Mountain Party backs Robb?

His city’s official documents are sealed with a picture of smokestacks, the kind of unmistakable industrial skyline that spews waste into the air. The town’s boosters have proudly called South Charleston “Chemical City” for decades. And they don’t mean it as an epithet, a reference to sour smells trapped by thermal inversions, or a heavy, malodorous August haze.

They mean it as testament to their bread and butter, their success, their vibrancy.

Drive through the town. It’s like someplace a young Steven Spielberg would have filmed. Broad streets, plenty of parking, boys doing tricks on bikes with high handlebars, mom at home cooking meatloaf and macaroni and cheese. Fresh-cut grass. Americana.

As mayor, obligated to be head booster, Robb has mouthed the words. He has lamented the loss of chemical industry jobs with everyone else, and attended his share of chamber and Rotary meetings. The business of South Charleston is business.

The Mountain Party, by contrast, takes its name and its philosophy from the surrounding hills — something to be preserved, not exploited. The Mountain Party lists among its priorities clean air, water and land, responsible mining and logging, and an end to corporate welfare.

The Mountain Party grew out of author Denise Giardina’s campaign for governor in 2000. She got more than 1 percent of the vote. The tiny third party then put up Jesse Johnson in 2004. He got more than 2 percent of the vote and qualified the party to appear on the ballot in 2008.

People who say rah-rah to business usually don’t attract support from people who like regulations that make business safer, but more costly.

But this year is different.

Robb was a good Republican, an Eisenhower Republican. When he recited the party mantra that government has got to stay out of people’s business, he included their personal business. He built his municipal success on reliable city services. People want their trash picked up and their streets clear of snow. Robb showed no angst about digging up land to build a park, or digging up a park to make a shopping center.

There’s an advantage to that type of strict management. People used to say of Mussolini that the trains ran on time. In South Charleston, so do the garbage trucks.

But he got tired of fighting the state Republican Party and changed sides. He joined the Democrats, the party from which the Mountain Party seceded.

The Mountain Party supports universal health care. Robb says that after 30 years of administering a health-care plan for city employees, he’s ready for a single-payer system that covers all Americans.

“His position to bring our troops home, and support for progressive issues in general was the reason we had no problem approving this unusual endorsement,” Mountain Party Chairman Gary Zuckett said in a news release.

“We believe that Richie Robb best represents the social justice principles of the Mountain Party and the good government ideals of progressive voters everywhere” added Frank Young, the party’s nomination coordinator.

So here we have a group of dissatisfied Democrats and at least one dissatisfied Republican, finding they have something in common, several things, in fact.

Could this be the beginning of a new coalescence? The guy who thinks people should be working is the same one who thinks that government shouldn’t be nosing around in their bedrooms or their boardrooms. It could be the same person who thinks a state’s natural resources have value beyond what is measured in dollars.

Such a person also can consider it a patriotic duty to oppose war. The same person might even believe that everyone should be able to get health care without suffering a life-altering financial reversal or cutting into their employer’s profits. They might long for the kind of community made possible by good-paying manufacturing jobs, but at the same time want such industries to minimize pollution.

That person might be happy to pray to God in his or her own way, or not at all, and to let others do the same.

Such a person would be complex, indeed. Sound like anyone you know?

Miller, a Gazette editorial writer, can be reached at 348-5117 or dawn@wvgazette.com.