When Bubba Meets Obama
LABASH, MATT
When Bubba Meets Obama If you want to fi sh for votes in Appalachia, here’s how BY MATT LABASH Roanoke To get the truth out of a political gun-for-hire, it is always best to catch him when he’s...
...Being a magazine writer by trade, obligated to graft metaphors onto even the most recalcitrant subject matter, I ask Mudcat what we’ve learned...
...Mudcat, who loves the ladies almost as much as he loves killing big bucks, agreed to take the gig only if he could persuade the bubbas in language they could relate to...
...These voters went in droves to the unlikeliest Jacksonian populist imaginable, Hillary Clinton, whose bubba street cred entailed calling the hogs at Arkansas Razorbacks football games, claiming she once bagged a banded duck, and doing a shot of Crown Royal at a campaign stop (three tries to get it down, and it was Canadian whiskey to boot...
...God loves them queers every bit that he loves the Republicans...
...Where others see disadvantage, Mudcat sees opportunity...
...Mudcat, who volunteered for Wilder’s campaign back then, tells a tale, related by a friend who was the candidate’s body man as he campaigned in the far corner of southwest Virginia: They were striking at Pittston Coal...
...Look at Ohio last time...
...Wilder, of course, knew how to speak the language and get through to even the most resistant parts of the culture...
...He’s speaking of the breed of mostly Northeastern elitist liberal that he encounters even on his own campaigns: condescending, green around the gills from consuming too much arugula, with overdeveloped thumbs from clacking nonstop on their Blackberries, all of whom jealously guard their titles such as “deputy campaign manager of the coffee pot...
...Obama should set about wedding the two by visiting here and sending active surrogates, says Mudcat, adding that he’d need “good rural surrogates, right-thinking people—people who have faith...
...But among rural whites in Appalachia, he needs a genuine point of entry, a way to fi nd commonality, express empathy, and connect with the culture without shooting a duck or looking like some goofball trying to choke down shots of Canadian whiskey...
...When Bubba Meets Obama If you want to fi sh for votes in Appalachia, here’s how BY MATT LABASH Roanoke To get the truth out of a political gun-for-hire, it is always best to catch him when he’s unemployed...
...Mudcat doesn’t detect much appetite for offense among Democrats (though he lauds DNC chair Howard Dean’s “50 State Strategy...
...Davis agrees with Mudcat that you don’t have to be of the culture to grab it...
...I don’t care...
...Shortly thereafter, I hear scattered kerplunks and think the wiseacre is throwing rocks, scaring down prospective fi sh...
...But if I was held accountable for the crazy s— I’ve heard Baptist preachers say over the years, I’d go straight to the pits of hellfi re...
...While nobody’s going to take anyone’s gun away in a country of 90 million gun owners, he says, Why make our members vote for bulls— bills that’ll get ’em beat in November...
...Tommy owns the downtown Roanoke store—featuring an oversized Rush Limbaugh banner on its wall— where Mudcat buys all his Carhartt shirts and pants...
...I caught 1,569 fi sh on it last year...
...But Mudcat has other ideas...
...I’ve worked in south Chicago, and I’ve seen their problems...
...He awakens mid-to-late morning, fl ips on a recorded women’s fast-pitch softball game (he will fi ght you if you disparage his beloved Hokies of Virginia Tech), and sits at his living room table in his Hula-girl boxers and a Colbert Report hat...
...Part of the reason they don’t think they can do it, Mudcat says, is they regard Appalachian/bubba voters with condescension...
...And there’s some evidence to back him...
...What kind of blinkered pinhead would want to spot Republicans 40 percent of the electorate...
...In 15 minutes or so, Mudcat helped me replicate about one-fi fth of my lifetime catfi sh take on a fl y. Of course, he cheated by throwing pellets...
...If Obama was spanked by a poseur like her in these regions, journalistic handicappers say, imagine how bad he’ll have it against a war hero with the ScotsIrish name “McCain...
...Yet the deal is, Democrats are perceived as anti-gun...
...You gotta mend line . . . too much drag...
...Rather than trying to make so many problems pretty by putting a nice spin on things, he’s able to hit you on a visceral level which also feels really, really truthful...
...Yes,” says Tommy...
...When not obliged to peddle the platitudes and fi ctions of the poll-tested mediocrities to whom such a one is often yoked, he may revert to speaking English straight...
...That strategy has helped Dems drop the last two presidentials, and could’ve lost them more if Bill Clinton hadn’t been in three-way races...
...If Obama doesn’t start becoming more of a regular in the region, Davis says, he’s punting a major opportunity...
...Moments later, an eight pounder is on my line, which is so feisty—trying to run me under the dock, stopping, then bulldogging me down again—that it takes nearly ten minutes to land it, since I don’t want to snap it off on my light tippet...
