City Mice
| Thu Sep. 4, 2008 8:39 AM PDT
CITY MICE....Ezra Klein points to a small panel of Detroit voters who commented on Sarah Palin's speech last night and notes that, of all the groups, it was the independents who were least impressed. Here's a sampling:
It appears that once she makes up her mind, that is the end of it....She was a Republican novelty act with a sophomoric script....I still don't know anymore about this young lady tonight than I did last night....Her speech contained few statements about policy or the party platform....I found her barrage of snide remarks and distortions to be a major turn off....I thought she would appear more professional, more stateswomanly. She's no match for Joe Biden.
Obviously this is a tiny group of people and may or may not represent anything larger. We'll have to wait for next week's polls to find out more on that score. But it does suggest that the snide mockery and withering sarcasm that both Palin and Rudy Giuliani delivered last night might be more of a turnoff to apolitical voters than the GOP thinks. (And, conversely, that just as audiences liked Bill Clinton's policy-heavy laundry lists better than the jaded DC press did, it may be that voters prefer a little more substance and gravitas in settings like this too.)
And me? Well, on a purely personal note, the most grating part of Palin's speech (and Giuliani's) was their reliance — yet again — on the trope that the only true Americans are those from small towns in the heartland. As a native Californian, that stuff just drives me up the wall. This smoldering esthetic resentment, eagerly stoked by the GOP every fours years since at least Nixon, relies on the myth that us coastal urbanites spend all our time looking down our patrician noses at anyone who lives outside the city limits, and it's dangerous, divisive, and annoying as hell. What's more, as near as I can tell, it's completely backwards. Far from criticizing small town life, America celebrates it. Liberals celebrate it. Politicians celebrate it. Everyone celebrates it. I can hardly turn on the TV without hearing that, compared with the hardworking everymen and women who populate the prairies and put food on our tables, anyone who lives where I do is degenerate, suspiciously cosmopolitan, and one step away from turning the country over to the UN.
Feh. I know this is hardly new or uniquely American. And it's designed for specifically political reasons. And it works and it wins elections and that's all conservatives care about. And this is exactly the reaction they're trying to sucker me into. But it still annoys me, and for some reason everyone feels like they have to continue playing this game forever. It's time to stop it.
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Comments
And me? Well, on a purely personal note, the most grating part of Palin's speech (and Giuliani's) was their reliance ? yet again ? on the trope that the only true Americans are those from small towns in the heartland. As a native Californian, that stuff just drives me up the wall.
What's so stupid about this is the fact that for over 100 years, most Americans have lived in and around larger cities and towns. Small towns in certain parts of the "heartland" (more accurately known as flyover land) are dying out.
That Guiliani, once the mayor of America's largest city, would emphasize something like this is particularly disingenuous.
And me? Well, on a purely personal note, the most grating part of Palin's speech (and Giuliani's) was their reliance ? yet again ? on the trope that the only true Americans are those from small towns in the heartland. As a native Californian, that stuff just drives me up the wall.
What's so stupid about this is the fact that for over 100 years, most Americans have lived in and around larger cities and towns. Small towns in certain parts of the "heartland" (more accurately known as flyover land) are dying out.
That Guiliani, once the mayor of America's largest city, would emphasize something like this is particularly disingenuous.
Submitted by Mr Furious (not verified) on Thu Sep. 4, 2008 8:44 AM PDT.
eagerly stoked by the GOP every fours years since at least Nixon
It's worked more often than not, so I'd call it a winning strategy.
Disgusting and demoralizing. But effective.
I'd love to see the Dems take a sledge hammer to that cliche. "Why do you look down your nose at people who live in cities?" Cities are melting pots, diverse in every way possible, with the richest rich and the poorest poor. They *are* America.
Pfft. I'm sick and tired of the GOP owning the language of politics.
It appears that Detroit's mayor just resigned, pleading guilty to perjury charges involved in his firing of some Detroit police in an attempt to cover up an affair.
Kilpatrick's been plotting this for a long time. He's preparing to switch parties and run for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination.
I didn't see the speeches yet. Perhaps I'll watch them later.
But let me say that this looks like all the Republicans have left. It's infuriating to hear this bullshit repeated endlessly, particularly from conservatives on television who don't live in small towns and politicians whose only connection usually remains tenuous at best. It's not true, at least any more than the vicious contempt small town Americans allegedly has for anyone else. But again, this is all they have left. These aren't the moves of a confident statesman. They are the plays of a weak, scared politician fighting for his last moment in the sun.
