TIME: The Democrats' New Western Stars
By JOE KLEIN
Friday, Jan. 19, 2007
Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer poses at a fence post on a working cattle ranch belonging to a friend.
Kurt Markus for TIME
....Something strange and tangy is happening in the Rocky Mountains. The Democratic Party is being reborn, with a raft of colorful candidates who have won the hearts of independents and moderate Republican voters. As the 2008 presidential campaign begins, there are lessons to be learned here for both national parties, but especially for Democrats, lessons involving both style and substance. The top-line Democratic candidates for President in 2008--people like Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards--are a decidedly un-Western crowd. They tend to be coastal, urban, legislative. They tend to talk too formally--and too much about too little. They tiptoe and kowtow when confronted by the gothic array of Democratic interest groups. At a time when political pomp and blab have come to seem prohibitively pompous and bloviational, Rocky Mountain politics is fresh and innovative and fun. It might not be a bad idea for Hillary and Barack and the rest to pause for a moment before the big show starts and take a look at what's happening just west of Iowa, in an electorally overlooked region of the country that just may hold the key to winning the White House in 2008.
There is a distinct Rocky Mountain Democratic agenda, which emphasizes pragmatism and moderation. Some of the issues are local and perennial, including how to manage growth and resources like water in the nation's fastest-growing region. But even the local issues have national implications. There is, for example, a competitive mania among the new Democratic Governors about developing alternative energy sources--especially the region's vast coal reserves and agricultural products. They are staunch fiscal conservatives. In fact, the booming economy has enabled most of the Democratic Governors to lower taxes. Immigration is a huge issue in the region, and the Democrats have profited by supporting comprehensive plans--increased border control, along with guest-worker provisions and a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants--that reflect both the growing influence of Latino voters in the region and the needs of the local farming and construction businesses for labor. Democrats also tend to reflect a Western let-and-let-live attitude on social issues like abortion and homosexuality. But given the traditional Western aversion to lockstep conformity, none of the above are hard-and-fast rules.
"Actually, the one thing we all have in common is our style," says Ken Salazar. The new Rocky Mountain Democrats are populist, unpretentious, egalitarian and tough. They tend to be avid hunters and fishermen. (I was with Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer one day when he reached into his pocket for a pen and pulled out a 30.06 rifle bullet.) A surprising number of them have backgrounds in law enforcement. Of the Democrats who have been elected Governors in the all-blue stripe of states running from Montana to New Mexico, only Bill Richardson of New Mexico has spent any time as a legislator. The rest are either ranchers or prosecutors. Janet Napolitano, the wildly popular Governor of Arizona, which is in the next stripe west, was a U.S. Attorney appointed by Bill Clinton, as was Dave Freudenthal, the Governor of Wyoming. Ken Salazar was Colorado's attorney general before winning his Senate seat. "I could never have gotten elected back East," says John Hickenlooper, a former geologist and microbrewery owner who was elected mayor of Denver in his first try for public office. "You don't have a complicated political superstructure out here. You don't have to wait your turn to run for office. Outside the Latino community, ethnicity doesn't count for much. Nobody cares who your grandparents were."
Democrats are not yet dominant in the inner Mountain West and may never be, not as long as states like Utah and Idaho remain a deep conservative crimson. They made only modest gains in the 2006 congressional elections, taking away one Republican seat in Colorado and two in Arizona and adding Jon Tester's Montana crew cut to the U.S. Senate. But they have had considerable success in local elections--and not just their stunning successes at the gubernatorial level. Since 2004 they have also won control of the Montana senate and both houses of the Colorado legislature. And the region's Democrats will throw disproportionate weight in the 2008 presidential selection process. Nevada will hold caucuses in the first week of the presidential campaign, having poked its way into the schedule between the traditional battles in Iowa and New Hampshire. A few weeks later, on Feb. 5, there will be a Rocky Mountain regional primary, with three states--New Mexico, Arizona and Utah--participating (and three more--Montana, Idaho and Wyoming--thinking about joining)....If the Democrats can pick off a few Rocky Mountain states to augment their strength in the Northeast, upper Midwest and West Coast, they may be able to build an electoral majority that does not include the ferociously conservative South. As Thomas Schaller of the University of Maryland pointed out after the 2006 elections, "For the first time in more than half a century, the minority party in the South is the majority party in both chambers of Congress."...
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1580387,00.html?cnn=yes
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