RNC chairman touts McCain’s concern for ’forgotten places’

FRANKFORT, Ky. — Republican National Committee Chairman Mike Duncan says Sen. John McCain’s scheduled visit to an impoverished mountain community on Wednesday shows the concern the presumed Republican presidential nominee has for “forgotten places.”

McCain plans to visit Inez as part of a tour that’s intended to send a message of hope to small towns across the nation. Former President Lyndon B. Johnson visited the same Kentucky community more than 40 years ago to launch an anti-poverty initiative.

The visit by McCain comes on the heels of new polling data that shows American voters have become more concerned about the economy than the war in Iraq. In an Associated Press-Yahoo News poll released Monday, 67 percent say the economy is an extremely important issue, up from 46 percent in November. The war in Iraq — the dominant issue for several years — stands at 48 percent.

Duncan, a former Inez banker, said residents of the town near the West Virginia border are excited to have a presidential candidate making a visit. Inez, a town of about 700 people, last made national news in 2000 when the bottom dropped out of a coal company’s waste reservoir, releasing more than 300 million gallons of black goo on outlying areas in what the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency called the worst ecological disaster in the Southeast.

“It has a lot to do with campaigning in places where Republicans don’t normally campaign,” Duncan said. “These are often forgotten places in presidential campaigns and forgotten in general.”

McCain will see firsthand a county with stubbornly deep pockets of poverty. More than 40 percent of the residents live in poverty, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.