Published: August 27, 2008 09:51 pm         

Much has changed since Gore, Heston gun debate, Caputo says

Eight years ago, actor Charlton Heston fired up an overflow crowd of union coal miners in Beckley with a grim warning about Al Gore over Second Amendment rights.

Much has changed since George W. Bush painted West Virginia red that year with the help of coal miners and applied a second coat four years later, says House Majority Whip Mike Caputo, D-Marion, an observer at the Democratic National Convention in Denver.

Caputo, an official of the United Mine Workers of America in Fairmont, is painfully aware of how union miners broke ranks and fled into the Bush camp in the 2000 presidential sweepstakes.

Not only did miners hold suspicions that Gore opposed gun rights but posed a threat to the coal industry over his strident environmental beliefs.

This time around, things are different with Barack Obama heading the ticket, Caputo said during a convention break Wednesday.

“I think what’s going to raise the comfort level of coal miners is that Barack Obama is from a coal-producing state,” Caputo said.

“He has worked with the Illinois Legislature on coal issues. We feel comfortable with that. And the fact that John McCain is proposing 13 new nuclear plants doesn’t do us any good at all. I think Barack Obama will appropriate money for clean coal research and technology and carbon capture and sequestration, which is what we’re going to have to do. We have to face the reality of the climate change issue, and we are becoming a greener society. But we need to be a part of that. I don’t think coal is going to go away for a long, long way.”

America still derives half of its electrical power from coal, he pointed out, and the fossil fuel figures to take a leading role in Obama’s national energy plan.

“People don’t realize it,” he said of the nation’s energy reliance on coal. “They take it for granted. They think maybe electricity is just something that comes out of the wall.”

Caputo and other UMWA leaders plan to take rank-and-file coal miners down memory lane in the remaining weeks of the campaign, reminding them of how the cost of living has soared under the Bush administration.

“We’re making sure they see the shoddy record that Sen. McCain has when it comes to veterans, when it comes to labor unions and when it comes to working class folks,” he said.

“We don’t tell our members how to vote. We’ll tell them it starts from the ground up, who we think would be the best candidate for the membership. It’s our job to put the information in their hands. I think they’ll make the right decision.

“We would really like to see some blue at the end of the tunnel this year.”

— E-mail:

mannix@register-herald.com