Editor’s Note: Jeff Biggers, author of “The United States of Appalachia,” is at work on a cultural history of coal. Biggers has been a commentator on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition and contributes to the Huffington Post.

Jeff Biggers
Jeffbiggers.com

The Wall Street crisis notwithstanding, coal continues to embroil the presidential campaign into knots unlike any other issue in the swing states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia.

Take a look at the backflips by both campaigns in the last several weeks:

Jumping on a not-in-my-backyard “clean coal” gaffe by Sen. Joe Biden, the McCain campaign released a wildly misleading ad accusing Sen. Barack Obama of not supporting coal. (And this just days after United Mine Workers President Cecil Roberts turned red in the face with a stirring endorsement of Obama in the southwest Virginia coalfields.)

When Sen. John McCain casually told a voter in Florida that he didn’t support mountaintop removal in Appalachia — the controversial process of blowing mountains to bits to strip the coal seams — his own campaign advisers hurriedly launched a Coalition to Protect Coal Jobs.

While not taking a clear-cut stand on the same mountaintop removal issue, the Obama campaign countered with a Clean Coal Jobs Task Force, as if upping the ante on coal.

As an old coal balladeer might ask: Which side are these candidates on?

The answer: Both candidates are on the wrong side. In one of the sorriest panders for votes, invoking a 20th century pound-on-the-chest lie that coal means jobs, neither candidate is brave enough to come clean and offer himself as the messenger for a 21st century vision for the coalfields of central Appalachia.

Funny thing is: Voters in these swing states already know the truth. Coal is on its way out, not its way in. Sure, new coal plants are being built, but scores of coal-fired plants have been canceled across the country.

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