Obama facing midterm backlash in Kentucky

Deep in the heart of Appalachia I got a big hug from 69 year old Julie Elliot. “Miss Julie” as she is known by all the churchgoers who regularly visit her with vital food parcels.

Without shame or embarrassment Miss Julie opened up her fridge and her cupboards to show us that she had almost no food in her house as we arrived with a couple of boxes of groceries. Without the flour, buttermilk, cornmeal and tinned tuna that was being delivered courtesy of the Baptist Food Pantry she would be reduced to eating “wild strawberries” again: tiny berries that grow on weeds in her yard – and are not even really strawberries.

People who are upset they haven’t had more government help over the last couple of years will vote for candidates who want to slash what government spending they do receive.

Miss Julie does get some government aid – but there really isn’t much a welfare safety net in America. And Miss Julie really can’t survive on less than the $133 (£85) a week she gets in food stamps.

Dire straits
She calls Sally Shook her saviour. A deeply religious woman, who describes helping to feed the poor as her mission, Mrs Shook knows all about just how tough life can be in eastern Kentucky, because she sees people in really dire straits every day – visiting them in their homes, bringing them what supplies she can muster and sharing a prayer. She is exactly the kind of person you would expect to tell you that the government needs to do more to help people who are suffering in this terrible economy.

“No…I don’t believe you can spend your way out of this” she says, when I ask her about extending government benefits. The deficit is already too large and when she has been in debt herself she has never been able to spend her way out of it using her credit cards. She thinks the same goes for the country. Deficit reduction is more important to her than providing food stamps and rent cheques to people who’ve lost their jobs and their unemployment benefits.

Republican supporter
In his cramped four bedroom apartment, where he is raising six children, Darrel Laws tells me he plans to vote Republican in November. That means he will be voting for Senatorial candidate Rand Paul, a man who embodies some of the more extreme ideas of the Tea Party movement. In the past he has advocated abolishing income tax – replacing it with a 23 per cent sales tax – and making pensioners pay for the first $2,000 of every medical treatment.

I point out to Darrell that if – with the help of his vote – Republicans do take control of Congress, their policies will take benefits away from people like him as they try to slash government spending. He says that if the government does not provide for him then he is confident The Lord will.

Anyone who has been serving in Washington for the last few years in vulnerable – Democrats even more so than Republicans.

In these mid term elections a lot of votes seem to be based on emotion not logic. People who are upset they haven’t had more government help over the last couple of years will vote for candidates who want to slash what government spending they do receive. Simply because they want to punish the people who are in charge.

Change for the worse
A lot of the people I met in Kentucky said they were deeply disappointed in President Obama. Whether they had voted for him or not people did believe that he would bring about change. But many voters think the only change they have seen is a change for the worse.

They are angry about persistently high unemployment and those who are still working are frightened that they will be the next to lose their jobs. And it is the Republicans – the Tea Party in particular – who have managed to exploit that fear and anger: managed to persuade voters that those who are currently in power have done nothing for them and its time to “Throw The Bums Out” to quote that age old American political expression. Anyone who has been serving in Washington for the last few years in vulnerable – Democrats even more so than Republicans.

Explanations from the White House about how much worse things could have been if they hadn’t spent billions on stimulus projects – and on rescuing Wall Street – fall on deaf ears.

President Obama tells interviewers he thinks he has done a pretty good job. He thinks the only thing they have got wrong is not selling the message better – not telling voters just how much they have achieved. But people who are out of work or relying on charity just to get enough to eat don’t think their plight is simply a public relations problem. And they will vote to punish those in charge – even if they end up punishing themselves as a result.