Posted on 11/03/2004 1:38:26 PM PST by Alberta's Child
A small knot of reporters and camera crews gathered in front of a sprawling ranch on a hot August day near Crawford, Texas. The Republican convention in Philadelphia had ended two weeks earlier, and the presidential campaign of George W. Bush was in a traditional hiatus as the Democratic Party put on its own show in Los Angeles. President Bill Clinton had given a rousing performance to the crowd early in the convention, and the candidate selected by the party to succeed him, Vice President Al Gore, was about to surprise many pundits with a rather successful acceptance speech of his own. The Republican campaign was reeling in the face of a Democratic surge, and most polls were showing that Gore had wiped out the Texas governor’s earlier lead. The media that descended on Bush’s ranch that August morning waited anxiously as the candidate came out to answer the torrent of rapid, frenzied, questions about the presidential campaign. Did the governor have any comment about the tightening race? What did he think about the surge in Gore’s poll numbers that had rapidly propelled him into the lead in the closest presidential race in 40 years?
The candidate known as “Dubya” approached the media gathering with a coffee mug in hand, leaned against a fence post in front of the modest ranch house, and squinted in the brilliant sunshine as he faced the media onslaught.
“It sure has been dry out here this summer,” he said, as if he were addressing a rancher across the road instead of a group of reporters from every corner of the nation.
That one short sentence spoke volumes of the emotional and intellectual chasm that existed between the two major candidates. There were no concerns about the apparent loss of his seemingly insurmountable lead, no comments about the goings-on at the Democratic convention, nothing about the campaign itself. Because the nation was still living in a period of unprecedented prosperity and peace, there were no clear issues that would define the 2000 race for the White House. This would be a contest between an ambitious, hard-nosed Democrat who had weathered the Washington turmoil for the previous eight years and an affable Republican who seemed convinced that the word “turmoil” had no place in his vocabulary. At its heart it was an election that was drawn along clear cultural and geographic lines, and in the end it was “Little America” that would prevail.
To most people, American popular culture is normally identified by fast food, shallow, vicarious entertainment, and large suburban homes with more cars in the garage than kids at the kitchen table. Little America, though, lies somewhere between the metropolitan centers of the Northeast and the New Liberalism and Hollywood glitter of the West Coast. It is as much a state of mind as an actual place, and it can best be described as rural in nature and simple in word and deed. It is a culture of truck stops, lonely stretches of interstate highway, and soft winds whispering through endless fields of grain; of NASCAR races and Sunday preachers on the radio, and George Strait and the Allman Brothers on cassette. It is a place where cattle futures and wheat prices define economic vitality instead of the NYSE and NASDAQ numbers that most of us insist on using as benchmarks to define how “rich” we are.
Despite the razor-thin margin by which this election was decided, the final electoral map clearly illustrates a stark political and cultural divide that exists in the United States. While Al Gore built his support in the traditional Democratic strongholds of New England, the mid-Atlantic states, the manufacturing centers of the Midwest, and the liberal Pacific Coast states, George Bush made his way to the White House by winning just about everything else on the map. The untold secret about this election is that it was simply another chapter in a story that has been nearly ten years in the making.
The saga actually began in 1992 when a governor from Arkansas named Bill Clinton selected Tennessee Senator Al Gore as his running mate, and a Democrat was elected President for the first time since 1976. Although the Democratic Party controlled both houses of Congress as well as the White House, the next two years were marked by constant political chaos, highlighted by the failed Clinton health care debacle of 1993. The mid-term “voter backlash” elections of 1994 saw the Republicans gain control of both houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years, and Georgia Representative Newt Gingrich assumed his role as the Speaker of the House. Washington’s Tom Foley became the first House Speaker since the 1850s to fail in his re-election bid, so the title of House Minority Leader was passed to Dick Gephardt of Missouri. Bob Dole of Kansas succeeded Maine Senator George Mitchell as the Senate Majority Leader, a role he filled until he launched his failed presidential bid in 1996 and relinquished it to Mississippi’s Trent Lott. Tom Daschle of South Dakota became the Senate minority leader when Mitchell retired in 1995.
