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Everybody in West Virginia knows Jim Justice saved the state’s historic Greenbrier resort from bankruptcy and restored the jobs of 650 laid-off workers.

In a state that ranks low on almost every measure of prosperity, he boosted the local sense of pride by building a training camp for the New Orleans Saints on the property and convincing the PGA to host a premiere tournament at the Greenbrier, turning a dying resort in White Sulphur Springs, West Va. into a sports destination.

He also added a casino, which the Greenbrier’s web site describes as “Monte Carlo meets Gone With the Wind.” Its splashy motif tested the old guard, but that’s how Justice rolls. According to Forbes, he’s West Virginia’s only billionaire, and now at age 65 he’s the frontrunner for governor in tomorrow’s Democratic primary.

A huge bear of a man with a shock of white hair, he stands 6’7”, weighs over 300 pounds, and wears crocs on the campaign trail. Like Donald Trump, another billionaire businessman turned politician, Justice makes a lot of grandiose pronouncements about what he could do if elected to make the economy take off, promising voters in an April debate, “I’ll take you on a rocket jobs ride you’ll never believe.”

Aside from a brief stint on the Raleigh County Board of Education 15 years ago, he’s a political novice. He was a Republican before he was a Democrat, and a Democrat before he was a Republican.

He’s also dared to question the future of the state’s most sacred of sacred cows: Coal

Coal is so central to the state’s psyche and its economic well being that the mineral’s image is in the state flag.

“I do not want to give up on coal. I do not want to throw it away, but you have to have a lot more than coal,” Justice told students at Blue Ridge Technical Community College, according to the Martinsburg Journal. “It does not take a rocket scientist to figure that out. No matter what I do, coal may never come back.”

That passes for radical in coal country, but there’s more to the story. Some accuse Justice of talking out of both sides of his mouth when it comes to coal, which is the source of his fortune.

He inherited Bluestone Coal, now Bluestone Resources, from his father, selling it to a Russian conglomerate when coal was still riding high, then buying it back last year for 99 percent less than what he sold it for in 2009.

The coal business did a nosedive in those six years, and Justice says he bought the mines back because he didn’t want to see all those miners thrown out of work. He reopened several mines and put over 200 miners back to work. The United Mine Workers has endorsed him.

West Virginians blame coal’s decline on “Obama’s war on coal” and EPA regulations. The state House of Delegates shifted to Republican control in 2014 after 83 years of Democratic dominance. Still,the voters elect Democrats as governor, and Justice leads in the polls over Republican state Senate leader Bill Cole, a local car dealer.

Justice’s chief asset is his larger than life personality, and his ability to convince voters that he can do for the state what he has done in his private life, think big, generate jobs and make money.

“I can do what no one has ever done, no one, because I have a creative mind like nobody’s business and I won’t take no,” he said in an interview with the Charleston Gazette-Mail. “I can pick up the phone and call anybody and he’ll take my call.”

Just like Trump on the national level, the braggadocio does not encompass much in the way of specifics. The message is trust me, I’m a smart guy with a lot of contacts, I’ll make it happen. If elected, Justice says he will be “marketer-in-chief” for West Virginia.

Source: The daily beast