Is the opposite true, though? Do rural dwellers look down on coastal/city/urban people? My experience leads me to say yes, in many instances. Often when visited by someone from rural America (often in my job) there are semi-snide remarks to the effect of "I don't know how you stand the traffic/hectic pace/noise/lights/"diverse" population (you know what they're getting at there)/smells/pollution/not knowing everyone in town, etc, ad nauseam." They're not so subtly demeaning the entire urban lifestyle. They don't need theater, opera, museums or anything they associate with "highfalootin" ways. Those are diversions for effette liberals, not real men and women of America's heartland. They will proudly inform you all the culture they need can be found at a county fair, a rodeo or car race, in a church or at a George Strait concert. City dwellers get a bad rap for their attitudes toward country people and maybe some of it is well deserved. I think it goes both ways and small town America is getting a free ride on the issue.
Is the bitter comment any more insulting than having this "woman from nowhere" insult every Obama supporter for being duped by his soaring but empty rhetoric? Hasn't she just insulted every single Obama supporter including the vast majority of non-whites in this country? The term "presumptuous" comes to mind.
It should also be pointed out that the question of her qualifications to be VP or CIC on the basis of being mayor of Wasilla and governor of Alaska presupposes she is qualified for those positions.
I'm bugged by those comments too, the implication that people in small towns work hard or harder; have the corner on honesty, sincerity, and dignity; and love their country, which infers that people elsewhere don't. No, she didn't specifically say that, but the inference was clearly there, and by design. I live in a small town in the middle of nowhere, and that kind of divisive and calculating comment is a bit of a turn-off.
I can hardly turn on the TV without hearing that, compared with the hardworking everymen and women who populate the prairies and put food on our tables, anyone who lives where I do is degenerate, suspiciously cosmopolitan, and one step away from turning the country over to the UN.
None of these people put food on our table. Consolidation has nearly eliminated the small town farmer. There are more players in World of Warcraft than there are farmers.
It won't stop until:
1) Democrats prove they can generate a more compelling narrative
2) It clearly leads to consistent losses for Republicans in elections
From my perspective, I think we are getting close to #2, but I am still not sure the Democrats have come up with a compelling narrative that will consistently cause our base to positively salivate at its apparent righteousness.
I'll say this - the undecided voter who watched her speech wanted to know the biggest question... is a governor from Alaska for two years and a small-town mayor before that qualified and ready to be VP/President?
Instead, she told them how awful Obama, the Democrats, and the liberal media were.
"Why do you look down your nose at people who live in cities?"
Just let the Republicans have it. They're throwing away the votes of minorities, women, and most city-dwellers. Small towns are small. If they're going for the votes of white guys in small towns, they lose in a landslide.
And me? Well, on a purely personal note, the most grating part of Palin's speech (and Giuliani's) was their reliance yet again on the trope that the only true Americans are those from small towns in the heartland. As a native Californian, that stuff just drives me up the wall.
What's so stupid about this is the fact that for over 100 years, most Americans have lived in and around larger cities and towns. Small towns in certain parts of the "heartland" (more accurately known as flyover land) are dying out.
That Guiliani, once the mayor of America's largest city, would emphasize something like this is particularly disingenuous.
Every country has small towns full o' reg'lar folk. I for one think it takes ALL KINDS to make a great America, and the salt of the earth types are just as good of Americans as anyone else.
But when Republicans defend our healthcare as "best in the world" do they never stop to ask where that comes from? This is not a product of small town America. This is a product of those damn urban intellectual elitists with their hoity-toity edumacation!
Why did the 9/11 attackers target NYC and not Anytown, USA? The fact is that it is the reg'lar folks who fail to recognize essential aspects of America's greatness.
Is the opposite true, though? Do rural dwellers look down on coastal/city/urban people? My experience leads me to say yes, in many instances. Posted by: steve duncan
This has been my experience in two cultures and you see the theme in literature as well - rural and small down folks dislike, don't understand, and distrust city dwellers.
Hatred of the cosmopolitan worked for the Nazis so, naturally, it works for the Republicans.
Because of this, I really think that What's the Matter with Kansas should be required reading for HS students throughout the U.S. Probably a book that Palin would try to get banned if she had the power (another thing the Nazis were well-known for).
My experience has been that well to do Manhattanites snear at people who live in New Jersey, never mind the heartland. San Franciscans have similar attitudes. It doesn't strike me as illegitimate for a Republican to point out that Obama reflects a certain background and worldview, which is probably different than that of someone in the 'heartland'. Recent democratic presidential candidates have tended to come from elite East coast backgrounds and have had problems. Clinton of course is the exception to this rule. Many democrats believe that as we become more cosmopolitan we will somehow all become enlightened and progressive. It sound too Whiggish a view for my taste.
