Jackson (United States) (AFP) - Jim Feltner's days are empty. He is a poor man in the poorest county in the United States and lives off government aid.
But the Kentucky resident has nothing but scorn for the head of that government, President Barack Obama, who has made the fight against economic inequality one of his battle cries.
Feltner sits in a plastic chair outside his ramshackle mobile home, surrounded by rusty cars and car parts. He has no television. People around here, he says, are "just surviving, barely. I know, because I'm one of them."
A victim of two heart attacks, he lives off disability checks, and $105 a month in government food stamps.
Feltner voted for a previous Democratic president, Bill Clinton, but now says: "I will vote for anybody against Obama. "I don't care who runs against him, I'll vote for him. I don't care if it's a Democrat, a Republican, an Indian, a Pakistani, even a Frenchman!"
The first reason is coal. He accuses Obama of dooming this mining region of the Appalachian mountains with environmental regulations.
Since 2011, 30 percent of the mining jobs -- around 4,000 -- in the region have vanished. Competition from natural gas is another factor in the decline.
"Here's what he said about the coal business: 'go ahead, build your coal fired energy plants, we will shut them down,'" Feltner alleged.
"Is that something for a president to say?," he added. "He's got a problem with the poor people."
Eastern Kentucky, a region that has long depended on the welfare state, is the epicenter of the war on poverty launched right here in 1964 by Democratic President Lyndon Johnson.
But 50 years later, Obama, another Democrat, is held in contempt in these parts. Nationwide, 63 percent of low-salary workers, those making under $30,000 a year, voted for his re-election in 2012.
But here in Wolfe County, 60 percent of voters backed Republican Mitt Romney. In neighboring countries Romney's score surpassed 80 percent.
Wolfe County has the lowest average income of all the 3,146 counties in America -- $31,000 dollars per household annually.
A massive 41 percent of its inhabitants live below the poverty line -- defined at $11,670 per person per year -- and 35 percent receive food stamps.
