Posted on 07/31/2008 9:33:38 PM PDT by MovementConservative
Ever since the 1930s, most urban areas have leaned Democratic. But in presidential elections, many remained stubbornly competitive between the two parties. As late as 1988, for example, Republican nominees won Dallas County and made strong showings in the core urban counties of Cook (Chicago), Los Angeles and King (Seattle).
Today, America’s urban areas have evolved into a political monoculture that increasingly resembles the “solid South” that provided a base for Democrats from the late 19th century to the 1960s. Since 1972, the year of the Nixon landslide, the Democratic share has grown 20 percent or more in most of the largest urban counties.
As a result, places where Republicans such as Ronald Reagan could once win a respectable share of the vote — including San Francisco, Philadelphia and New York City — by 2004 were delivering 80 percent or more to the Democrats. Even in the losing year of 2004, Democratic nominee John F. Kerry won almost every city of more than 500,000 people.
Many new urbanites tend to be students or professionals enjoying city life during their first, highly experimental years of adulthood. At this point, they are most open to liberal ideas and causes; they have yet to worry much about taxes and crime, issues that drive people to the center. As they grow older, marry and raise families, many in this cohort — particularly those who do not ascend into the upper classes — leave the urban core for the suburbs or other more affordable regions.
Yet if the urban base — roughly 30 percent of the population — offers Obama a huge edge in the election, he must not identify too much as an urban candidate. In the past, the danger for Democrats lay in being perceived as paying too much heed to poor, minority voters. Fortunately, Obama, as an African-American, has little need to compete for their affections.
More tempting, however, might be to embrace the emerging agenda of the benefactors of gentrification: powerful real estate interests and other groups. Among them are vocal constituencies who are openly hostile to people in suburbs and small cities. This ideology first emerged in 2004 in John Sperling’s “Retro vs. Metro” thesis, which envisioned the eventual triumph of a sophisticated urban population over backward-seeming rural, small town and suburban constituencies.
An even clearer example of this urbanist ideology came in the wake of Kerry’s 2004 defeat, largely at the hands of rural, small-town and exurban “retro” voters. Editors of The Stranger, a Seattle alternative weekly, pointed out in an article that “if the cities elected our president, if urban voters determined the outcome, John F. Kerry would have won by a landslide.” Their solution was not to reach out to the other geographies, but to build an “urban identity politics” to counter Republicans’ hold over suburban and rural voters.
“From here on out, we’re glad red-state rubes live in areas where guns are more powerful and more plentiful, cars are larger and faster, and people are fatter and slower and dumber,” The Stranger proclaimed. Given the editors’ uninhibited sense of superiority, they felt confident that in the emerging Darwinian struggle, the suburban and exurban Neanderthals would be forced to give way to the clear superiority of the urban Cro-Magnons.
Since 2004, this ideology has become stronger, ironically bolstered by two bubbles fostered by President Bush’s fiscal policy: the boom in city condominium development and the rapid expansion of the financial services industry. Even as 80 percent to 90 percent of metropolitan growth redounded to the suburbs, the rising affluence of the urban cores persuaded the media that cities were not only back but were also reasserting their historic ascendance over the periphery.
In recent months, the city-centered media such as CNN, The New York Times and National Public Radio have jumped on the urbanist bandwagon. They have promoted urban chauvinists’ contention that high gas prices and legislation to limit global warming would end the era of dispersion. This return to a more urbanized demography, some Democratic bloggers suggest, would assure a new liberal ascendancy.
Whatever Obama may believe personally, he would be well-advised to distance himself from such sentiments. For one thing, identifying with people who celebrate the demise of other geographies may offend the majority of Americans who prefer to live in “retro,” lower-density environments. Suburb- and countryside-bashing may turn on editors and readers of The New York Times, but it hardly constitutes good politics.
In terms of political strategy, Obama would be far better off stressing the commonalities between people in differing geographies. His time on the campaign trail should tell him that laid-off paper industry workers in central Wisconsin, hard-pressed suburban homeowners in San Bernardino, Calif., and struggling inner city residents in Brooklyn have ample cause to reject an extension of Republican rule. Why repeat the Bush tactic of dividing people from each other, this time based on where they choose to live, when the economic misery is so well-distributed?
By displaying genuine empathy for Americans living in suburbs and small towns as well as in cities, Obama could achieve more than a small tactical victory, à la Karl Rove. With a strong showing in the other geographies as well as his inevitable landslide in cities, he could instead realize a historic triumph closer to Rooseveltian proportions.
Joel Kotkin is a presidential fellow at Chapman University and executive editor of www.newgeography.com. Mark Schill is the website’s managing editor and a community strategy consultant with Praxis Strategy Group.
Urban areas also have the Dead, Illegal, criminal and multiple/fraud voters, organized by the likes of ACORN, that Democrats need so badly.
Urban areas are the storm drains of society. People too weak, stupid, or lazy to make it on their own gravitate to big cities, which is why they vote Democrat.
It’s hilarious that liberals act as if they’re so much more intelligent than conservatives. But we all know what would happen if we required citizens to score 100 or higher on a standard IQ test to be eligible to vote. Obama would end up with about 32% of the popular vote.
(the infowarrior cocks an eyebrow) Indeed? Who are *they* to be thinking this? Are they really so ill-informed, and so arrogant as to believe that I am at all impressed with where it was they took "Marxism 101", and how long it took them to finish their indoctrination?
Here's a news flash for the presumptuous little darlings... I'm not.
So they deem me a Neanderthal to be "subjugated", do they? Well, then, who are they going to get to subjugate me? Some of their own ilk? Ha! It is to laugh. These chumps involuntarily void their bodily wastes in terror at the mere sight of a sporting firearm, let alone a weapon of war. Some "gangbanger"? You know, the ones that can't even hold a common handgun properly, and spray the streets with rapid fire, trying to kill one another, but mainly end up killing some uninvolved bystander? Again, laughable.
No, they can only rely on the gunbearers of the state to do their dirty work, largely for pay. The problem with mercenaries is, they wish to be alive to spend that pay, dying doesn't figure into their equations at all, and when enough of them do die, then they become unavailable for further service.
Be careful urbanites, be very careful as to where you wish to go. The food you eat, the gas you use to go to your "upscale" jobs, indeed, everything that makes your life in the city livable, either comes from, or passes through the territory you wish to bend to your will, and yours alone. Should you be so rash as to continue biting the hand that literally feeds you, then, you cannot say you haven't been warned...
the infowarrior
The rodent base is made up of two extremes. Those so “smart” they lack in all common sense and reason (educational and media elites) and often hate America and all it stands for, and at the other end, the very stupid, brainwashed and gullible. The ones that believe that Lincoln was a Democrat and getting gold grilles on their teeth and having as many children as possible out of wedlock is one of the greatest achievements in life.
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