https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/bill-clinton-takes-on-protesters-in-coal-country/2016/05/13/5a2715d2-1931-11e6-9e16-2e5a123aac62_story.html By Karen Tumulty May 13 at 4:18 PM
PRESTONSBURG, Ky. — The booing was nearly as loud as the cheering when Bill Clinton stepped to the microphone in this remote mountain hamlet deep in the depressed heart of coal country.
In the audience at the local elementary school Thursday night was a sizable contingent of coal miners and their families, many wearing helmets and T-shirts declaring their support for Donald Trump.
“I’m not like a lot of people. It doesn’t bother me to have protesters at rallies,” the former president began. “I’m glad they come, because I think one of the biggest problems in America today is we seem to be less prejudiced about a lot of things, except we don’t want to be around anybody who disagrees with us. You notice that?”
That he should encounter hostility here was not a surprise. Floyd County’s unemployment rate last year was close to 10 percent — nearly twice as high as the state average. Many locals blame the federal government’s policies on coal.
Hillary Clinton seemed to confirm that perception in March, at a town hall in Ohio, when she said that a transition to clean energy would “put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.” She later said she had made “a misstatement,” but the comment contributed to her loss Tuesday in West Virginia, a state whose Democratic primary she had won by a landslide in 2008.
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