Like other Military Bastions, the Iraq war is everywhere and nowhere in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, as people talk about the presidential race.

Tens of thousands of troops have been deployed and redeployed from nearby Fort Campbell, the massive 105,000-acre base that straddles Tennessee and Kentucky and that leaves many here with very personal feelings about the war. The fighting overseas is not an abstraction in places like this. It is about friends and neighbors, broken leases and pawned goods.

But while the war is on everyone’s mind here, no one talks about it. Not as a policy issue anyway.

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On the five-year anniversary of the war, the local paper in Hopkinsville didn’t run a single story about the conflict on the front page. Questioning the war is generally not warmly embraced in these places.

At the same time, however, the missing troops, who are slated to come home in Hopkinsville starting in the next few weeks, have a real effect on these communities — particularly where the economy is concerned. There are fewer people to visit local restaurants and stores and fewer people to buy homes. That has been an additional drag in tough economic times.

And one last issue hangs over many of these communities — race. While the nation’s Military Bastions are scattered geographically, they tend to be found in more rural locales where diversity isn’t necessarily common and if it is it can be a complicated issue. These places, which would expect to lean toward John McCain, hold a host of potential problems for Barack Obama.

– Dante Chinni

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