evaluates the different explanations for why Kerry lost. My own take is that Kerry lost because Bush got several more percent of the vote nationwide, and that there's certainly no single reason what that happened. But this article debunks some of the more simple theories.
It has to be understood that rural America is hurting, and has been for a couple of decades now. Visit any rural community now and it's palpable: The schools are run down, the roads are falling apart, the former downtowns have been gutted by the destruction of the local economies and their displacement by the new Wal-Mart economy.
People living in rural areas increasingly feel that they have become mere colonies of urban society, treated dismissively and ignored at best, the victims of an evil plot by wealthy liberal elites at worst.
Liberals, largely due to their increasing urban-centric approach to politics, have mostly ignored the problem. And conservatives have been busy exploiting it.
It's important to understand that they have been doing so not by offering any actual solutions. Indeed, Republican "solutions" like the 1995 "Freedom to Farm Act" have actually turned out to be real disasters for the nation's family farmers; the only people who have benefited from it have been in the boardrooms of corporate agribusiness, which of course bellied up first to the big federal trough offered by the law. Even conservatives admit it has been a disaster.
No, conservatives have instead employed a strategy of scapegoating. It isn't bad policy or the conservative captivity to agribusiness interests that has made life miserable in rural America -- it's liberals. Their lack of morals (especially embodied by Bill Clinton), their contempt for real, hard-working Americans, their selfish arrogance -- those are the reasons things are so bad.
These audiences are feeding on a steady diet of hate. And as with all such feedings, they never are sated, but only have their appetites whetted for more. So each day, people come back to get a fresh fill-up of hate.
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While liberals' chief claim to moral superiority mainly rests on championing the rights and needs of the disenfranchised and downtrodden, one of the most significantly and consistently disenfranchised segments of the American economy of the past 20 years has been the rural sector. If rural dwellers who see their way of life under assault wonder why liberals do not seem to consider their cause a worthy one, they probably cannot be blamed for concluding that they simply live in the wrong place, lead the wrong kind of lifestyle, and are not the right color. It may not be the whole truth, but there is some truth to it.
More to the point, urban liberals should be concerned about what's happening to rural America, because it directly affects their lives as well. The corporatization of agriculture and the accompanying gutting of local rural economies first of all affects urban dwellers' food sources; even as genetically modified foods are being pushed into the food chain, the actual supply of traditional hybrid strains of crops and the genetic diversity they represented has been decreasing dramatically, since many of these resided within the purview of smaller family farms.
Moreover, corporate farms are rapidly becoming a major source of pollution, a problem that affects every locality. Unsurprisingly, the current administration relies on "voluntary compliance" when it comes to regulating this pollution.
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Cecil Andrus, the longtime Idaho governor, former Interior Secretary and godfather of the Alaskan National Wildlife Reserve, tried to warn party leaders against pursuing this course in the 1990s. In 1994, he and a group of Western governors met with President Clinton and his advisers to discuss the party's approach to rural issues, particularly those in the West. Andrus bluntly warned Clinton that, if his administration didn't take rural people's concerns seriously, and continued to send signals of being out of touch with Western issues, they risked becoming a permanent minority party in the West. Democrats' insistence on representing an urban perspective was a real problem, he warned.
At the end of the meeting, Al Gore reportedly took Andrus aside and gave him a chewing-out, telling him: "We think you're the problem."
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It's hard to overstate the powerful effect a campaign appearance by John Kerry would have had in a place like Idaho -- where he owns a vacation home, but hardly seems to actually visit or have any contact with the residents. It says everything you need to know about the DLC approach to the 2004 campaign that, during one of Kerry's springtime visits to Sun Valley, the Blaine County Democratic Party held a major Kerry fundraiser in Ketchum, raising several hundred thousand dollars -- and Kerry couldn't be bothered to drop in and make even a brief appearance.
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The larger point, of course, is to shift the focus from supposed cultural differences back to the vast common ground. Rural people, just like urban and suburban folk, value good schools, good jobs, sound infrastructure, social amenities, a vibrant and healthy culture. When we talk to rural Americans, those are kinds of things we should be talking about -- because, for many of them, these are things they have been losing, while the rest of the country seems to be gaining.
There will be inevitable differences. We won't always see eye to eye on some subjects, especially when they are products of differences in religious beliefs: abortion, gay rights, evolution. What has to change is how we react to these differences. Instead of dismissing people as hopeless ignoramuses for disagreeing on these matters, liberals need to operate from a basis of mutual respect for differing but sincerely held beliefs.
Of course, this respect will not always be reciprocated. This will be especially the case for the hard-core right wing that has an entrenched presence in rural America. Those are not the people whose minds can be changed. And in these kinds of cases, liberals should feel no compulsion to be "sensitive." Indeed, failing to stand up to them with appropriate strength is a recipe for getting bulldozed, as liberals have for the past decade.