...Sipping our iced teas, with Tommy in seersucker slacks and a navy blazer, Mudcat goes to work on him...
...I can’t stress strongly enough to bring extra ammunition...
...I’ll take you to a hole over behind Cousin Gertie’s trailer, but you must fi sh alone for awhile as I have not seen Cousin Gertie for several months and need to get “caught up...
...There are things you understand when you eat a sandwich with someone out of their refrigerator, when you go out hunting with Mudcat...
...He walks up to these two big-ass United Mine Workers, who wore camouflage and had muscles on their turds, rednecks with chaws of tobacco, and he says, “Y’all from Wise County...
...You don’t have to be of the culture to punch through it (see Hillary), you just have to give it its due, says Mudcat...
...The rumbling, foul-mouthed Jeremiah Johnson of the campaign trail, Bard of the Bubbasphere, Mudcat has worked his voodoo, with varying results, for everyone from former governor Mark Warner of Virginia (win), to failed presidential candidates Edwards and Bob Graham, to Virginia senator and vicepresidential prospect Jim Webb (who won, with the help of liberal turnout in Northern Virginia and George Allen’s “Macaca” implosion...
...By the time he came to at 4:00 yesterday afternoon, they were cooked...
...I fi rst take a six pounder...
...And then they got to smiling...
...Mudcat blanches at Dems’ constantly moaning about such people voting against their economic self-interest by voting for Republicans...
...The website Daily Yonder, news outlet of Kentucky’s Center for Rural Strategies, has done the best analysis of the rural vote this cycle, and it reports that in exit polls, only 20 percent of voters in West Virginia said race was an “important” factor in their decision—overwhelmingly, to vote for Clinton...
...Catfi sh are slimy, ugly, and can stick you with their sharp dorsal and pectoral fi ns...
...He puts down a cigarette to let out his feral cat, Kitty, who kills everything from geese to groundhogs, sometimes bringing them back and leaving gutpiles on the porch...
...That’s kind of his gift...
...There’s things you don’t get by reading position papers...
...Says Tommy, “And what magic drug are you going to give Obama to make him say that...
...While her circle in Los Angeles, for whom she occasionally plays his voicemails, has told her he sounds “you know . . . not smart,” Stowe shakes her head “over the predictability of it all,” which she regards as “the problem Obama has in a nutshell...
...He’s an archetype...
...I have some in-laws who to this day refuse to watch the Dallas Cowboys on Thanksgiving because “that’s where they killed my president...
...When she fi rst saw Mudcat on MSNBC, Stowe was suspicious...
...I unload my gear into his seven-year-old daughter Abby’s room (she lives with her mother, nearby...
...But what I’m going to do is this: My people are suffering...
...Mudcat revels in the unorthodox...
...Bubba doesn’t mind an instant check, but closing the gun show is all he can hear...
...He don’t think of a brother...
...The house is all mounted antlers and furry pelts and other things that would send Ingrid Newkirk straight to her therapist...
...They’re having a revival over at the church so we’ll be having supper on the grounds tomorrow evening...
...Still, all this work is getting in the way of our true business: fi shing...
...Part of the thrill of catching them on a fl y is that you’re not supposed to...
...This is confi rmed for me anecdotally one day over lunch with one of Mudcat’s Republican fi shing buddies (they used to gamble $100 a fi sh...
...Schaller holds that Democrats should write off the South as unwinnable because of the forces of race and religion...
...But even if Obama’s comments lend themselves to Republican attack ads, Mudcat insists he isn’t permanently doomed among Appalachian voters...
...Dee Davis, who heads the Center for Rural Strategies, says winning Appalachia isn’t even so much about the issues...
...My take on it is very simple...
...You read in all the local papers that Obama ain’t comin’ out here and getting your vote, cause he don’t think he can win it...
...He didn’t have to put on hunting gear and swap knives...
...Mudcat lives in a converted migrant-worker’s shack at the foot of Bent Mountain with burbling Back Creek running through his front yard...
...A while later, I take a leaping rainbow trout and a nice-sized brookie on a bead-head zug bug, barely saving my dignity, though one of the Charlies seems cross that I horsed the latter in...
...Obama can’t win those voters because of race...
...And when you hook ’em...
...They’ll take you on a ride...
...As for Barack Obama, Mudcat says, he’s got problems in these parts, but not the kind all these out-oftowners think...
...Look at the Kennedys, he said, Jack making serious inroads during his presidential run, Bobby taking his 1968 Poverty Tour to places often unvisited by politicians...
...They nodded their heads...
...And I have served as sounding board for Mudcat’s upcoming book, a spiritual treatise that will be so “reverent to The Power” that it will have next to no rude words after those in the title, The HalfAssed Christian’s Guide to Living...
...He thundered to the Roanoke Times: “I’m pretty sure I ain’t a queer...
