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Jewish World Review Nov. 15, 2000 / 17 Mar-Cheshvan, 5761
Chris Matthews
On the coasts, West and East, there was not much of a
contest on Tuesday. It wasn't close in California, where
Al Gore triumphed by more than a million votes, nor here
in New York, which the vice president carried by 60
percent.
That vast continent in between was equally one-sided.
George W. swept every state, Tennessee and Arkansas
included, where people speak with a Southern accent.
Westward, he broke the 60-percent barrier in Idaho,
Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Texas.
The political geography carries enormous freight for the
next man, Bush or Gore, to take the presidential oath.
If it's Bush, he will need to govern from a city that voted
85 percent for Gore, covered by a media rooted in
Washington and New York, capitals notorious for
Democratic loyalty and at least some degree of
East-Coast elitism.
If it's Gore, he will need to lead a continental nation the
great expanse of which voted for the other guy. Boarding
Air Force One, he will be able to fly from Washington to the California border
without passing a single state that voted for him.
If these two worlds — the bi-coastal nation of pro-choice, somewhat hip,
ethnically diverse Democrats and the inland nation of culturally conservative
Republicans — are to live and act as one, it will take a leader who matches his
strength with humility. He will need to convince both followers and opponents
that his first and foremost interests lie in meeting the needs of both.
The danger is that both winner and loser will proceed in the direction he took in
carving out his half of the electorate on Election Day.
Bush, an Ivy League-educated Texan of obvious charm, failed to exploit his
personal gifts to win support up North. He lost Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin,
Illinois, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York and Connecticut because he
failed to crack the all-important suburban vote.
There were two reasons for this failure: the perception that he is not articulate
or smart enough to be president and the perception that he is surrounded by
right-wing Republicans who will dominate his selection of Supreme Court
justices.
Bush could have won up North, especially in Michigan and Pennsylvania, both
of which he lost 51 to 46 percent, had he picked either John McCain or
Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge as his running mate. Given a chance to
bridge the gap between North and South, he failed to take it, relying instead on
the safe choice of Dick Cheney, another Texas oil man.
Gore also blew his chance to be a national unifier. He could have run a
campaign that exploited the economic progress of the last eight years. He chose
instead to run a campaign of anger at the country's ongoing economic injustices.
He could have run to the political center, continuing the New Democratic
movement of President Clinton. Instead, he tilted leftward, playing to the old
Democratic pressure groups, not the moderate voter who wanted nothing more
than to continue the successful fiscal and trade policies Clinton had begun.
The result is a country whose coasts voted one way and whose great heartland
voted the other, a country whose future will now be dictated by the troubling
vote count in Florida, the one state whose polyglot, oddly integrated population
puts it in neither of the great geographic factions that now wrestle each other for
power.
11/07/00: A real electoral horror show
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