Behind the names and faces, this superficial sketch of the U.S. political scene in the mid-1990s contains a fascinating story line, particularly when the ranking members of the House and Senate leadership are added to the mix. Because Americans tend to think of government in purely political terms, a dramatic geographic trend had gone largely unnoticed in recent years. Since 1995, nearly every major elected office in the U.S. government has been held by someone from the South or the rural West (today, House Speaker Dennis Hastert of Illinois and House Democratic whip David Bonier of Michigan are the only ones who do not fit this profile). What is particularly remarkable, in retrospect, is that regardless of party affiliation, these people all represented states that would end up casting their electoral votes for George W. Bush in the 2000 election. This was not a mere coincidence, and it points to a clear shift in political power away from the population centers of the two coasts and toward the rural areas that have come to be derisively known as “flyover country” by that segment of the population that has never been there. And so it was only natural that Texan George W. Bush and his running mate Dick Cheney (from Wyoming by way of Texas) should prevail in this election.
Al Gore, in contrast, made two crucial mistakes during the course of this campaign that helped to seal his defeat. By selecting a running mate from Connecticut, he reached to a state and region that would have voted for him under any circumstances. In addition, his prospects for success were further hampered by his well-documented shifting political stands. The Tennessee version of Al Gore officially became a Washington D.C. insider when he was selected to be Clinton’s running mate in 1992, but the price he paid for that office was his abandonment of the moderate positions that had helped him get elected to the U.S. Senate in the 1980s. This made him immensely popular among the wealthy liberal elite on the two coasts and in the industrial northeast, but the end result was that in the 2000 election he lost huge patches of real estate in between these areas. While the Florida debacle has justifiably captured the attention of the media for the last month, it is worth noting that the Florida results would have been nothing more than a historical footnote if Gore had simply won his home state of Tennessee (or Clinton’s Arkansas, for that matter). Even the D.C. version of Gore would have to admit that Tennessee’s eleven electoral votes are more important in a presidential election than the District of Columbia’s three.
After the dust settles and the Clinton administration is consigned to the dustbin of history, people will reflect on the last eight years and wonder about the legacy of the man who had the strongest love-hate relationship with the American people of any politician in recent memory. Perhaps he offered a glimpse of it himself in one of his recent “exit interviews.” When asked about his most important accomplishments as President, he thought for a moment before replying that “defeating the Gingrich revolution” was the greatest achievement of his administration. The response says more about his legacy than even the sordid impeachment episode does, for those who are not fooled by such propaganda will remember that he himself signed most of the items in the Republican Contract With America into law. In reality, Clinton was as much a part of the Republican Revolution as Newt Gingrich was, a seldom-recognized fact that may explain why the GOP probably never had any interest in throwing such a hollow man out of the White House.
While the nation will continue to argue one issue or another along partisan lines, it was, in the end, the triumph of Little America that defined U.S. politics for the last decade. What was once known as the Democratic Party has become largely irrelevant to most Americans, as it is now dominated by leftist Hollywood elites, radical feminists, minority leaders who are Marxists at heart, and malcontents from one end of the country to the other. They even find it necessary to turn occasionally to Republican mayors and governors in times of need, when the failed urban policies of yesteryear result in moral and economic chaos that turns their cherished cities into unbearable places even for Democrats to live. It is a sad bunch of people who have never been to Little America, for they would find that the hot August winds that scorch the earth in western Texas and the gentle breezes that whisper through fields of grain on the endless prairie often speak louder than a rush-hour crowd in New York City
As I looked at the unfolding electoral map last night, it occurred to me that from a political perspective nothing really changed all that much in the last four years.
My apologies to anyone who went blind trying to read the unedited version I mistakenly posted earlier today!
"Despite the razor-thin margin by which this election was decided"
A margin of 4 million people = razor thin? Need to keep puching down these Dem talking points.
Oops sorry, wrong election. My bad.
It tells a remarkable story about the geographic/cultural divide in this country, doesn't it?
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