| A couple of brilliant in-depth analyses came out in the past couple of days, examining why Democrats are threatening to retake the Rocky Mountain West from the herefore tenacious grip of the Republican party.
On Sunday, Kossak mcjoan described the political environment of the West, and why it matters. McJoan:
That said, there are some things happening out here that really should be recognized by the national party as it considers building on what is bound to be an extremely successful election year. That's because there are some long-term shifts that a few smart politicians--Brian Schweitzer and Jon Tester, to name two--grasped early on and have been building upon. That kind of forward thinking will be key to building our majority down the line and gaining and holding the White House. The 2008 national mood, I'd argue, is still throw the bums out--gains made by Democrats this cycle are going to come as a result of us not being them. While the promises of "change" are compelling, for any gains made in 2008 to hold and increase in 2010, 2012 and beyond, there has to be some delivery in the next two years.
There are two highly connected issues that top what Westerners are concerned about leading into 2008--Iraq and the economy....What voters are figuring out in the West is that the economy sucks largely because of the war, and we're in this war largely because of oil. It's not a situation they are particularly happy about. |
What Mcjoan argues is that Westerns are particularly susceptable to a encomic populist message of affordable universal health care, investing in alternative energy, and tax cuts for working families (not mega-corporations), and that, at the recent Democratic Convention, Harry Reid and Brian Schweitzer best voiced the message that embodies the new political realities in the West.
The other, and perhaps even better, analysis of the changing political landscape comes from The Stranger's Eli Sanders who this month wrote a piece for the American Prospect called, "How the West Will be Won."
In it, Sanders frames the Western political climate around the cousins, Tom and Mark Udall, who are running (and leading their races) in New Mexico and Colorado, respectively.
In essence, Sanders argues that Democrats are winning the West with charismatic candidates, a message of pragmatic conservationism, and a good dose of populist rhetoric, equating Republicans with big corporations, but going light on social issues.
That an aspiring Mountain West senator is addressing the energy issue in this way is notable and indicative of the changing issue matrix in the region. It's a complicated shift, but to broadly summarize: As economic and environmental issues have come to the fore in recent years, social issues have receded in importance in voters' minds. At the same time, as the Iraq War and other unpopular strategies backed by Republicans have sapped confidence in the Republican Party's ability to lead, more people have become interested in hearing Democratic solutions.
"Republicans have believed ever since Reagan that Westerners care more about corporate extractive jobs than they do about landscape and clean places to hunt, fish, and camp," Williams of the Center for the Rocky Mountain West told me. "That's a mistake." Or, at least, it has become a mistake for Republicans over time.
While Sanders falls prey to the false meme (supplied by the Wall Street Journal, of all publications) that newly arrived outsiders are pushing a conservationist ethic onto the political scene -- ignoring the fact that likely as many folks come to Montana because they perceive it as a conservative haven where they can play with guns and mingle with other social conservatives, and ignoring the home-grown foundation of the recent Democratic upsurge -- it seems that he's in agreement with McJoan: Westerners are tired of unregulated exploitation of their land, and see big out-of-region corporations, aided by Republicans, as the culprit.
What's obvious from both of these articles is that Democrats in the West have their work cut out for them in crafting a message and executing policy that's pragmatic, not overly ideological, that's conservationist in nature, but that's also mindful of local economies. In short, it sounds like the perfect conditions in which to create good public servants.
Let's end this post with an image supplied to Sanders by Pat Williams:
Pat Williams, the nine-term Democratic congressman from Montana who now watches trends in the region as a senior fellow at the Center for the Rocky Mountain West, said that Republicans used to count on the high peaks of the Rockies as a kind of magic barrier--not just the marker of the Continental Divide but also a kind of cultural and political divide that would keep liberal successes contained to the Pacific Coast. "For Republicans, the Rockies are like a levee," Williams said. "The levee on the left bank. It's been leaking. Republicans have been doing a lot of sandbagging out here, but it's starting to break, and if it does, it's going to flood Republicans out for a long time." |