...And Mudcat has plenty of detractors, sometimes on his own side, calling him “Mudfl ap” and worse...
...His problem out here, insists Mudcat, isn’t his blackness, but that he ceded too much ground and didn’t aggressively go after the vote, as Hillary did, communicating lack of interest...
...At this point, it’s beyond the science of politics, beyond the votecounting and being seen in media markets in three different places a day...
...I go absolutely nuts...
...He tells me to go to it, which I do, sight-casting to large grass carp and channel catfi sh, their shadows darting through the water...
...What would happen, he asks Tommy, if Obama sat down before ten white Appalachian males and properly explained the problems their communities share, paying respect to the culture, talking of building coalitions and fl oating similar policies to transform rural and urban America...
...And they nodded their heads again...
...I am a regular recipient of phone calls that start with the greeting, “Listen to this, Brotha,” as he’s already spinning a tune, like Dr...
...Even his daughter’s room, apart from the pink “Princess” chair and Mickey Mouse statuary, is a reminder of animal holocaust, with an American Hunter magazine on the nightstand...
...The living-room symposia are not conducted in the dulcet tones of a public-radio broadcast...
...I’m intrigued...
...It’s a culture, Webb wrote, “that is so adamantly individualistic that it will never overtly form into one of the many interest groups that dominate Democratic party politics...
...About catching catfi sh on a fl y?” he asks...
...It spits mile-a-minute porn pop-ups and offers for Mudcat to increase his breast size...
...While there’s something to this, he says, the shopworn class-warfare tropes have proven that they don’t work...
...I have one eye on the water, the other on the boys, when my strike indicator bobs a few times, but I’m too slow on the trigger and miss a few fi sh...
...Go get ’em...
...I respond that aside from his Muslimsounding name, which even Mudcat admits could give him problems in the area, most wouldn’t characterize Obama as “threatening...
...He’s left-handed in his thinking, which is always interesting...
...Just to illustrate the sort of cultural shorthand by which Dems hand Republicans the truncheon to club them with, he pursues the issue of guns...
...Close the gun show...
...Mudcat admits it probably won’t happen, but asks, What if it did...
...And many more elections stand to be dropped, Mudcat says...
...I call Webb’s offi ce to fi ll in the picture a bit, but Webb declines to elaborate...
...Davis says of current Democratic strategy, They can say we’re never going to win, so why do it...
...Their issues include intense patriotism and strong opposition to gun control, which “probably cost Mr...
...State police had been sent down ’cause it was getting rowdy...
...Between the pop-ups, Mudcat furiously logs on to election websites, where he spends hours...
...It’s something I turn to with great regularity...
...There’s a defeatist attitude among his party’s elites about getting Dems elected in Bubbaland, which is preposterous says Mudcat—just ask West Virginia’s Jay Rockefeller and Robert Byrd, the two perennially reelected Democratic senators from what is commonly ridiculed as the most backward state in the country...
...So I don’t typically spook when fi shing in front of an audience...
...Hillary Clinton a populist...
...Back at the house, Mudcat’s in a full lather...
...While he’s looking through the box, he tells me that rather than writing off Appalachia, as so many think he needs to do, Obama should embrace it...
...Yep, no fi sh in there...
...We’re changed by seeing art, or hearing music, and we’re changed by the people we meet...
...With the setting sun in my eyes and a glare on the water, I can’t quite make out what the fi sh are doing, though I see plenty of action on top, with fi sh trying to vacuum up pellets before they sink...
...A former sportswriter who has made a considerable amount of money in real estate development (politics has been a late-life hobbyhorse), Mudcat keeps the hours of a retiree, though he says, “It’s hard to retire if you’ve never had a job...
...I’ve heard him croak out bluegrass tunes at a jam session in the Nashville living room of banjo player Rob McCoury, of the legendary Del McCoury Band...
...In Ontario, he once took a 25-pound king salmon with a rock as it was headed for a fi sh ladder where, at the top, it was going to get clubbed with a bat and stripped of its roe...
...They’re addicted to their “thread the needle strategy” of depending on liberal urban bulwarks and enough fi ckle new young voters’ being registered to win elections...
...While this has been thought of before (Jesse Jackson took a stab at it, with little success), Mudcat says it’ll only work with the right national leader...
...It’s all perception—nothing’s going to pass...
...I know how much you like to fi sh...
...Oh yeah...
...If they don’t have faith, I don’t f—in’ want ’em...
...Since the original story, Mudcat and I have become friends...
...Mudcat offers the piece as a sort of manifesto for what he’s calling “The Webb Coalition...
...It’s the goddamndest thing I’ve ever seen in my life...
...Turns out, it is...
...Obama, says Mudcat, is a better campaigner than Wilder, “has as gifted a mouth as I’ve ever heard on anybody, and the guy’s IQ is maybe 50 points higher than mine...
