Tipsheet

Wait…That's What Kamala Harris Said About West Virginia's Coal Mines?

Condescending Kamala. Snobby Kerry. Crooked Hillary. All three of these prominent members of the Democratic Party have one thing in common: they’ve all shown their hatred and disdain for rural Americans, especially those who work in the coal industry. This has been a fact for quite some time, but Democrats are no longer the party for working people. It can’t be anymore. The base is dominated by professional urban elites. Its political war chests are filled by wealthy college-educated whites, which will collide with activists in the communities of color, but that’s a pending civil war tale for another time. It’s painfully obvious that this party hates blue-collar workers, their families, and their communities. It’s written in their policies. It’s now expressed in their words. There’s no word salad to cover up the Left’s ingrained hatred of people who aren’t snobby, progressive, and have an insufferable moral superiority complex like they do. Three words sum up the Biden administration’s agenda: regional economic genocide. Coal supports a whole host of rural communities. They already took a beating under Obama. In 2016, Hillary Clinton proudly declared that she would put coal miners out of work. 

In 2020, John Kerry, the Biden’s White House’s climate czar of sorts, all but said these people’s jobs will be destroyed, so smarten up:

 “What President Biden wants to do is make sure that those folks have better choices, that they have alternatives, that they can be the people who go to work to make the solar panels,” Kerry said. Jobs in wind and solar energy on average pay half what jobs in the oil and gas industry do.

Look, John, not all of us can inherit the wealth from a ketchup empire through marriage. What a detached statement, but one that shows this Democratic Party has undergone a full-blown limousine liberal takeover. I doubt most of the House Democratic caucus has even spoken to anyone outside of their urban-based congressional district. Most Americans don’t live in cities either, so when it comes to the pulse of the nation—the liberals are still painfully behind which is why legislative overreach is bound to happen. 

I’d thought the campaign of denigration against coal miners would cease there. No. Kamala Harris has entered the chat. The VP went onto a local West Virginia station for an interview where she was trying to pressure conservative Democrat Joe Manchin to back the COVID relief package. She described the state’s coal mines, a staple of its economy, as “land mines.” We’re not even a month into this administration and they’re already attempting to play hardball. Not only that but being outright terrible at it. This plan, as you’d expect, is not having the results the Biden White House had hoped to achieve. Manchin said he was blindsided by this interview. As you can expect, he’s not happy about it. Also, Democrats can ill-afford to anger the one Democrat that means quite a lot when it comes to passing their agenda items without Republican support. Also, as Rachel Bade wrote in Politico, why was Harris, a California progressive, picked to kick off this political scheme? It’s a misfire indeed—and it could be repercussions down the road (via Politico):

…congressional Democrats are planning to take their first step toward passing the president’s $1.9 trillion pandemic relief bill without Republican help. But now they’ve got a problem: an unhappy Manchin — who, like it or not, has the power to grind this entire thing to a halt.

…here’s what happened: For days the moderate West Virginia Democrat has been imploring the White House to cut a deal with Republicans on coronavirus assistance. Stimulus checks shouldn’t be going to people making $300,000, he’s made clear, and the overall price tag should come down after Congress has already spent upward of $4 trillion. Democratic leaders, however, have balked at the notion of slowing down to negotiate and will put a budget on the floor this week to prepare reconciliation.

But here’s the thing: They need Manchin’s support to do it.

Enter Harris and what one of my Democratic sources called a “ham-handed” interview on local West Virginia television Thursday. It was clearly meant to up the pressure on Manchin to support Biden’s package, but it only antagonized him. “I couldn’t believe it,” Manchin said in a video that went viral Saturday. “No one called me [about it]. … We’re going to try to find a bipartisan pathway forward … but we need to work together. That’s not a way of working together, what was done.”

I’m told Manchin also conveyed his displeasure privately to senior White House officials late last week. Another head-scratcher in all this: Harris isn’t exactly popular in West Virginia. And in the interview, she referred to “abandoned land mines” instead of “abandoned mine lands” in West Virginia, a slip-up sure to cause eye rolls in the state.

Even before Harris’ interview, senior Democrats on the Hill were privately a little worried about Manchin, noting that he has the power to stop Democratic leaders from jamming through the Covid package without Republicans. Two options at Manchin’s disposal: refuse to back the budget this week until there are more talks with Republicans, or insist that Biden and Democrats lower the price tag before doing so.

It’s a situation Biden and Democratic leaders will have to deal with all year.

It looks like Sleepy Joe isn’t the only one having brain farts. Well, for Joe, those are legitimate. For Harris and company, it’s just their hatred of normal, hard-working Americans who, heaven-forbid, work in mines to extract energy resources. We’re the Saudi Arabia of coal. We should exploit that if we’re smart. Alas, Democrats are not—and you’re seeing that on full display right now.