The truth about Clinton’s visit to Zanesville
If you listen to NPR’s coverage of Hillary Clinton’s visit to Zanesville yesterday, you’d get the impression she was out courting the poor, uneducated, white voters that have supported her in the past. I hear this mantra that uneducated Whites are her base and it seems to go pretty much unchallenged in the mainstream media. Let me tell you what you didn’t hear in that NPR report.
- The event took place on the collocated campuses of Zane State College and Ohio University-Zanesville.
- Many attendees were employees of the two institutions, as well as students.
- I recognized some attendees from the community; they were neither poor nor uneducated.
- At the beginning, the event was by invitation only.
So, in what can only be described as a stroke of sheer genius, the Clinton campaign decided to get out the uneducated white voters of Zanesville by staging an invitation-only event on a college campus. Little does the rest of the country know just how politically connected our uneducated Whites are here in Zanesville.
The unemployed former Lowe’s carpet salesman interviewed at the beginning of the NPR piece must have stuck out like a sore thumb. By far the attendees were either college educated–ranging from associate’s to doctorate degrees–or students. The Clinton campaign had to bring in some poor guy who lost his home in the home mortgage crisis; he was stereotype incarnate.
So, of all the people in attendance that the NPR reporter could have interviewed, he had to hunt down an unemployed former carpet salesman. I imagine that’s because such a gathering of educated Whites did not fit the story the national, mainstream media wanted to write about this part of Appalachian Ohio.
My point is, it’s not that there aren’t uneducated Whites around here, it’s that there were so few of them at the Clinton event. How does that equate to “Clinton Targets Poor Voters in Appalachia?”
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