...More specifi cally, he has a problem with white rural voters, particularly those of the Appalachian belt, which straddles key states like Pennsylvania and Ohio...
...I’ll Fight You...
...Don’t retrieve, let her drop, give it time, they’ll get it...
...Mudcat’s eyes grow wild when he says this, as if it’s the most preposterous thing he’s ever heard...
...He said, “Democrats go after class, Republicans go after culture...
...It can be distilled as The Twofer Strategy: If you get a rural white voter who otherwise would have voted for McCain to switch to Obama, his vote is worth twice as much as a vote from your standard “liberal pinko commie” or your MTV Rock-the-Voter, since Obama not only accrues one vote for himself, but also takes one away from McCain...
...But if you do it from the message of culture, you get them from top to bottom...
...In addition to his first and highest calling—as a lethal hunter whose ideal day involves sitting still as a sniper up a tree in a deer stand in the Blue Ridge mountains— Mudcat is a Democratic rural strategist, in a year when the Democratic nominee badly needs a rural strategy...
...Catfi sh, he tells me, warming to his assignment, are a lot like white rural voters: “They gotta feed on the bottom —cause all they get is scraps...
...But as he once told a woman who stood up after a speech he gave to a Democratic audience to say he made compelling points, but they’d be more effective without the swearing, “Lady, there’s nothing I can do about it...
...Over the several days I stay with him, I settle into Mudcat time...
...As I keep fi shing and am getting skunked, I notice one of the boys sneaking upstream...
...His friend dislikes Obama, but at the elitist charge, he shrugs...
...There are things people can’t slip you on an index card...
...That’s all anyone wants to tell us...
...We were planning on burning seven crosses tomorrow night, but with gasoline prices being where they are, we can only afford to burn two...
...The Grand Dragon has scaled the weekly program back a bit...
...The Klan meets right after church so we can all walk over together...
...Please...
...Not everyone, however, is so cynical...
...Everybody who’s gone to church has heard their preacher say crazy things...
...His Roanoker magazine just christened Mudcat “The Most Memorable Roanoker of 2007” (though Wells assures me it was a writein contest and he didn’t fi x the vote...
...Y’know Mudcat,” says Tommy, “If...
...He fought in the Upper Shenandoah Valley, marched 60 miles, and won a battle at Fredericksburg the third day...
...Since Obama doesn’t come around Appalachia much, having taken a powder in places like West Virginia and Kentucky, “nobody knows about Obama out here...
...When I contacted Mudcat, he was in a state of blood-spitting agitation at all the Poindexter reporters traffi cking in stereotypes, depicting mountain people as racist mouth-breathers, while explaining Obama’s “Appalachian problem” as if they were anthropologists dropping in on the lip-plated savages of America’s last exotic tribe...
...Mudcat grows excited and prescriptive, eager to light a candle rather than curse the darkness...
...Right now, you hear Dems say they are going to change the map, but they seem to be counting Colorado three times...
...So Wilder comes around this corner—he was a tough guy, that came across...
...As we agree on the musicality of Mudcat’s delivery, Stowe says, “There’s also something epic-like in his thinking— which is a quality any great song has, and all epics are born from something simple...
...Class only touches a small portion of the white working class electorate...
...Generally speaking, I regard my fl y rod as a crack addict regards his crack pipe...
...He agreed to host me, insisting I stay at his house instead of a hotel...
...Yet when you catch one, they are strong, tenacious fi ghters, providing much more pullage than trout or bass of comparable size...
...Mudcat barks counterintuitive instruction...
...He calls them “the Harvards” (a term pinched from LBJ), though in fairness he stipulates that “there’s a lot of jerks that went to other places too...
...About catching rural Appalachian voters...
...They are nicotine-laced and profanity-spiked...
...These are not, he maintains, committed Red State voters...
...On the surface, those two couldn’t have been more foreign to the culture of Appalachia...
...Sure enough, they do...
...Jackson wanted to go over the river after Manassas, and Joseph Johnston, then commander of Confederate forces, wouldn’t let him...
...Who you gonna vote for if you live in Kentucky and the candidate takes off for Oregon...
...Pick up 13 electoral votes in Virginia—big step, Son...
...John Kennedy won West Virginia...
...He’ll take the smallest detail and spin a huge story out of it...
...He says he wants me to see something, and walks over to his record stash and opens up the box set of Mac Weisman, the bluegrass singer known as “The Voice with a Heart...
...No matter how much you sit and talk to these f—ers, they don’t understand twofers...
...There isn’t much meat on the bones as yet, but in the piece, Webb sets out to diagnose the problem of Democrats’ reaching the “Scots-Irish, along with those others who make up the ‘Jacksonian’ political culture that has migrated toward the values of this ethnic group...
