Also: VIDEO INTERVIEW: Clinton Stronger Than Obama in W. Va. General Election]]> http://blogs.cqpolitics.com/trail-less-traveled/2008/05/video-w-virginians-dont-count.html http://blogs.cqpolitics.com/trail-less-traveled/2008/05/video-w-virginians-dont-count.html Mon, 12 May 2008 16:21:57 -0500 MORGANTOWN, W.Va. (May 11) -- It is clear that Democrats Leslie Maxwell and Carrie Taylor have a lot in common as the two friends chat across the bar at Gibbie’s, a college-town pub with high-end Blue Moon and Magic Hat beer taps mixed in with working man’s standbys Pabst Blue Ribbon and Budweiser.

Maxwell, 23, just finished up coursework for a journalism degree at West Virginia University. She is serving beer to a thin crowd of Mother’s Day patrons.

Taylor, also 23, was one class ahead of Maxwell at their Putnam County high school, nearly three hours south of here by car. She wrapped up her masters degree in public administration this year while working in the state legislature. She used to work at Gibbie’s.

Despite word from political analysts that, because of his lead in delegates, Barack Obama has defeated Hillary Rodham Clinton ., both Maxwell and Taylor, like many of the 665,000 registered Democrats here, are enthusiastic about voting in Tuesday’s primary.

But the friends are separated by the essential question for Democrats.

Taylor plans to vote for Clinton. Maxwell already cast an absentee ballot for Obama.

“I think he’s locked it up,” Maxwell said. But that didn’t stop her from making the drive home to cast an absentee ballot.

“I believe that he can make some changes,” said Maxwell, who was born in South Korea and moved to West Virginia after being adopted.

She seems unfazed when one of her customers, a rough-cut guy drinking Rogue beer, exhibits the depth of his political acumen by telling a pair of newly met political reporters a joke that combines a racial epithet with a gender slam to denigrate Obama and Clinton in one quick turn of phrase.

Maxwell hopes that West Virginians, who favored Republican George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004 after giving Democrat Bill Clinton their five electoral votes in 1992 and 1996, will “overlook” cultural issues, including gun rights and abortion, that helped Bush win crossover support from Democrats.

Richard Brisbin, a political science professor at West Virginia University, said that if Obama is the Democratic nominee he will have to improve his standing with the working-class white voters who constitute the bulk of the state’s electorate.

Those voters are “a little out of touch with the culture and background that Barack Obama possesses,” Brisbin said. He said Democratic nominees John Kerry and Al Gore were hurt by their inability to connect with rural voters in a state where the biggest city, Charleston, has barely more than 50,000 residents.

Because Obama is biracial and most West Virgnians have never had the opportunity to vote for a black candidate, he said, “the bar is higher” in the general election.

ROCKY MOUNT, N.C. — As a freight train sullied by grime and graffiti lumbered down the tracks that bisect Main Street here in the late afternoon sun Monday, it revealed in its wake a blocks-long chain of boarded-up storefronts and hollowed-out buildings whose abandonment was relieved only by churches and a handful of discount shops.

This majority-black city a little less than an hour’s drive east of Raleigh, still racially split by the train tracks, was pounded first by the closing of Rocky Mount Mills in 1996 and then by flooding from Hurricane Floyd in 1999. The main drag is a ghost town. But local officials say it has already hit rock bottom and they are investing, with the help of earmarked federal dollars, in a downtown revitalization project that they hope will resurrect the city.

For at least four decades, this suburban-style tree-lined enclave in the northwest part of the city has been heralded as a model of harmonious racial diversity and economic stability. The wealthier corners of the community, with median household incomes ranging well into six figures, and the poorer sections, where $40,000 per year is common, are heavily Democratic and very liberal.

As the political and real-estate signs dotting the neighborhood seem to symbolize, middle-class communities are the places where the hardships brought on by the subprime mortgage crisis will be seized upon by Democrats during their campaign in their attacks on Republican economic policies. Democrats see a powerful tie between the Bush administration’s distaste for industry regulation and the deepening mortgage crisis, a connection they hope to drive home to voters as they craft their economic platform.

“Under Bush’s America, when he leaves office gas is going to cost you know $4-plus at the pump, the dollar is at its weakest, millions of people have lost their homes in foreclosures, students it will be made more difficult for them to go to college in terms of student loans,” said Rep. Chaka Fattah , whose 2nd District contains Mt. Airy. “Elections have consequences, and that’s why we hope people come out and vote, because the country’s a lot worse off than it was seven years ago.”

Obama and his rival for the Democratic nomination, New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton , have proposed housing plans that would pour $30 billion of federal money into efforts to ameliorate the housing crisis, including assistance to state and local governments. They both have expressed support for congressional efforts to expand the Federal Housing Administration’s ability to insure home loans and repeal prohibitions on bankruptcy judges modifying the terms of home loans.

Obama wants to up mortgage revenue bond authority by $10 billion, which would facilitate the refinancing of home loans and the extension of credit for homebuyers who are new to the market. Clinton’s plan, which more heavily favors government intervention, would implement a 90-day national moratorium on foreclosures and freeze adjustable rate mortgages, or ARMs, for five years.

Their approaches vary markedly from that of presumptive Republican nominee John McCain , who is the senior senator from Arizona. McCain has been critical of those who want the government to subsidize big-time lenders and also those who want to provide money for consumers. He has been supportive of the Senate’s bipartisan relief package but offered little in the way of his own proposals for government action.

“All we want to do is have it hit bottom now so it can start going up,” McCain told Fox News Channel’s Greta Van Susteren last week.

“I’ve always been committed to the principle that it’s not the duty of government to bail out and reward those who act irresponsibly, whether they’re big banks or small borrowers,” he said in March.

Doug Holtz-Eakin, a senior McCain adviser and the former director of the Congressional Budget Office, said McCain wants to see if the Senate’s plan is capable of adjusting to the crisis.

“If he decides ‘no,’ then he would move to make more proposals,” Holtz-Eakin said.

The Politics of Intervention

McCain’s stance is being received well by fiscal conservatives, a set that has misgivings about his past wavering on President Bush’s tax cuts.

Complete archive of CQ Politics video

CANONSBURG, Pa. — New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton will win the majority of popular votes and the Democratic presidential nomination “if she gets a big victory in Pennsylvania,” former President Bill Clinton told a packed senior center in this borough south of Pittsburgh Tuesday.

And if Canonsburg is any indication, the New York senator is on track to do very well in the Keystone State.