David Brooks’ Palin Rebound column provoked a lot of comment earlier today, but I think he was more on point tonight on The NewsHour. There he concisely summed up why McCain’s small-town strategy is a loser:
Mark mentioned small-town values when talking about Michigan. You know, I think Sarah Palin did very fine last night by her own standards, but this has become — the Republican Party has become a small-town party, running against — as Sarah Palin did last night — against big cities, against the East Coast, to some extent, against newspaper readers.
I understand why they’re doing it, running against Washington. This is the way Republicans do populism. But in the long run, it’s poisonous and self-destructive. You cannot be a majority party in this country if the coasts don’t like you and people who read newspapers don’t like you… And with Sarah Palin, short-term gain last night, but long-term turning people off.
McCain Republicans apparently don’t believe all small-towns are to be treated equally. In his column recalling Republican efforts to brand Obama as foreign and exotic because he grew up in Hawaii, Slate’s Timothy Noah wonders, Why is Alaska authentically American when Hawaii is not?
Alaska leans Republican while Hawaii leans Democratic, and the GOP long ago intimidated the media into believing that only Republican strongholds represent the “real America.” These Republican strongholds are usually sparsely populated, and I suppose the media’s been sold on the idea that because the United States started out as an agrarian nation, rural areas are somehow more authentic than urban ones.
But if it’s really true, as Palin said in the debate, that Americans are tired of “constantly looking backwards,” then perhaps it’s time we noticed that, as Rachael Larimore points out in Slate’s “XX Factor” blog, 80 percent of the U.S. population lives in metropolitan areas. We city-dwellers make no claim to being more “authentically American” than Alaskans or the inhabitants of any of this country’s many other big open spaces. But we are, by dispassionate numerical reckoning, more typical. And while most people probably don’t think of Hawaii as an urban state, 70 percent of its 1.3 million inhabitants live in and around Honolulu, the state’s biggest city. In Alaska, by contrast, only 42 percent of its 670,000 inhabitants live in and around Anchorage, that state’s biggest city. So if either of the last two states admitted to the union has any claim to being more characteristic of the nation as a whole, it’s Hawaii, not Alaska.
After nearly thirty years in New York City (twenty of those on the liberal Upper West Side of Manhattan) I moved to rural Georgia. (Don’t ask!) It was from here last night that I said I expected McCain would get a bounce from last night’s debate. Said bounce has not materialized. Perhaps I’d best stick to technology predictions. 🙂
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: Palin Answers Katie Couric’s Questions … to Fox News’ Carl Cameron (She Reads The Economist, She Says). The quote that’s making the rounds:
As we send our young men and women overseas in a war zone to fight for democracy and freedoms, including freedom of the press, we’ve really got to have a mutually beneficial relationship here with those fighting the freedom of the press, and then the press, though not taking advantage and exploiting a situation, perhaps they would want to capture and abuse the privilege. We just want truth, we want fairness, we want balance.