...But that’s about the last of the praise...
...says the consultant...
...Are you gonna vote for the sonofabitch...
...If you present enough food out there, you’re gonna get ’em in a frenzy, just like those catfi sh in the pond...
...It’s a zero,” he says...
...On one outing, we hit a fi shing spot so choice I’d never be invited back if I published its name...
...Could he turn one of them...
...But while analysis of why Obama won so few votes in poorer Appalachian counties (where Hillary picked up 71 percent) has focused on race, Mudcat says race is no more a factor here than anywhere else...
...In both communities, he needs to put forth agendas that highlight their shared affl ictions...
...asks Mudcat...
...The damndest thing I’ve ever seen...
...Oh Jay-zuuuusss,” he says, wincing, realizing I’m trying to infl ict order on his universe, thus justifying our fi shing trip to my editors...
...I can live with it,” he says...
...Mudcat tells Tommy to put that aside and asks if he thinks Obama could turn two of the ten...
...It turns out the prankster had stashed trout pellets in his beer bottle, and had thrown them in a riffl e, which had washed down into my hole...
...Being a fan of lost causes, he’s attracted to one of my own: catching catfi sh on a fl y. Catfi sh are typically uninterested in artifi cials, preferring smellier natural baits, so it is extremely uncommon to pursue them on a fl y rod...
...Not that Dave “Mudcat” Saunders, most recently of John Edwards’s abortive presidential run, has ever let employability get in the way of blasting the truth, or his peculiar version of it, from a sawedoff double barrel...
...When I run it by Republican strategists, I get a range of reactions, everything from, Why not, there’s nothing to lose since Democrats have no other strategy besides registering new voters and appealing to their traditional base, to: “Boy, Mudcat’s selling a pile of s...
...If you mention this quest to other fl y fi shermen, they grimace—it just isn’t done...
...His proud mug adorned our cover with the headline “Hunting Bubba,” as he held up the head of a freshly killed 12-point buck in the back of his truckbed...
...He sits down at his wheezing, virusinfected computer...
...That’s all we know...
...Listen,” says Mudcat, exhaling a fog of Camel smoke, “when Bubba thinks of elitists, he thinks of white guys from Boston like John Kerry...
...Faith in the power that can pull us all together...
...I don’t want your vote...
...The response: “Yes, all except that...
...Mudcat swears like he’s being paid by the four-letter word...
...Working for Edwards last year, Mudcat took it upon himself, when dealing with a skeptical Boston Globe reporter, to rename Edwards’s “Economic Fairness for the North Country” tour the “Let’s Help John Edwards Screw Those Who Screwed Us” tour (the screwers, in this case, being the NAFTA-loving Clintons...
...It’s all about twofers, Brotha...
...He takes me to a large pond behind the house of his business partner, Richard Wells, who owns a local publishing empire...
...I think it’s blasphemy to put this on the ballot and try to divide God’s children for political gain...
...Hell no...
...He’d go into your kitchen and have a cup of coffee...
...As he plays with an Electoral College map, he repeatedly demonstrates how, if Obama doesn’t start picking off the Appalachian belt, he’s going to have to swing lots more states than Kerry did in 2004...
...Listen, I’m probably going to hell...
...Who votes on issues...
...So Hillary defi ned the debate out here, which boiled down to that she’s antitrade and pro-gun...
...I decide to fl y Mudcat’s Webb Coalition idea by some skeptics...
...I killed that one...
...All we know is that he’s black...
...It’s Mudcat Math: Turn one out of ten Appalachian male voters into an Obama supporter, and you’ve not only added 10 percent of the white male vote to the Democratic column but slashed the Republicans’ share of it by 10 percent...
...I give him a head start: Catfi sh aren’t highly regarded, I tell him, yet they are cagey and smart...
...Cause they don’t think they can do it...
...What Obama needs to do, says Mudcat, is get on the ground regularly in Appalachia and give a version of the following: I’m a black guy, and I promise you I didn’t have a thing to do with it...
...The thinking goes that the poor whites of Appalachia and inner-city blacks are “spiders on a mirror,” in Mudcat’s words...
...Yet Davis, who used to deliver furniture for his family’s business in rural Kentucky, says, You’d go into people’s houses and see John and Bobby Kennedy on the wall right next to the praying hands...
...But a minute or so later, trout start rising like bombs going off around my waders, which inspires a new round of catcalls...
...I’ve been out to rural America, and I’ve seen your problems, and they’re a mirror image of each other...
...He understands how a person will react on the gut level to just about any idea, probably because he’s so reactive himself...
...Cast into the seam...
...These are the people Mudcat knows best...
...C’mon,” he commands, taking me up to his offi ce, which is little more than a desk and a graveyard of old computers, mounted buck heads, and his 20 or so sets of Trebark camo hunting gear...
