Articles by Melinda Henneberger

Talking with voters in Portland about the environment and the election

Photo: David Grant

This is part of a series of dispatches from Melinda Henneberger, who's talking to voters around the U.S. about their views on the environment and the election.

Portland, Ore. -- Oh, the indignity of tooling around environmentally aware Portland in a big-dog SUV, in between conversations about the environment. Even the guy at the rental-car counter was apologetic: "I know," he said, when I gulped at the news that my economy car had been super-sized. "No one wants them, but we have to give them to somebody."

Just as gay people grow up and move to San Francisco or New York, green people grow up and move here. Years before I began sorting bottles and cans on the other coast, my buddy who is a Kansan-turned-Oregonian was struggling to convey just how bad her new boss really was: "Melinda," she finally told me, "he does not even recycle."

My friend's next-door neighbors are transplanted Texans, Linda d'Onofrio and Andrew Migliore, who as d'Onofrio says "came here for local produce and a forward way of thinking." Even so, it took them a while to settle in with their chosen tribe: "I didn't grow up around political correctness, and we had a hard time the first couple of years," says d'Onofrio. "We'd say tasteless things about everybody's race, religion, animals; we'd make kitty taco jokes" -- not widely appreciated by "people who will stop you on the street and tell you what they think of your Hummer." Now, though, this is home, and the whole moment is more subdued: "My sister's a true Communist who goes around the world teaching micro-banking, my brother's a true Fascist with his boots in the corner, and we used to have the best conversations, but all the fun has been sucked out of that. The conversation has stopped because it's not funny anymore; you can't make jokes about Abu Ghraib and melting ice caps."

Race mattered in the W.Va. primary, but will it keep mattering?

This is the second in a series of dispatches from Melinda Henneberger, who's talking to voters around the U.S. about their views on the election.

Charleston, W.Va. -- According to the exit polls, I was hanging out with a bunch of racially challenged Hillary supporters at last night's victory party here.

One in five West Virginia voters fessed up that race was an important factor in their choice of a candidate –- and they didn't mean they saw Obama's diverse heritage as a positive. How do we know that? Because of those who walked right up to pollsters and said out loud that race was the elephant in their donkey-party living room, 81 percent voted for Clinton. Not only that, but 7 percent of West Virginia voters went for John Edwards –- who ended his run decades ago, as measured in political time –- but was the only white dude still on the ballot. What does that tell us? Nothing we want to hear.

Talking with voters in the Mountain State

This is the first in a series of dispatches from Melinda Henneberger, who's talking to voters around the U.S. about their views on the environment and the election.

Photo: Wignut

Huntington, W.Va. -- Door-knocking for Barack Obama in a state where he expects to get stomped today has been kind of thankless for Pam Wonnell, a nurse and old friend of mine who moved here from Illinois last year for her husband's job in coal mining: "I am not feeling the love" while phone canvassing or standing on front porches watching the people inside pretend not to be home. "But I'm not quitting, 'cause I'm a fighter, like Hillary," she says, and laughs at her own joke. "Isn't that Hillary-ous?"

Canvassing with her in her hilly, aerobically "butt-busting" neighborhood on the eve of the Democratic primary, though, one surprise is the can't-wait-for-November enthusiasm for Obama among ... Republicans? Hmm. Another is that even -- or perhaps especially -- in this coal-mining state, where billboards along I-64 scream, "Yes, Coal" and "Coal Keeps the Lights On," voters say they want to hear candidates talk more about the environment, not less.