The Voters of Appalachia …

So it's OK to laugh at some of the jokes. We certainly laugh at ourselves. A T shirt popular at the festival even riffs off "Deliverance": PADDLE FASTER, I HEAR BANJOS. Here's another one: how do we know the toothbrush was invented in West Virginia? Answer: because what other state would call it a "tooth" brush?

I laughed the first time I heard that, and I admit to repeating it a few times myself throughout the years. But as I've gotten older, I've started to feel a little bit of shame for finding these jokes funny. Where I grew up, some people had to wait for the "mobile dentist" to come to town if they had a bad tooth. In many remote parts of Appalachia, it's still that way. Is it funny that a child has to go to a dentist in an RV along some dirt road because his parents can't afford any better?

What I see when I return from Washington, D.C., to my childhood home is beautiful and sad. I see postcard scenes of crystal-clear trout streams, indigo buntings and scarlet tanagers, and mountainsides lit with rosebuds and rhododendron blooms. But on that same drive, I'll see tumbledown shacks and trailers, a lumber treatment yard practically on top of a river where the creosote smells so strong it makes your eyes water, and people lining up at a rusty pipe coming out of the side of a ridge to get clean spring water, because it's better than what they have at home. Kids run around in the dirt yards amid the detritus of scraping out a life in this hard, isolated world. If the Great Depression-era photographer Dorothea Lange were alive today, she'd have no shortage of material. Only it's 2008, and it says a lot about our country that so much hasn't changed.

Some things have. In fact, there's been quite a bit of progress in the 44 years since Lyndon Johnson declared a "War on Poverty" from a broken-down porch in Inez, Ky. In 1965, one third of Appalachians lived in poverty. The last U.S. Census showed that since then, the poverty rate has declined by more than half. Technology has helped make far-flung places less remote. I vividly remember watching television with my father. He'd shout out, "Boy, get up and see what's on the other channel." Our TV pulled in only two. Now satellites bloom on the hillsides, bringing hundreds of channels along with high-speed Internet.

In many of the remotest areas of Appalachia, though, life is as tough as ever. In the central part of the region, only 68 percent of kids graduate from high school. A generation ago, they'd find jobs in mines or factories or working tobacco farms. But those jobs are getting scarcer. To support their families, more people are commuting hundreds of miles to low-paying service-industry jobs in larger towns and cities. In April, when John McCain returned to the house where Johnson launched his poverty war, he found it padlocked with a NO TRESPASSING sign out front. A car was parked in the driveway, a broken window covered with a blanket. Despite LBJ's efforts, today about one third of the people in Martin County—where Inez is the county seat—still live below the poverty line.

In the coming months, McCain and Obama will, like the long line of candidates who came before them, descend on Appalachia bearing plenty of promises. The truth is, there's not much any president can do to change things in four or eight years. What they can do is simply take the place and its people seriously. Folks know when a politician is using them as stage props. John Kerry didn't sound believable last time around when he tried to pass himself off as a NASCAR fan. And no one in West Virginia thinks Obama actually kicks back with a bottle of Bud. If I could give advice to the candidates and their handlers, it would be this: don't pretend, don't condescend. (I made that rhyme so it would be easier to remember.) Andy Griffith, the patron saint of Southern culture whose mythical Mayberry sat on the edge of Appalachia, once said of his classic TV show: "We wanted them to laugh with us, not at us."