...Mudcat and his friends take their guns and God straight, and don’t require any chaser of frustration...
...Jackson believed in moving armies and moving them quick...
...Unlike many in his party, fretting that Webb is an ideological outlier who would bring ruin to the ticket, Mudcat thinks Webb ought to bypass vice president so we could “just go ahead and elect him king...
...I cite Doug Wilder’s win of 20 years ago...
...They start barking sideline instructions...
...I have caught eight or ten myself this way, but have been unable to systematically replicate results...
...Mudcat had been imploring me for months to grab my fl y rod and catch some trout with him...
...I believe in quick movement, and surprise...
...When it comes to turkey hunting, Mudcat’s an elitist...
...A friend Abby brought home, marveling at all the mounted buckheads, once asked Abby if her daddy had killed all those...
...Though they couldn’t be more divorced culturally, they have many of the same problems, from crumbling infrastructure to poor schools to the need to leave home to find jobs...
...He said to them, “I also heard you boys at the UMW said you would vote for a N— before you’d vote for a Republican, and I’m here to tell you that this November, you’re gonna get your chance...
...He reeked of Big Daddy from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof...
...The Jeremiah Wright scandal...
...I wade into a hole that Mudcat has already worked over for four or so rainbow trout...
...You gotta put ’em on defense, and keep ’em there...
...Having spent plenty of time campaigning for Edwards, she became fast friends with Mudcat on the trail...
...I’d never seen one before, so I’m gonna get it, even if I don’t have a rod,” he explains...
...The fi rst is that Barack Obama put away the nomination...
...The second is that Obama has a white-people problem in the general...
...While still insisting that Edwards would’ve matched up better against McCain than anyone, Mudcat admits Edwards was always a “dead man walking,” who didn’t have a shot in a three-way primary against “two historical bookends...
...Bring us something back...
...Many of them are wealthy, but they are committed gentlemen of leisure, dedicated to the art of angling to the point that some have bought their own trout hatchery on their private limestone stream...
...And if you’re holding in politics, you’re not driving votes your way...
...Mudcat asks to take a look at my fl ies, and settles on a brown woolly bugger, of which he cuts off the tail, to make it look more cylindrical...
...And why would anyone want to...
...While the GOP has sought to keep peace with this culture, favoring “guns, God, fl ag, opposition to abortion, and success in war,” Democrats have “consistently alienated this group, to their detriment,” partly because of “their shift toward minorities as the foundation of their national electoral strategy...
...Gore both his home state of Tennessee and traditionally Democratic West Virginia in 2000...
...He was willing to listen and be changed by the experience...
...The service shouldn’t last too long because Orville got drunk the night before last, rolled up his windows, locked his truck, and forgot to pull the snakes out of the cab...
...It was a memorable trip...
...Here, he consumes his breakfast of champions: a string of unfi ltered Camels and a couple of Red Bulls, which give him the stamina he needs to hold forth on politics half the day, then fi sh until dark...
...Bobby wasn’t the good ’ol boy, but when he showed up, he showed up...
...Mudcat, who describes himself as “an old-timey Democrat: pro-gun, pro-God, pro fi scal conservatism,” is tired of teaching remedial Mudcat Math to deaf ears in his own party...
...Be sure to bring your gun and plenty of ammo,” he wrote me in an email, playing to Poindexter type: The state put up a new road sign a few days ago out here in front of my house, and I’ve been saving it until you get here...
...There’s only one thing an Appalachian boy likes to do more in the summer than fi sh, and that’s to catch a Ned Beatty look-alike as he leisurely makes his way down the river with no idea he’s fl oating livestock...
...This is a way of laying the trackwork for a lasting coalition beyond this election between two largely forgotten tribes who’ve regarded each other with suspicion if they’ve regarded each other at all...
...But it also gives Obama, the community organizer from Chicago, a way to demystify himself...
...To put it in Mudcat-speak, Obama got beat there in the primaries like a tied-up billy goat...
...He came in here with an open mind, and learned, and then went back and did something...
...Ohhhhh,” they yell in unison each time...
...No,” says Tommy...
...He shows me choice tidbits, like historic results from Virginia’s most Appalachian congressional district, the ninth (known as the Fighting Ninth “because you gotta fi ght for it,” he says), where outcomes constantly seesaw back and forth between Republicans and Democrats...
...Your friend, Mudcat I hadn’t seen Mudcat in his natural habitat since I profi led him for this magazine three years ago...
...If the Pilgrims would’ve shot a cat, what would we be eating for Thanksgiving...
...Ruggedly independent, anti-elitist, and famously pugnacious, the denizens of Appalachia include many of the Scots-Irish variety lionized in Jim Webb’s last book, Born Fighting, touched upon in his current book, A Time to Fight, and whose fi ght song is bound to be reprised in a future book, What Are You Looking At...
