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Democrats borrow from Madison Avenue |
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Written by RAY RING, Writers on the Range
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Monday, 25 August 2008 |
It's like a supercharged dream: You find yourself sliding into the driver's seat
of a sleek, brand new car. Slap it into gear and you zoom ahead, through a
spectacular wild-looking Western landscape.
You take the curves faster than seemed possible, maybe around Utah's eerie
redrock spires, or between Rocky Mountain snowcaps, past waterfalls and through
giant-trunk forests, or along Oregon's coast where waves crash, or on Nevada's
desert flats where it's all about maximum speed through nature.
You
might end up parked fantastically, somehow atop a stone butte scarcely wider
than the car, where your sunset view goes forever. It feels great. And it
should, because it's a carefully composed scene. You're in a typical TV
commercial or magazine ad trying to attract customers to buy that
car.
The ad implies customers will get a big-horsepower connection with
Western wildness, exciting forward motion, a youthful freedom on a surreal
frontier.
And all that helps explain why the Democrats are staging their
national convention in Denver.
No, my brain is not clouded by tailpipe
fumes. I know the Dems have many reasons for picking Denver. They begin with the
mundane, as in, Denver has a big airport, so everyone can fly in easily. Beyond
that, the reasons are political -- but not fully exposed.
Conventional
wisdom says the West warrants the attention. And sure, the Dems have done well
in the region since 2000, winning at least three Senate seats and four House
seats from Republicans, while holding or capturing a total of seven
governorships, in places that might seem unlikely, such as Montana, Colorado and
Arizona. The Dems honor those Western winners by gathering in Denver. And they
aim to energize Western voters even more, while providing a sense of stronger
party backing to all their Western candidates for the November
election.
But the pundits -- those masters of blathering the obvious --
haven't noticed the party bosses' underlying motive. The Dems aren't just
focusing on the West. They want to use the West's image as a backdrop, to
excite voters in other regions.
I'm not talking about scenes of Denver's
traffic jams and mediocre air and sprawling suburbs. I mean the jagged wall of
mountains on Denver's western horizon. And far more than that, I mean what
Denver implies to people in other regions, subconsciously.
To most
viewers who'll tune in the TV and newspaper coverage of the convention, Denver
will seem outside the box. Because it's Western in ways that California's
megacities -- the chief Western sites for past national conventions -- are
not.
Like the car salesmen, the Dems want to wrap themselves in the
West's 2008 identity. That includes not only the region's political shifts, but
also the remnants of wild landscapes and charismatic wildlife, actual cowboys
riding the shreds of the range, hunters and anglers on epic quests, and people
moving to modern frontiers. Some of that is still real, and some lingers as
mythology and in the popular culture.
The West's robust economies are
also part of the image, with dramatic population growth, and leading
entrepreneurs in the region's Silicon Valleys, Microsoftonian campuses, and the
Bozemans and Boulders and Los Alamoses. All that implies success and change --
the hot theme this year.
Compared to other regions, the West is still
the least stodgy, least predictable, least about which bloodline you come from.
The West is where you'll face fewer repercussions if you let it all hang
out.
Chevy and Ford and other carmakers know the power of the West's
image. The Dems are crafting their sales pitch along similar lines. They want
everyone to imagine sliding into the driver's seat and flooring it, on the edgy
open roads in the Western dream.
Years ago, one carmaker had another
catchy image to attract buyers who were either young or looking for a youthful
feeling: "Not your father's Oldsmobile." The Dems are saying, "We're not your
father's Democrats."
Ray Ring is a contributor to Writers on the Range,
a service of High Country News (hcn.org). He is the paper’s senior editor in
Bozeman, Montana.
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Last Updated ( Monday, 25 August 2008 )
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