Kevin,
I think there is a genuine reservoir of resentment among rural voters. Yet, this resentment has nothing to do with city dwellers actually being elitist or looking down their noses, rather the source is rural citizens feel self-conscious about their sophistication in comparison (a comparison made easier with media, etc).
This is a simple human defense mechanism which the republican party and its operatives are simply mining. The key for me going forward is for democrats to not fall for this trap. The focus should be on McCain and Bush. There is more than enough material there for democrats to win.
Ezra Klein points to a small panel of Detroit voters who commented on Sarah Palin's speech last night and notes that, of all the groups, it was the independents who were least impressed.
This "small panel" of what appears to be eleven independent voters (that's how many are quoted in the original article) is getting a comically high level of coverage in the liberal blogosphere this morning. Time for a lecture on statistical samples?
I think the heartland stuff is suburban coding. The votes are in urban places, not rural America. But within urban America the majority are suburbanites, and there's a tendency to think of the city as somewhere else and of its denizens as the others that the tract homers among us are trying to get away from.
On that score Palin as hockey mom is taking dead aim at the GOP slice of the soccer moms.
I disagree with the notion that Palin can pull Reagan Democrats back into the fold. Ronald Reagan sold a product he claimed would help people in their daily lives. Get rid of government intrusion, excessive regulations, waste and high taxes.
Palin's speech was all about Palin. It was like a Bush speech. Not surprising it was written by the same speech writers. It was all about the specialness of the inside elite of the old white guy's party. It didn't really talk to the rest of us.
If a surgeon is carving into your brain you fervently hope he's had the best education possible. You want your broker to know the ways of the world, trusting his knowledge will multiply your investments. You want your employer ready and able to compete in the global marketplace, possessed of the myriad tools for waging battle with competitors for your product or service. Add to the list yourself. But our President? Nah, he's supposed to be some sort of homespun Frank Capra concoction, Gary Cooper with a tie. He doesn't need advanced degrees, special skills, those are impairments to some sort of instinctive governing style elites just don't get. Shoot first, ask questions later. Look into your opponent's eyes and read the truth of his soul. Keep an ear to the rail and a keen nose for smoke. Obama isn't qualified, he's a Harvard dandy with a fancy law degree. We need ourselves a third tier, bottom of his class, couldn't keep a plane in the sky and stay out of trouble, beauty queen marrying smart-aleck frat boy. You know, a 72 year old Levi Johnston, a fucking redneck. That'll do. You betcha.
Noonan quoted someone saying "we are a nation of Wasillas" on her blog. This sounded like new meme planning, so I quickly checked, and of course it's nonsense if you look at census data. By the most generous grouping of "rural" "micropolitan" and other categories together, they still only amount to 30% of the population. 70% of us live in cities, big towns or dense suburban areas, nothing like Wasilla.
Submitted by Mark L. (not verified) on Thu Sep. 4, 2008 11:18 AM PDT.
Don't you suppose it's all about the electoral college? The Republicans know that the college is weighted in favor of the more rural states (i.e., "small towns in the heartland").
I like Richard Cownie's suggestion about turning it around: What do they have against people who live in cities?
Submitted by Yellow Dog (not verified) on Thu Sep. 4, 2008 11:19 AM PDT.
It's weirdly inconsistent, though. I hear self-praise of "us rural folks" from wingnut freakazoids who have lived in the dense Houston suburbs all their lives and can't tell a cow from a horse. They remind me of that horse-fearing urban cowboy in the White House.
I myself am an elite liberal, even though I have never lived in an urban area and grew up and now live in farm country with a population density of about 50 per square mile.
Small-town is as small-town does.
"Far from criticizing small town life, America celebrates it. Liberals celebrate it. Politicians celebrate it. Everyone celebrates it."
Then who the hell was Obama referring to about all bitter and unemployed rubes in Pennsylvania and West Virginia who "cling" to such useless items like God and guns because they are afraid of the change he represents? lol
Submitted by Blue Girl (not verified) on Thu Sep. 4, 2008 11:39 AM PDT.
Lets hope that we aren't a "nation of Wasillas" because that town has has the worst meth problem in all of Alaska.
I find the small town vs everyone else narrative annoying, as well. I also think Palin stretched the reality of it too far last night. In speaking of the virtues of small-town America, she said:
"They are the ones who do some of the hardest work in America ... who grow our food, run our factories, and fight our wars."
Really? Is it true that most of the soldiers in our wars come from places like Wasilla? or even, taken together, all the towns smaller than say 100,000 people away from the metro areas? I would REALLY doubt this. Don't most Americans live in the metro areas? haven't they for a while now?
