American Dream

On October 7, one of the stranger evenings in recent California history, Arnold Schwarzenegger strode triumphantly onstage in Los Angeles to accept his election victory as governor of California. He held wife Maria Shriver's limp wrist as if she were another defeated bodybuilding opponent. Confetti rained on the broad shoulders that had helped make him an iron-pumping superstar. But commentators were not discussing how he was going to accomplish the Atlasian task of lifting California out of its $38 billion budget deficit. Rather, talk focused on the potential national implications of a Republican victory in the country's most populous state. Would Arnold be the platform from which Republicans would launch another successful presidential campaign?

Only days before I had arrived in San Francisco from a weeklong trip through the American heartland. In a series of long conversations with small town white working class residents in Iowa, Nebraska, Colorado and Utah I sought to unravel the logic that propels this population to vote decidedly Republican. In the 2000 election, Al Gore won 60% of the urban vote, while president George Bush won 60% of rural voters.

Liberal city folk might point to this as evidence that the Republican Party feeds off small town ignorance while Democrats cater to a more discerning and better educated urban population. Of course this doesn't jive with years of Republican initiatives aimed at decreasing upper income taxes for their very wealthy and cosmopolitan constituency. The Republican Party is anything but homogenous, but somehow it all hangs together. We know that Republicans have a lock on Bible Belt social conservatives and Sun Belt business de-regulators, but why do they play so well among middle American rural voters?

"The Democratic Party is too split up between people like me and Eastern liberals," says Peter James, a millet farmer in Eckley, Colorado. He eases his leg onto the adjacent barstool at the Roadside Inn, the town watering hole, and takes a sip from a frothy mug of beer. And what holds the Republican Party together? He tilts his head back, sucks on his wad of tobacco, and grins at the handful of patrons shooting pool and shooting the breeze with him.

"Bullshit," he says matter of factly and then hoots with laughter. The bartender and the patrons hunched over the bar chuckle along with him. But Mr. James won't get the last laugh tonight. He is the lone Democrat in the bar, and a minority in the rural flatlands of Eastern Colorado. The county, Yuma, was the nation's largest corn producer two years ago, so perhaps it is fitting that Mr. James, a political oddball of sorts, switched to millet farming five years back.

The bartender, Jade Simpson, is more representative of the politics of the region. Asked what makes him a Republican, he's quick to respond: welfare. Having lived for four years in China, he detests any scent of socialism, and the Democrats, with their more generous social spending, fairly reek to him. Leaning over the bar his eyes sparkle and his gaze is steady. "The biggest issue here is water; there's not enough water for the West. But the Democrats will get elected and make it one family, one child, just like they did in China. It's the same gang. It's socialism." He grins broadly to show that he's only partly serious but he looks into my eyes long enough to let me know he's not completely joking either.

In small towns like these, where the front pages of local newspapers tell of upcoming corn husking competitions and marriages of grandsons of deceased residents, a city boy can sometimes hardly believe his ears and eyes. Hours go by without seeing a foreign car. Buicks and Chevys abound. From the county highway, giant corn silos, cooperatives owned by the town, announce a coming cluster of residences. In Funk, Nebraska, we drive down the only street with a name: Easy Street, where, the sign reads, "the living is easy." There are no people out to tell us otherwise.