Kerry, Bush Vie for Coal States

In the 2000 presidential campaign, it took Al Gore until October to get to West Virginia, and he paid the consequences. The aggressive, industry-friendly campaign of George W. Bush had already persuaded the state’s voters that Gore was a radical environmentalist who would doom its cash crop -- coal.

West Virginia gave its crucial electoral votes to Bush, the first nonincumbent Republican in 72 years to win the state.

That won’t happen this year -- not if John F. Kerry can help it -- and not in western Pennsylvania or southeastern Ohio either. The Democratic nominee went to West Virginia the night he clinched the nomination. He has been back four times since, promising to protect miners’ jobs and health and moderating his position on clean air.

The United Mine Workers, which reluctantly endorsed Gore weeks before the election, has been campaigning for Kerry since embracing him in April.

In 2000, “the Democratic Party took West Virginia for granted,” said Cecil Roberts, president of the United Mine Workers of America. “Bush came into West Virginia talking about coal and believing in coal. But [Gore] didn’t make a very strong statement about coal.”

Kerry, Roberts said, is different: “I think he’s going to be great for coal miners and their futures. There’s a lot of enthusiasm in this state for this candidate.”

During a speech two weeks ago in Wheeling, W.Va., Kerry said that by learning to burn coal more cleanly, the nation could help reduce its dependence on foreign oil.

“I want a nation that depends on its own ingenuity, not the Saudi royal family,” Kerry said.

“You’ve got coal to be dug right here -- it can be mined. But we’ve got to make sure we do it clean.”

Charles “Dick” Kimbler, 67, a miner who helped Bush win the mine workers’ support in 2000, worries that Kerry could take the state this year. He complained that the president’s West Virginia campaign staffers were not making it to the flea markets and county fairs to promote their boss.

“It’s going to probably cost him the state of West Virginia,” Kimbler said.

But Bush remains a formidable opponent in the coal belt. He visited West Virginia early and often in the 2000 campaign, choosing Kimbler to introduce him at rallies. Returning 11 times as president, he has eased regulations for extracting coal from Appalachia’s mountaintops and made it easier to modify or renovate older coal-fired power plants without installing expensive pollution controls.

Terry Holt, Bush’s campaign spokesman, disputed the notion that Kerry was a better friend to coal than Gore. He cited Kerry’s vote last year for a bill designed to combat global warming. The bill, which failed to pass the Senate, would have had “a significant negative impact on the coal industry,” according to the Energy Department.

Coal generates slightly more than half the nation’s electricity, but it is also a major source of air pollution.

As a senator from Massachusetts, where the air is polluted by upwind coal-fired power plants in the Midwest, Kerry has long advocated stringent pollution controls that are not popular with the coal industry. On the campaign trail, he contends that the nation does not have to choose between coal and clean air.

He advocates doubling the nation’s investment in clean coal technology to $10 billion over 10 years to make coal burn more cleanly. Bush has asked for $310 million to $470 million a year for these purposes, sums that Congress has regularly increased.

Kerry has moderated his position on the Kyoto Accord, an international global warming treaty that miners and the coal industry say threatens their future. Kerry says that it is now too late for the United States to make the Kyoto treaty’s aggressive targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions. But unlike Bush, he favors bringing the United States back to the negotiating table on the treaty, which was signed by most other developed nations.

Gore had written a controversial book about environmental problems called “Earth in the Balance” and was identified with the Kyoto treaty, which he had worked on.

“Gore was viewed as anti-coal because he was so pro-environment,” University of West Virginia political scientist Allan Hammond said. “Kerry, although he has a strong environmental record, doesn’t carry the baggage Gore did.”

In West Virginia, where recent polls show Kerry with a slight lead over Bush, coal is more important politically than the state’s 15,000 coal-industry jobs would suggest. Bush won the state by about 41,000 votes, or 6% of the total vote, in 2000. Without West Virginia, he would have been defeated.

“If you lose the vote of coal miners, it might not be many in numbers,” Hammond said, “but it adds up” when family members, retirees and workers whose jobs depend in part on mining are included.

The issue is similarly important in southeastern Ohio and southwestern Pennsylvania, two other tightly contested states. Gore won Pennsylvania by 5% and lost Ohio by 4%.

The Kerry campaign has courted coal companies, but with less success than he has had with their workers. Campaign representatives have met with mining companies in West Virginia and Edison Electric Institute, the trade group for electric utilities.

Carol Raulston, spokeswoman for the National Mining Assn., said she was suspicious of Kerry’s conversion to coal.

Maybe Kerry has accepted the necessity of generating electricity from coal, she said, “but one has to wonder, if West Virginia and Ohio were not swing states, if there’d be as much interest in this by his campaign.”

Mike Carey, president of the Ohio Coal Assn., criticized Kerry’s vote in 1999 against a measure sponsored by Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) to overturn a federal judge’s ruling that mountaintop mining violated federal environmental laws.

Mountaintop mining, which involves removing the top of mountains to unveil seams of coal and heaping leftover rock and soil in valleys and streams, has become the mainstay of Appalachian mining. The president’s support of it helped him capture West Virginia in 2000, and his administration has rewritten regulations to protect it.

Carey said he was determined not to let Kerry “backpedal” on votes such as this one.

“My goal ... is to make sure [miners] are not duped by campaign reinvention,” Carey said. “I’m going to make it a top priority to get this message into the hands of every coal miner in Ohio.”

The Kerry campaign and the United Mine Workers are trying to make the case that not all of the president’s policies have helped coal.

West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio have lost 4,000 coal jobs since Bush took office, Roberts said. And the Bush administration’s proposal for reducing mercury from power plant emissions would disadvantage Eastern coal by allowing power plants that burn Western coal to continue emitting more mercury, according to the union and many coal companies that mine in Appalachia.

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Mike Leavitt said that the final proposal, which will not be released until well after the election, would be designed to avoid triggering utilities to switch from one type of coal to another or from coal to natural gas.

Kerry’s approach to regulating mercury would be to “do it in a way that is good for the environment and for the health of our families, but -- unlike Bush’s proposal -- is not going to negatively impact Eastern coal versus Western coal,” Kerry spokeswoman Kathy Roeder said.

Kerry’s energy advisors said many of the Bush administration’s aggressive efforts to help the coal industry had backfired.

Last year, for example, federal judges threw out an administration rule on mountaintop mining and blocked another that made it easier for older power plants to modify or renovate plants and increase pollution without installing pollution controls.