton is elected, he will head up her efforts to bring retraining, jobs and investment into distressed areas like the coal fields of Appalachia, the Mississippi Delta and Native American reservations.
And he didn't sugar coat his talk about jobs in Eastern Kentucky's coal industry, which he said will be going away no matter who the president is or what the president does because of low natural gas costs and the harder-to-reach seams of coal. |
