Swing State: West Virginia
Greetings from West Virginia, home to America’s largest powerball winner, Jack Whitaker. Reports reveal our newest, celebrity resident Martha Stewart has fashioned some batches of jelly from the crab apples she picked from Alderson’s camp grounds. Meanwhile, Senator John Kerry’s campaign has decided that it will not air any television spots in West Virginia in the two weeks before November 2.
Although most polls give President Bush a slight lead over Kerry in West Virginia, the word on the street is the Kerry camp has given up the ghost on winning here. Bush has visited the state at least six times, and, last week, I couldn’t take my usual route home for lunch because the V.P. was eating his lunch near my office.
Back in the old days, when five measly, electoral votes didn’t decide our national election, and politicians promised only liquor for votes, a traffic jam in Charleston, West Virginia, usually meant a tractor-trailer crash on I-64. Now, it means either Dick or W.’s eating a cheese sandwich with some Republican cronies at The Grill. Ho-hum.
Although Kerry’s visited West Virginia several times, the outlook on his winning is bleak, and a local paper reported that his camp will now focus on more important swing states, like Ohio. Unemployment in West Virginia continues, but when I returned home from my mother’s home today (where I disposed of one dead bird, and a piece of black, plastic garbage bag that my mom had mistaken for a dead bat–but I digress), I passed a trailer home prominently displaying a Bush-Cheney sign. And that sums up the sentiment here, I think.
Maybe Kerry should have learned to make crab apple jelly.
Expressive Cynic blogs at Donut Buzz
(Update: now they plan to run ads after all.)
October 29th, 2004 at 8:38 am
The race has tightened, with Kerry edging within two points of BC04. The problem, as noted above, is that it looks like the majority of West Virginians will fall for the GOP divide and conquer tactic by voting against their best economic interest. Hence, donutbuzz’s mention of the mobile home sporting BC04 signs.
(BTW: Not that KE04 presents a much better plan. Kerry voted for NAFTA.)