Donald Trump has, for the time being, entirely eclipsed normal American politics. In doing so, he has distracted attention from all the banal and familiar ways that US politics has become a tedious, empty grind.
Take "gaffes." They have long been a staple of conventional campaign coverage. But Trump doesn't make gaffes. He bluntly says insane things and refuses to back down from them.
This has utterly flummoxed the political media. They are used to dealing with scripted politicians trying to stay on message. Those messages are typically so bland, repetitive, and poll-tested that the only fun in campaign coverage is catching them slipping up, saying something off script, something that sounds bad or can be spun to sound bad. Think Obama and "you didn't build that" or Romney and "corporations are people."
So you can practically hear journalists sigh in relief when they get to cover Hillary Clinton. Here is something they understand: a politician who strives stay on message but ... fails. Regularly. The Daily Show recently documented this in painful detail:
This kind of stuff is perfect fodder for the gaffe cycle we all know and ... well, no one loves it. But at least everyone understands their roles in it.
I want to focus on one of these gaffes in particular, the one about coal, both because it says something about coal and because it illustrates just how vapid and onanistic the rituals of presidential campaign coverage have become.
The dreaded gaffe
Here's what Clinton said, at a Democratic town hall in Ohio:
I'm the only candidate which has a policy about how to bring economic opportunity using clean renewable energy as the key into coal country. Because we're going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business, right, Tim?
And we're going to make it clear that we don't want to forget those people. 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.
That part in bold instantly became a gaffe.
(And of course it did. Dammit, Hillary! You've been doing this half your life. When are you going to get good at it?)
Plucked out of context, Clinton's comment can be spun to sound like she is boasting about the "war on coal," as though she's part of an intentional effort on the part of the Democratic Party to destroy an industry. And that's just how it has been spun, across right-wing media, with headlines like "Hillary Clinton Has A Message For Coal Miners: You’re Fired."
Clinton has since apologized for her infelicitous phrasing in a letter to West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, reaffirming that "coal will be a part of the energy mix for years to come, both in the US and around the world." (Sigh.)
Even by the degraded standards of US campaign coverage, this is a silly bit of kabuki. Here are four reasons why.
1) Coal miners and coal companies are going out of business no matter what
Employment in Appalachian coal mining, which is what Clinton was talking about, has been declining since 1985.
The reasons are myriad:
- Coal mining has become highly mechanized, displacing coal miners.
- The best seams have been mined out, shifting demand to cheaper Western coal.
- Fracked natural gas has become plentiful and cheap, outcompeting coal electricity.
- Electricity demand has been flat even as new capacity is built, pushing out old base load power plants.
- Energy efficiency has become more sophisticated and widespread, keeping electricity demand flat.
- Solar and particularly wind have gotten cheap and scaled up.
- The market for metallurgical coal is crashing.
- Banks are pulling financing from troubled coal companies (as the New York Times documented today).
- Federal pollution regulations have steadily tightened on new power plants.
- Now, finally, thanks to Obama's Clean Power Plan, existing coal power plants, grandfathered in under the Clean Air Act and exempt from pollution standards for so long, are subject to pollution regulations as well.
It would take extraordinary effort for a President Hillary Clinton to slow these trends; many of them are beyond the reach of federal policy. And why would she try?
The larger fact looming behind all this is that the US has pledged substantial carbon reductions, to both international and domestic audiences. Its credibility rides on achieving them. And there is simply no way to achieve them without accelerating coal's decline.
We — the collective we, the United States — are shifting to cleaner energy, both as a market reality and as an explicit policy goal. As part of that, yes, "we're going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business."
There's no way around it; it's just math. The decline is inevitable and almost certainly irreversible.
2) Hillary Clinton wants to spend $30 billion on ailing coal communities
The most absurd aspect of this whole episode is that Clinton's intentions toward coal communities are not a mystery, or even an open question. She wants to help them. She has a detailed, thoughtful $30 billion plan to help them, securing their health care and pension benefits, offering tax credits and job training, and pouring economic development money into the region.