...There are moments when you teach, and moments when you learn...
...I’ve watched the silver-tongued 59-year-old nearly pick up half a college women’s volleyball team at a cab stand in Vegas...
...If he turns one of them,” says Mudcat, satisfi ed, “he wins the election...
...He’s psychologically cunning...
...Mudcat fi nds what he’s looking for and hands me a 2004 Wall Street Journal piece by Jim Webb...
...Citing Mike Murphy, Republican consultant and sometime WEEKLY STANDARD contributor, Mudcat calls him a smart as s— guy who hit it on the f—in’ nose as clean as I’ve ever seen it done...
...Working tirelessly for John Edwards, Mudcat seemed convinced that the senator was on a par with Jesus Christ (with the slight edge going to Edwards, since Christ only had the Beatitudes, not a 12-point Rural Recovery Plan), whereas I could never shake the impression Edwards was selling me a used car, and not a very good one—maybe a Ford Festiva with the odometer rolled back...
...It’s just plain old ignorance—fear of what’s different...
...But if you’re their pal, and you feed ’em what they want—and you gotta feed ’em, you can’t goddamn pull it away, you gotta let ’em eat it...
...People vote on iconography, what club they want to be in...
...When it comes to trout fi shing, I’m the elitist, cause I can kick his ass...
...The reformed alcoholic fed me moonshine out of his freezer, gave me turkey beards to take home to my kids, and nearly killed us on a white-knuckle spin in his SUV on an outlaw track (all four of his tires ended up needing to be replaced...
...If anyone holds that a black guy can’t win in these parts, says Mudcat, then they ought to notify former Virginia governor Doug Wilder, a black guy who won 20 years ago...
...Whatever catches fi sh...
...But no matter who’s fi ling his W-2s, he tends to go his own way...
...It’s not a bad outing...
...I wouldn’t even get an accounting...
...Goddamnit,” he shouts, convincingly outraged...
...This is where Mudcat keeps “my important papers, so I know where to fi nd them...
...We hit the streams with a gaggle of Mudcat’s gregarious and generous friends, half of whom are named “Charlie...
...I remember thinking he must be some deep southern friend of the family...
...The truth is, if you look in the rural areas of battleground states, it’s pretty determinative of who wins elections...
...Mudcat certainly wasn’t pleased with Obama’s infamous comments at his San Francisco fundraiser about Pennsylvania voters in depressed rural communities: “So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or antiimmigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations...
...You can stay in the spare bedroom, at least until she warms up to you a little bit...
...Because if you’d seen what I’ve seen from elitist Democrats, you’d swear too...
...You’re just holding the ones you got...
...They can sample bait by smell without ever mouthing it, making them more resistant to artifi cial lures than are more prized game fi sh...
...The last couple of months have seen two storylines emerge in the Democratic party...
...That’s comparable to the 20 percent of voters in New York who said the same thing...
...And these same people talk bitterly of racism...
...A few years back, he joined forces with the Commonwealth Coalition, a group trying to torpedo an anti-gay marriage amendment in his native Virginia...
...I mean she threw her goddamn rural kickoff at Monsanto’s lobbying offi ce on K Street, for chrissakes...
...But Mudcat is always willing to think outside the lines, sometimes throwing live hellgrammites off a fl y rod...
...But in Obama’s home state of Illinois, 23 percent of the electorate said race was important in their decision—and 73 percent of them voted for Obama...
...But as Mudcat’s pals decide to take a creek-side seat, watching me fi sh as they cut into the beer and bourbon, I start hearing the fi shing equivalent of footsteps, with all these mountain boys watching my every move...
...One of the Charlies compliments me on throwing a tight loop...
...And so with a slogan like “Close the gun show loophole,” what are the fi rst four words of that...
...Ralph Stanley’s “Angel Band,” a version of which he recorded for Mudcat’s dying mother, Miss Aggie...
...Still, he pays her grudging respect, since cynically pretending you’re on the right side beats an open-arms embrace of the wrong one...
...Two years ago, in a panel discussion at the Daily Kos convention, Mudcat nearly set the drapes on fi re in front of a roomful of netroots nerds when debating Thomas Schaller, author of Whistling Past Dixie...
...Wait till you see him Photoshopped in a dashiki...
...I feel s—y about it,” he says...
...Mudcat is not, therefore, a defensive tactician...
...Next, Mudcat starts adding “the secret ingredient”—cylindrical fi sh pellets— which he throws in by the handful, as he sits with a Camel dangling from his mouth in a lawn chair on a dock, about 50 feet in front of me from the shore...
...His thesis prompted Mudcat to extend a standing social invitation: “Kiss my Rebel ass...
...But homely girls like to dance too, they just want to be asked...
...Is Obama that leader...
