Opinion

Hillary’s vow to kill coal miners’ jobs finishes a vast Democratic betrayal

Here’s a novelty: Hillary Clinton told the truth. Oops!

“We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business,” Clinton said Sunday night while boasting about her clean energy program — and with a big smile on her face.

In fact, this is standard Democratic policy: President Obama’s been throwing coal miners out of work for seven years now, aiming to deliver on his 2008 pledge to “bankrupt” the coal industry.

But most Dems have the sense to pretend they’re just protecting the environment — and bashing business, ’natch.

Fine, Clinton quickly followed with a vow to dole out $30 billion for job retraining and to cover early-retirement costs for the workers she’ll get fired.

But retrain for what? Name a single working-class industry that the modern Democratic Party actually favors. (And, no, “green jobs” don’t count: They exist almost exclusively in liberal rhetoric.)

In fact, if Clinton keeps up with the honesty, she’ll tell the voters of other industries she means to destroy — oil, for sure, and probably natural gas, too. (Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s already led the way there with his ban on fracking.) And, hey, aren’t those evil Koch brothers big in (ick!) manufacturing?

No, coal’s not the perfect fuel — nothing is. But the industry has invested billions in getting cleaner — only to find Democrats (or their green masters) always raising the bar.

OK, Democrats have already lost the coal vote. When Obama took office, coal-producing US House districts were evenly split. Now they’re 90 percent Republican.

To see how shameful the Democrats’ betrayal is, look to history: The coal miners’ union, the United Mine Workers of America, has one of the nation’s proudest records on race. Its founding constitution of 1890 barred discrimination based on race, religion or national origin.

By 1900, some 20,000 black miners made the union about 20 percent African-American. And the UMWA stuck by those ideals all the way up to fighting to end apartheid.

Political commentary this year is full of sneers about what ignorant bigots working-class voters are. We’d suggest the biggest ignorance lies in the commentariat.