I'm a brie-eating, white wine-drinking, latte-sipping liberal and I vote

The last time my vote had any influence at all on who the Democrats nominated for President---in fact, the last time my vote had any influence at all on who would be the next President---was when I was in grad school.

At the University of Iowa.

I voted in the Iowa Caucuses.

Yup.  I caucused with the real murkins.

You know, the type of real murkins who only live in the Heartland.  Like me and the other grad students, college professors, high school teachers, and lawyers who gathered in that church basement that night.

Might have been a few farmers caucusing with us.  I couldn't tell.  The only people there dressed like farmers were us grad students.  If any of my fellow caucus voters were farmers, they were probably like the (very few) other farmers I'd met since I moved to Iowa---college professors who owned working farms.

There I was, a brie-eating, white wine-drinking, latte-sipping liberal---nevermind that I didn't like brie, hated white wine, and probably would have sneered at the idea of sipping a latte if the nearest one to be sipped wasn't in New Orleans---about as representative of the average Iowan as the people of Massachusetts are thought to be representative of all Americans.

But I was young and callow back then and I naively believed that I was a representative American because I was an American.

I didn't know that the only real Murkins were farmers and blue-collar types (as long as they didn't belong to a union) who lived in the Heartland.

I didn't know that the Heartland, the real Murka, was only that part of what was labeled the United States on the maps east of the Rockies to Cleveland---excluding Denver, Aspen, Minneapolis, Chicago, Madison, Wisconsin, Detroit, East St Louis, and Iowa City---and south of Washington D.C. but north of Palm Beach---excluding Atlanta, San Antonio, and until George Bush let it drown New Orleans, but including, in an abberant one-shot and very limited embrace of ethnic diversity, the Cuban neighborhoods in Miami and, with geographic whimsicality, New Hampshire---that part of the country that was still predominately rural and populated mainly by white folks.  (On this map, a black farmer in Georgia is less of a real Murkin than a white car salesman in Peoria.)  In short, that part of the country that had become least representative of the United States in the last quarter of the 20th Century.

The Iowa Caucuses and the New Hampshire primaries are important, because they're first.  They matter because they've been made to matter when it comes to fund-raising and media attention.  The Media cover them as if that's why they matter too.  The Media cover Presidential elections as if they are sporting events and care about them only in as far as they resemble sporting events.  Issues and outcomes don't interest them at all.  New Hampshire and Iowa let them write about the only aspect of the election they care about---who's ahead.

Oh, there are other things they like about New Hampshire and Iowa.  The Beltway Insiders who cover politics enjoy getting out of town once in a while and flattering themselves that they are still real reporters.  The fact that there are cows and pigs and manure spreaders near enough to get a whiff of makes them feel as though they've traveled to a foreign country.  Meeting a few people whose daily work isn't directly related to generating paper lets them believe for a moment that they themselves aren't part of the paper-generating machinery of Washington.  Talking to "real" people makes them feel real to themselves.

It's not as though many of them do any real reporting though.  They mostly file the same story as they filed four years ago, which was the same story that's been filed from the Heartland for the last hundred years or so.

It's a lazy story and a not particularly accurate one, but it's a pretty story and they like to tell it because they believe it sells papers and ads and because they believe it's a story we need to hear over and over again.

The story is this:  We are a nation of pioneers and frontiersmen, embattled farmers still, making our own way come hell or high water; self-reliant, commonsensical, stoic, ingenious, practical, make-do or do-without types who don't need no government hand-outs or pointy-headed intellectuals to tell us how to run our lives, church-going, God-fearing, stand-on-our-own two feet heroes and heroines.

So they write about Iowa and New Hampshire as if both states are populated entirely by characters who have sprung to life out of a Norman Rockwell painting (minus Rockwell's New Deal idealism).

They write about New Hampshire as if the southeastern corner of the state hasn’t become a suburb of Boston.  They write about Iowa as if nobody like me ever lived and voted there, as if Iowa City, Cedar Falls, and Ames don’t exist, as if Des Moines is only the site of the state fair.

They write about farmers as if none of them are also college professors or multi-millionaire agribusinessmen and women.