...Some estimates say the South, for instance, which some Democrats wish to write off altogether, will be home to 40 percent of the electorate within the next few cycles...
...Webb’s comfortable (he thinks...
...with Mudcat being his spokesperson on this,” an aide tells me, proving perhaps that Webb is even braver than suggested by his status as one of the Vietnam war’s most decorated veterans...
...I know a lot of elitists...
...She kills something every day,” Mudcat explains...
...We thought we had us some Yankees last week, but when we sneaked up on them, it was just the Crowell boys dumping an old refrigerator and washing machine in the river...
...I kept count...
...Lesson: “They’re fi ckle, Brotha...
...Because I don’t give a f— if Bubba loads the truck or owns the trucking company, he’s going to want his gun...
...I barely have to prompt him...
...Right now, it’s part of being the change you’re waiting for...
...And he said, “I understand there ain’t no black folks in Wise County...
...While Mudcat gets summoned by the likes of Senate majority leader Harry Reid to tell the Democratic caucus what they need to do to bring rural Reagan-Democrat types back into the fold, he says it’s an eternal struggle on the ground, among the permanent class of campaign professionals...
...And he said, “I understand that’s why y’all call it Wiiiiiiise County...
...The next day we’ll fi sh the fast water where the big-city Yankees ride them rafts...
...If you’re not going to vote for me since I’m black, then go to hell...
...Among blacks, of course, this is unnecessary...
...Obama needs to show up and learn...
...It’s not a shtick that travels well, to be sure...
...As a student of history and uphill fi ghts (he’s perhaps the only Democratic consultant alive who sleeps under a Confederate fl ag bedspread, though he’d never fl y the Stars’n’Bars outside, as he’s merely celebrating “the benign parts of my culture” and wouldn’t want to “disrupt my black friends’ peace of mind”), he cites Stonewall Jackson, who believed in taking it to the enemy at their strengths...
...And I’ve never had queer thoughts, but I do have several queer buddies who called me and asked me to Matt Labash is a senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...If you get your opponent on defense, he burns up his ammunition holding his own ground...
...It’s a dry hole...
...Still, Mudcat and I had all but stopped talking politics in the interest of maintaining civility, on account of his last campaign...
...Campaigns that court the base while ignoring voters who could be won over are “hunting squirrels they’ve already killed...
...But the brainy, bewitching actress Madeleine Stowe (Last of the Mohicans, We Were Soldiers) isn’t one of them...
...Mudcat is no technocrat, describing himself as “more Bagger Vance than Karl Rove,” occasionally telling his candidate to go to a fi ve-iron, while mostly providing “spiritual uplift...
...I don’t know...
...I always fi gured that if you wanted to see a naked woman, go fi nd you one...
...Mudcat highlights what for him is the money paragraph, the last few sentences, which read, The greatest realignment in modern politics would take place rather quickly if the right national leader found a way to bring the Scots-Irish and African Americans to the same table, and so to redefi ne a formula that has consciously set them apart for the past two centuries...
...He’ll do anything for his guy, from slapping his face on a stock car, to choreographing back-country barnstorming tours that sop up bubba attention with the likes of his pal Ben “Cooter” Jones (formerly of Congress and The Dukes of Hazzard), to providing security by bringing his own gun to campaign events...
...I hit every piece of bait the devil ever threw at me except for pornography...
...He doesn’t need to hear “loophole,” after he’s heard the fi rst four words...
...To pull out of rural Appalachia at this point would be a tactical mistake because people are really hurting, and when they are, they don’t tend to return the party in power...
...So Mudcat proffers: “Screw trout, we’re gonna catch you some catfi sh — on a fl y!” He has some ideas...
...Mudcat doesn’t deny that Obama’s race could be a factor...
...But with Edwards long gone—and the rural vote coming into sharp relief, as Hillary picked up the slack—we’d reopened a constructive dialogue...
...It’s not elitism being practiced in L.A...
...Being an elitist doesn’t bother me that much...
...Yeah,” says the consultant, “but he was a nonthreatening African American...
...We probably won’t be able to sleep much anyway because nobody can cook up a mess of Crystal Meth like Cousin Gertie...
...To many politicians, rural Appalachian voters are the homeliest girls at the dance...
...When we think of black guys, we think of oppression...
...Go out and kill, Kitty...
...He’ll bring in some Reagan Democrats, and all those are twofers...
...By the next day, I’m again ready to hook into some of their trout...
...One afternoon at lunch, we are joined by his Republican friend and committed McCain voter Tommy Anderton, who calls himself “Mudcat’s haberdasher...
...So when my editor commanded me to get down to the Roanoke Valley of southwest Virginia, where he lives, to fi nd out what Mudcat’s prescription was for Obama to stanch the bleeding, it seemed like an ideal opportunity to kill two birds...
...help...
Vol. 13 • June 2008 • No. 40
