Politics and elections: rural voters - not issues - get attention

A recent internal federal investigation reminded us of why elections are important — and how damaging it is that discussion of issues affecting rural America is nearly missing from this presidential campaign. The Office of Inspector General of the federal Health and Human Services Department released two reports criticizing the care provided in 28 hospitals directly operated by the federal Indian Health Service. The Associated Press reports that “the often substandard quality of care at hospitals serving Native Americans is the result of outdated equipment and technology, lack of resources, and difficulty attracting and keeping skilled staff.”  The health care offered at Indian Health Service hospitals would have been an interesting topic for Sunday night’s presidential debate. But, again, there was little offered to rural voters, except, perhaps for Democrat Hillary Clinton’s comments on what the country owed coal mining regions.  Clinton allowed that a clean energy future (and low natural gas prices) were changing the energy economy. “But I also want to be sure that we don’t leave people behind,” Clinton said. “Those coal miners and their fathers and grandfathers, they dug that coal out, a lot of them lost their lives. They were injured. But they turned the lights on and they powered their factories. I don’t want to walk away from them.”  Republican Donald Trump continued during the debate to equate “inner city” with black Americans. “I would be a president for all of the people — African Americans, the inner cities,” he said. “You go into the inner cities and you see it’s 45 percent poverty, African Americans now 45 percent poverty in the inner cities.”  As the Washington Post reports, this was wrong on several counts. First, the poverty rate among African Americans in metro areas is 26 percent. He also misses the five million African Americans who live in rural areas or small towns. Most of those people live in the South. The Post has a good map showing that there is a huge swath of rural America with large percentages of African American residents.