|
|
The 1996 Election in the West
A Clash between Old and New
Joe McKenzie and Carl Luna
Mesa College -- San Diego, CA
Out on the Pacific Rim, the sun is already setting on the November elections. Lone Ranger Bill Clinton and his faithful sidekick Gore-onto are cheerfully riding to a second term at the old white house ranchero amidst the last rays of twilight of the American century.
As is usual in modern times, this election match-up had been decided well in advance of either party's convention. In this case, the corral gates were locked up tight when Bob Dole won the South Carolina primary, becoming his party's presumptive nominee. 1996 will be a repeat of 1992 in the west for the Presidential elections, but not be a repeat of 1994 for the Congressional races because you will have the extra 5 percent of increased voter turnout. This normal 50 percent voter turnout election does not bode well for the Republicans.
In the mind of the ordinary western voter, politics is simple and does not require endless debate and analysis; either keep the boss the same or make a change to some other direction. In this election year, the only two potential candidates with sufficient appeal to enough diverse constituencies to challenge incumbent Slick Willie were Ross Perot and Colin Powell. Neither would run in the Republican party leaving Bob Dole, the Midwest's version of George Bush, to lead his party into a repeat of the 1992 Republican debacle.
Perot has his own party now, but the winner-take-all system of apportionment of the Electoral College has guaranteed the failure of every third party movement since the Civil War and this year will be no exception. Only the divisiveness of the pending Civil War turned the newcomer Republican Party into a real contender. As no one we know predicts a pending Civil War in America today, the Reform Party will be left to wither and die in the desert of failed political ideas.
As is also usual in modern times, the most important political issues for the voters--those affecting their body and soul, pocket book and conscience--have not been presented to the voters by either party in terms of effective choice. No doubt about it, the voters have been ignored; no party, since the collapse of the Pat Buchanan campaign, talks of the impact of three decades of a stagnating middle class and a growing gap between haves and have nots. The Bill and Bob show has offered the 1990's version of political snakeoil (tax cuts without balanced budgets, tax credits with marginal economic impact.) Neither Bill nor Bob offers a vision of the future or effective solutions to current problems. For a semi-popular incumbent with solid support from women, African Americans and gays, this is prudent. For a down-in-the-polls challenger, this is suicide.
The Republicans, afraid to move as far to the right as the Gingrich/Buchanan cadres would have it, yet unwilling to offend this faction by moving toward the centrist position of most Americans, are in the process of inflicting on themselves the same sort of ritual electoral self-flagellation the Democrats abused themselves with during the Presidential campaigns of Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis.
One trend is clear in recent elections: traditional notions of a "western" vote simply don't exist. Just as there is a new south in electoral politics, there is a "new" West -- and an "old" one. The "new west" Pacific Rim and border states of California, Hawaii, Arizona, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington bear little resemblance in demographics or voting behavior any more to the "old west" states of the interior. These "new west" states, representing 89 of the region's 119 electoral college votes, are high-tech, hard wired, export oriented, immigrant inundated, more "third wave" (to use the Gingrich/Tofler lexicon), went for Clinton and his moderate pro-trade, pro-Wall Street (and anyone who thinks this president is not a friend of Wall Street doesn't know a derivative from a treasury bill) agenda in 1992, and will do so again in 1996.
The second wave agrarian-rancher raw material-producing states of the Rocky Mountains, unsure of this "global economy" (drive across the heartland and count the number of "Stop the New World Order" hand-painted signs on farm and ranch fences!), peer with trepidation into the Clinton Global World Order. However, Bob Dole, Mr. I-fly-ADM and friend of the Republican party's many global corporate friends, offers little solace. Hence, the old west states either lean lightly towards Clinton (Nevada, Colorado and Montana) or waver towards Dole (Alaska, Utah and Wyoming) with only the militia-man heavy Idaho firmly in the Dole camp. All told, Dole may pick up fewer than 12 of the region's 119 electoral college votes. In 1992, the Republicans picked up only 20.
The trend for the 1996 elections in the "new" west may well have been set by the March California Primary, in which a number of "progressive-liberal" state ballot propositions, ranging from increased bonds for "big government" issues like school construction to environmentally correct votes on protecting Mountain Lions from hunting passed by reasonably large margins, seemingly reversing a trend towards the right that began in 1978 with the Proposition 13 tax revolt. In 1994, the Republicans picked up 16 seats in the west. Current polls in pivotal elections in California seem to indicate this swing has stopped and might well be reversed. Moreover, at the state and local level, the usual bellwether for national political change, look for the Republicans to barely hold on or lose their hard wrought control of the California State Assembly by 2000. This sets the stage for an interesting confrontation of interests in the early years of the next century: a progressive, new order "new west" versus a conservative South and old order Liberal North East. Bob Dole and the Republicans will not find their El Dorado in the West in 1996. The Regain Revolution began in the new west; perhaps it will end there.
| |||||
 | |||||
| |||||
|
|
| |||
| |||||
| |||||
| Support the kind of journalism done by the NewsHour...Become a member of your local PBS station. | |||||
