Newspaper: Could Asheville represent Obama’s vision for America?

The Christian Science Monitor asks the provocative question, then does a poor job of answering it. Here’s part of the story:

Founded as a health resort, the little city of “hillbilly-hippies,” entrepreneurs, musicians, retirees, and community drum circles is, indeed, a progressive’s vision of America. 

Nestled in the oldest hills on earth, Asheville (pop. 70,000), the first East Coast city to require sustainable green construction, is a sort of experiment in environmentalism that has made the city the gateway to the new Appalachia and gotten it listed both as one of America’s “happiest places” and as one of the “best places to reinvent your life.”

But it also represents conservative fears about what President’s intentions might wreak: A dearth of high-paying jobs, relatively high taxes, large numbers of homeless and other wards of the state, a high crime rate, and a progressive ruling class perhaps more interested in maintaining quaintness than thickening residents’ wallets. 

“At least as far back as the arrival of the Vanderbilts, it has been a haven for artists, innovative types, sophisticated thinkers, and people who want a little something more out of life than the average,” writes former resident Thomas Osborne on City-Data.com. “Asheville is cultured and educated, perhaps more like a New England town, but amazingly friendly and polite, like a piece of decent southern aristocracy.”

To be sure, the visit also fits into Obama’s “White House to Main Street” program, where he will travel next week to the struggling small towns of the Midwest who first gave him real traction in the 2008 campaign.