From a quick dig in google, I did find some interesting stats of US Army war dead, by state, for WWII, Korea & Vietnam. I downloaded some data from http://www.history.army.mil/documents/misc/stcas.htm into Excel and massaged it a bit into a summarizable format and then sorted by the states with the highest war dead for each war. It turns out that the top 7 are the same for all 3 wars, though the order changes a bit each time. The top 7 account for 40-45% of the army's war dead in these wars. These 7 states are (in WWII order): NY, PA, IL, CA, OH, TX, MI. Do you notice anything about this list? It strikes me that the populations for these states are high and I would bet my last dollar the vast majority of them aren't in small towns.
Well, it's only a piece of the total picture since it is only the army, but I think the army, by itself, will account for over 50% of all combat war dead in each of these wars (309K in WWII; 28K in Korea; 38K in Vietnam). I would bet that the pattern of war dead for the other branches of the military would not vary significantly from the army, anyway.
I wish someone would pick up on this idea, that the small towners are fighting our wars - millions of people in our armed forces are being disregarded, just because they come from metropolitan areas like NY, as if their service and sacrifice are irrelevant - which is just how Sarah Palin and her ilk regard all of us who don't shoot moose for our food.
Sarah Palin took a town with $0 debt in 1996 and left it $22 million in the hole in 2002, mostly from the hockey rink/sports complex she shoved down their throats which never became the money generator she promised it would. Another white elephant from another white elephant.
Even with the stable Clinton economy during most of her mayoral tenure and Jack Abramoff's crony she hired to lobby Washington to help her now indicted buddy Ted Stevens ring up $27 million in federal pork for tiny Wasilla (pop. 5000 when she entered office) she still managed to leave the town swimming in debt. Three of her pork projects even made McCain's own wasteful spending list.
The following organization is the offshoot of President Reagan's Private Sector Survey on Cost Control started in 1984, also known as the Grace Commission. Definitely not a Dem friendly group but even these guys apparently think Alaska is America's welfare queen state.
Citizens Against Government Waste
http://www.cagw.org/site/PageServer?pagename=homePage
Rank State Pork Population Pork/Capita
2000 1 Alaska $394,514,000 619,500 $636.83
2001 1 Alaska $480,297,000 626,932 $766.11
2002 1 Alaska $451,334,278 634,892 $710.88
2003 1 Alaska $393,346,750 643,786 $610.99
2004 1 Alaska $524,329,000 648,818 $808.13
2005 1 Alaska $645,502,000 655,435 $984.85
2006 1 Alaska $325,106,000 663,661 $489.87
2007 not listed
2008 1 Alaska $379,699,715 683,478 $555.54
As governor she is borrowing from Alaska's future while she wants to blow today's Alaskan windfall oil tax bonanza and the huge surpluses they've generated on bread and circuses tax giveaways.
Alaska gets 89% of it's operating budget from taxing oil coming out of the ground just like Arab kingdoms and Hugo Chavez's Venezuela. They have no state income or sales tax up there. Instead of using that windfall to pay for all the profligate spending her Republican legislature keeps sending her she's issuing bonds to pay for it which Alaskans and US taxpayers will have to pay off in future years while she takes credit for tax "rebates" while she's governor.
Her fiscal policy is a disaster in the making which won't hit til she's left the governor's office. She'd be a disaster as Vice President especially to a President who despite his grevious wounds and type A personality is already past the age his father and grandfather died of sudden heart attacks.
She can put on all the lipstick she wants but her political record is for the dogs.
...the myth that us coastal urbanites spend all our time looking down our patrician noses at anyone who lives outside the city limits...
This is no myth in Sarah Palin's case, as it happens. A couple years ago, when Senator Ted Stevens' son, Ben, was a state senator, Ben referred to Wasilla and its neighbors as "Valley trash." At the time, Ben Stevens represented a la-di-da section of Anchorage (metropolis to Wasilla's smallville). Naturally, this put Ben on Sarah's shitlist.
Chicounsel,
I don't know about West Virginia, but I imagine that a lot of those unemployed folks in central and western Pennsylvania lost urban jobs. It's possible that someone who lives in Erie, PA or Charleston, WV self-identifies as "small town" but that doesn't make it true, not even if they're hunters and church-goers.
Let's put it another way. You're a lawyer in Chicago, and are part of the elite, by any rational measure. I was born in a town with fewer than 100 people, and grew up in another town with fewer than 2000 people. The area I grew up in *did* actually provide primary products (fish and timber) to the rest of the country. It certainly has a lot more hunters, per capita, than Chicago (I've got no idea about numbers of churches). Yet, somehow, my coastal state puts me in the elite, and your inland state puts makes you just plain folks, or something like that. And that's just plain dumb.
