I'm going to stop nattering about this Real Soon Now, I promise, but a friend passed this on to me:

The talk outside the school where I took my daughter this morning, a bastion of Kerry/Edwards supporters, was mostly bewilderment about where people in urban areas -- who overwhelmingly supported Kerry -- can go politically now. Here in the bubble of Seattle, the outlook was voiced by one father: "It's like we're an island now, cut off from the rest of the country. And we just have to go it on our own now."

Unfortunately, I think that's the problem. Urban liberals have been writing off their rural counterparts for too long. The larger the gap grows and festers, the more isolated they're doomed to become. Outreach, not withdrawal, is what is needed.

If progressives are serious about making a real effort at rebuilding their political machinery from the ground up, they need to start by going back to their rural roots. And it can't just be lip service.

While much of the rest of the post is more than a scosh conspiratorial, I definitely agree with this conclusion. For whatever reason, those Red State and Red County folks voted for Bush. Arguing over whether they should have or not is meaningless. Arguing over whether they're all slack-jawed yokels tricked by beads and trinkets, or gun-nuts shilled by Karl Rove into voting to protect their guns from the gummint, or Bible-thumping retards who are deluded by their religious views, or just plain The Enemy, is not only meaningless, it's counter-productive.

They are Americans, and they vote. You can try to deny them. You can try to despise them. But if the Dems really want to take the White House (or majorities in either chamber of Congress) back, decisively, they will actually have to reach out to them, make friends of them, convince them that they, the Dems, can best represent their needs and ideals.

Otherwise, those blue islands will only get smaller, and smaller, and smaller ...

Filed under :: Elections 2004
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