To support their folk tale they then go about writing about Massachusetts as if it begins in Boston and ends at Cambridge.  They write about New York as if there were no other cities in it but New York, no green spaces outside of Central Park, no animals but the dogs who get walked by paid help along Park Avenue.  They write about California as if there’s nothing between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

They write about Americans who aren’t real Murkins as if they are alien invaders, dismissing women, minorities, union members, and now old people as “special interests” and "pressure groups."

Every four years sensible people make the sensible case that two such unrepresentative states as Iowa and New Hampshire should not have so great a say in who the parties nominate, especially who the Democrats nominate.

But some state has to be first and whichever one it was would be seen by the people who don't live there as "unrepresentative."  Switching to regional super-primaries or having one national primary day would no doubt produce other unfair and unrepresentative distortions.

So we might as well let Iowa and New Hampshire go first.

Except that we need to put an end to the pretty stories about real Murkins.

The real Murka that the Heartland supposedly represents ceased to exist in about 1901 when we could no longer pretend we weren't what we were, an industrialized, urbanized, ethnicized, world power.  Whatever remained of it was blown away by the winds that that created the Dust Bowl.

Between the ascendencies of the two Presidents Roosevelt that real Murica was abandoned.  People stopped living in it---they moved out quite willingly---when they installed telephones, electrified, and bought cars.

It would be nice if the Media stopped telling us the story that the real America is that part of it where William McKinley is still President, if only because that story is the one the Big Business elites who run the Republican Party want us to hear and believe.  They want us to think that the real America is the America of the late 19th Century so they can take us back to a time when there were no unions, no health and safety regulations, no notion of a decent wage except what they cared to pay.

That story is also one the religious bigots and the racists and the misogynists who make up so much of the Republican base want to hear because they long for a time when people believed whatever their preachers told them and black people knew their place and wives and daughters obeyed their husbands and fathers without question or complaint.

But it would be good if the story was put to rest because it's always good when journalists report on what's really happening and not on their own prejudices and preconceptions about what they think we want to hear about ourselves.

PS.  I still don't like brie and still hate white wine.  I don't sneer at latte-sipping but I won't sip one myself.  Coffee's coffee and dessert's dessert in my mind and I can't bring myself to mix them up.  Doesn't change the fact that I'm a brie-eating, white wine-drinking, latte-sipping liberal and proud of it.  And I'll bet there are at least as many of us as there actual farmers left in the Heartland---in fact, some of us are farmers, just as some of us aren't actually liberals---and our opinions and our votes are just as representative and just as American as apple pie and baseball, both of which I love as much as I hate white wine.

Hat-tip to Mr Drum.

Comments

[Linkmeister]

You're spot on, I think. The other thing I always wonder is whether the press thinks of itself as less American somehow since its members don't live in those idealized Heartland places which don't exist anymore.

And didn't Norman Rockwell paint any damned urban scenes?

[Lance]

Link,

Yep, he painted a few.

This is one of my favorites.

[catherine]

I don't drink white wine either, but will admit to liking brie and lattes.

Sadly, my vote has never had a hand in picking candidates or Presidents, but that is what happens when you live in San Francisco.

[Dylan]

The moment that I'll never forget was when Andrew Sullivan blamed me (as a liberal) for 9/11. He may have been one among many, but he's the one I remember. That's when I realized that to many in America, I "wasn't an American".

I still get sick when I think about it.

[Rana]

I appreciate your point about how even these "heartland" states are a lot more complicated than the media would like to think (or want to tell us); I think it's akin to that whole red/blue state nonsense, as if each state was this great homogenous blob.

On the other hand, as someone who grew up west of the Rockies for most of her life (and west of the Plains prior to 2001), it really does get old having national political decisions being made on the basis of what bothers easterners. When you've sat through enough elections in which the candidates are eliminated from the primaries before you even get to vote, and when the news anchors start calling the final results before you've even gotten to the polls that day, it's hard believing that what you do at the polls matters. (I won't even go into the ways that enormous, populous states are underrepresented in the House allocations.)

So seeing the whole Iowa-New Hampshire thing toppled has a certain appeal. Personally, I've long thought that (a) the primaries should rotate, with several states from each region being given first shot in one cycle, and (b) that the electoral college should stop being winner-take-all. As a former resident of a diverse, populous, western state, I have to say that what goes on in New Hampshire, even the new, diversified New Hampshire, has little to do with the concerns of a state like California or Arizona or Alaska.

[JD]

Get rid of the electoral college entirely and go with the popular vote.