Hillary Clinton raised hackles in coal country when she said her energy policies would "put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business," a blunt admission the Democratic candidate later retracted.
Clinton said that her policies would eliminate coal miners’ jobs during a debate in Columbus, Ohio earlier this month. The comment upset many who live in areas where coal is still a major employer.
"My news feed has been blowing up with talk of Hillary Clinton saying we're going to put coal miners out of work, and seeming a little gleeful," WEPM radio cohost Jennifer Smith said in Martinsburg, W. Va.
"Yeah. You wonder at the people who [write her speeches]—or is she just bad off the cuff?" cohost Chris Lawrence said.
"Tone-deaf, I've heard," Smith said.
There were 68,000 coal miners working in the United States in 2015, not including coal company employees who were not miners and individuals who were indirectly employed by the coal industry.
Coal company employees who worked in construction and extraction—the labor-intensive work commonly associated with coal mining—earned an average hourly wage of $22.40, significantly higher than the average hourly wage for all nonsupervisory workers in the United States.
Clinton's sudden transformation into a destroyer of blue collar jobs seemed strange given the context: she was asked by the debate moderator to explain to "poor whites who vote Republican" why they should support her instead of the GOP candidate.
"Clinton made the statement during the CNN town hall meeting when she was answering a question about creating jobs," WCHS reporter Kennie Bass said in Charleston, W. Va.
Politicians in coal-producing states were quick to denounce Clinton's comments. A spokesman for Sen. Joe Manchin (D., W. Va.), who endorsed Clinton last year, said the senator was "extremely upset" by her comment. Republicans, who have benefited electorally by campaigning against President Obama's strict regulations on the fossil fuel industry, were unsparing in their criticism of Clinton.
"Thousands of our citizens, families, businesses and communities have already been devastated by President Obama’s War on Fossil Fuels. We won’t stand by and watch Secretary Clinton, or anyone else, continue these policies," said Liz Cheney, a Republican candidate for the U.S. House in Wyoming. Wyoming is the country's biggest producer of coal.
Clinton apologized for her comments in a letter to Manchin.
"Simply put, I was mistaken in my remarks," the letter stated. The letter added that "coal will be part of the energy mix for years to come."
Clinton’s campaign surrogates have been more defensive, pointing out that the candidate's full response at the CNN town hall expressed concern for miners’ well-being and proposed injecting $30 billion in federal money into depressed coal mining regions.
These billions would be spent on "infrastructure and broadband improvements," environmental remediation of the land that used to employ workers, and educational programs for individuals whose jobs were eliminated by Clinton's energy policies.
The president of the West Virginia Coal Association told WEPM that coal workers would prefer to keep their jobs.
"They don't want a check from the federal government. They want to work," William Raney said.
Clinton’s heavy-handed environmental policies are not restricted to coal. The candidate announced at a debate in early March that her regulations would all but end the drilling method known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. Fracking was responsible for the recent boom in blue-collar jobs in areas rich with natural gas.