She was literally talking about her plan to help them when she made the "gaffe."
Which leads us to...
3) No one genuinely misunderstood Clinton
What is a gaffe supposed to be, anyway? Why is it supposed to matter?
The idea is that the politician is slipping and telling some truth that she intended to hide. A gaffe is supposed to reveal something.
Did Clinton's gaffe reveal that coal companies will keep going out of business? No, that's already well-understood by analysts (and the stock market).
Did it reveal that her energy plans, while purportedly about reducing carbon and spurring new clean energy industries, are secretly about destroying coal communities?
No. And no one in the media who covered it as a gaffe really thought it did. The gaffiness is premised on the idea that some other people might think that. But of course, other people will think that only if the quote is plucked out of context and distorted.
So that's what qualifies as a gaffe these days: not an unwitting revelation, but anything that can be spun to look bad or reinforce an existing narrative.
The campaign press, so reticent to draw even the most obvious conclusions about policy-related matters, is quick to judge a politician as a performer. Saying something your opponents can easily distort is, in their view, poor performance.
No one gets this kind of theater-criticism scrutiny more than Clinton — who is also, incidentally, criticized for not being spontaneous and authentic.
4) Republicans, not Obama or Clinton, are turning their backs on coal communities
Clinton isn't the only one with a plan to help coal communities. Obama also has one, as part of this 2016 budget. It's called the POWER+ Plan; Republicans refuse to bring it to a vote, despite pleas from several coal communities.
In last December's bipartisan budget deal, there was a provision that would have ensured the solvency of coal miners' health care and pension funds. By law, those benefits are supposed to be backed by federal guarantee, though funding has lapsed in recent years. This is highly relevant today, because coal companies going through bankruptcy are busy trying to jettison those obligations.
The provision got stripped out at the last minute.
Why? Who would do that?
Funny you should ask. It was yanked out of the bill on the specific and vigorous insistence of one Addison Mitchell "Mitch" McConnell Jr., the senator from Kentucky. (Yes, Kentucky, where the suffering coal miners are.)
Why would the man representing beleaguered coal communities block a plan to ensure their benefits? This was his response to the Washington Post:
McConnell’s spokesman does not dispute that telling of events. And McConnell has not publicly explained his opposition to the measure.
Since McConnell has offered no official justification, here are some educated guesses:
- McConnell doesn't like the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), and it doesn't like him. It endorsed his opponent, Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes, in the last election, and campaigned hard for her. The UMWA desperately wants the funds guaranteed; McConnell wants to deny UMWA things it wants.
- If help for miners gets through Congress, Obama will get some credit for it. McConnell's political North Star is denying Obama credit for anything.
- The "war on coal" narrative is extremely convenient for McConnell and other Republicans. As long as they can harness the decline in coal mining to an anti-Obama/Clinton narrative, it amounts to an endless source of rage among their constituents. That rage is more useful to McConnell than relief for coal communities would be.
Conclusion: Telling the truth is a good thing
Republicans like McConnell are telling Appalachian coal communities that the coal jobs will come back if they can just get rid of those pesky Democratic presidents. That is a lie. And it's not a benign lie, either — it's preventing those communities from turning their attention to alternative futures.
Obama and Clinton are trying to tell them the truth: The jobs aren't coming back; it's time to build a new economy. They want to send these communities funds for education, economic development, and health care.
Appalachian coal communities are suffering. One party has a plan to help them, while the other party is using them for electoral advantage. That's the story.
But it's not the story told on cable news.
Instead, it's covered as a gaffe, which means the fault, according to media theater critics, lies not with the people distorting Clinton's intentions and her policy. The fault lies with Clinton, for giving them an opening. Silly Clinton.
And so it goes, until the next gaffe, and the next.
Whatever else you might say about Trump, it's difficult to argue that his contempt for this process is misplaced.