justen

I finally fell asleep around midnight. Yesterday was amazing. Going from a double-digit gap in the polls to win the primary in New Hampshire must be invigorating for Hillary’s campaign. I’m excited to see how the next several weeks go, since there’s still a lot more that’s going to happen before we have our nominee.

Being the geek I am, I was looking over some of the stats from the exit polls from CBS News, and I’m really blown away. Despite the “restoring democracy for all Americans” message that Barack Obama and John Edwards are both shouting, Hillary won 47% of the vote coming from families making $50,000 or less, fifteen percent higher than Obama and a whopping 31% more than Edwards. And, among families making $15,000 or less (a disturbing, yet terribly prevalent fact in America today), Hillary captured 49% of the vote.

Among voters who didn’t finish high school, Hillary got 61% of the vote. In fact, she had overwhelming leads among high school graduates and among voters who attended but did not compete college. (She also led among college graduates, although with a more modest margin.)

It’s the really encouraging thing to me: people recognize that Hillary Clinton didn’t show up a few years ago and suddenly “become” an advocate for families, for working Americans, for children… It’s something she’s been doing all her life. Not to quote her campaign, but it really is true that calling for change is one thing, while actually making that change happen is quite another matter entirely.

I was home, in West Virginia, for Christmas. I love West Virginia, it’s a beautiful state. No matter where I go, I find people are friendly, but I’m always amazed to walk into a coffee shop in Charleston and feel, almost literally, like family. Charleston isn’t a big city, by almost any standard, but it’s big enough that it still takes me a second to adjust every time I go home, because the genuine warmth is a bit unnerving when you’ve not been there in a while.

Everything about my trip back home, though, wasn’t perfect. As unnerving as the warmth of people is, seeing the absolutely out-of-control substance abuse problem among kids was disheartening. I last lived in West Virginia only four or five years ago. I knew it was an issue then, but I’m afraid it absolutely is a crisis now.

As a kid, when you have poverty coupled with a demoralizing lack of opportunity, I recognize you can search in many unhealthy places for solace. But, the ridiculous accessibility to controlled (which could be more accurately, at this point, termed uncontrolled) substances seems to have combined with that despair to create a very tragic situation. I talked, for what must have been hours, with two friends, one a community and child advocate who works for Marshall University and one an extension agent from West Virginia University, about what was happening, and I came away really fearing there just aren’t enough resources being focussed in the right ways to even begin to fix these problems.

When Hillary Clinton talks about fearing that our country could fall backward if this election produces another four or eight years of poor leadership… I really, really recognize what she means, now, after my trip home, more than ever. There’s so much wrong with our standing in the world, with our foreign policy, with the war. But I think the ambivalence… No, the contempt the current administration has shown with regard to domestic issues over the past seven years will be the lasting, and truly critical challenge America will have to face for years, if not decades, to come.