INDEPTH: US ELECTION 2004
The mean season
CBC News Online | October 29, 2004
Reporter: Brian Stewart
Producer: Carmen Merrifield
It's the most polarized U.S. election in years, and the bitterness has seeped right into communities across the United States. Brian Stewart went south to explore this growing nastiness. He found a new segregation in place, one based on politics.
If you think the presidential race is rough, consider the local campaign battles for Congress.
Here in Texas, a Democrat hopes to see a Republican organizer jailed almost forever. Chet Edwards tells an audience, "Felony criminal indictment on a crime that, if found guilty, would be so serious he could serve up to 99 years in prison."
No slouch herself, his Republican opponent, Arlene Wohlgemuth, blasts back with a hint of witchcraft.
"He helped to facilitate getting the religion of Wicca, which is witchcraft, as a recognized religion on to Fort Hood. Not what we in central Texas stand for," she says.
One of the leading historians of modern American society, David Halberstam, says, "There's a lack of respect for the other side and a sense that there are no rules, no limits, that meanness of spirit if it works is acceptable…I find that so troubling and just an America in a way that is unrecognizable to me. It's a mean season."
Remarkable bitterness
There's no general agreement when it began or how it erupted, but a remarkable bitterness has now settled over American politics.
It is driving neighbours apart and dividing Republican and Democratic communities against one another in ways not seen in well over a generation. It is shown vividly here in central Texas where state and national politics has descended into trench warfare, where compromise is sneered at as weakness and no quarter is given.
Texas is not one of the key battleground states. Bush is a shoo-in but what is worth exploring is that the extreme divisions here show the increasing danger of polarization that is now changing the very mood and landscape of American politics.
Polarization has made this the most divisive election since at least Vietnam, some say since the 1930s. Campaigns appear fuelled on hate for the other side. The opposition is denounced as near treason.
U.S. Senator Zell Miller, speaking at the Republican National Convention, said,
"Today at the same time, young Americans are dying in the sands of Iraq, in the mountains of Afghanistan. Our nation is being torn apart and made weaker because of a Democrat's manic obsession to bring down our commander-in-chief."
Bush's district
One of the fiercest battles is in a Waco, Texas, a congressional district that happens to be Bush's own.
The hard-edged fundamentalism of Texas conservatives has become one of the dominant influences on new American politics. In Waco, the Bush team has gathered every resource available to unseat Chet Edwards, one of five Texas Democrats in the House of Representatives up for re-election. Republican strategy counts on wiping out the 14-year veteran and others in order to gain firm conservative control of the new Congress.
"We must have been doing something right, my friends, to get targeted like that," Edwards says.
They've even redrawn political maps to make it harder for Democrats to stand a chance.
Author, columnist and journalist Molly Ivins says, "I can remember in my political lifetime when Waco was represented largely by liberals in the state house and Chet Edwards is the last remnant of that old Waco."
Ivins, who lives in Austin, is one of America's leading political writers. She says religious fundamentalism stokes the new desire to end an era of political compromise.
The object, of course, was to get rid of the Democratic congressmen from Texas and so solidify the Republican majority so they would never have to compromise on anything. And what you see in Chet Edwards' seat is perhaps the starkest contrast imaginable. Edwards is by no means a liberal. The woman running against him has been the most extreme right-winger in the state legislature for many years now, Arlene Wohlgemuth. And she herself is a very devout fundamentalist Christian.
Cultural war
In Waco, Wohlgemuth is designated Republican terminator against Edwards. A steely state budget-slasher and brilliant pilot who teaches aerobatics on the side, Wohlgemuth is right wing enough to view liberalism as a social danger.
"There is a cultural war in America, and so we are at a very important crossroads in our nation about which direction our nation is going to go as far as our culture's concerned, particularly things like the marriage amendment and the definition of marriage," she says.
"Accepting gay marriage has proven to be the death knell of the family in the Scandinavian countries where it has been in effect the longest, and I personally believe very strongly that daddies are important people and that children need mamas and daddies."
The battle in Texas has been made even more intense in recent years as Republicans have redrawn Democratic ridings. And when Democrats lost their fight to block this gerrymandering, they were denounced as gutless.
Democratic fury is still building as they mobilize the grassroots to block a complete conservative takeover of the state.
"What many of us had been missing as George Bush rolled on and on and on and nobody in the media stood up and nobody in the political process stood up, we're all going around saying, damn, where's the leader?" Ivins says. "And when somebody finally stood up to fight, that was really an exciting moment."
But Texas Republicans, conservative to the core, feel Democrats have to face reality. Ray Sullivan was media aide to George Bush when he was governor.
"Well, Texas is a conservative state, and Texans have elected since 1996, every single statewide elected office has become Republican. We took control of the state senate that year, we took control of the state house in 2002," Sullivan says. "So the voters have spoken. There is plenty of room for debate and discussion, but this is a Republican state right now."
Sullivan believes a divisive election simply mirrors profound divides in America today.
"There are very few national elections that I can remember where the candidates were so different politically, Bush being a mainstream, solid Texas conservative, and John Kerry being a very liberal, Boston Democrat. Two very different views of the world and different records and different views of America's political future," Sullivan says.
Rigidity
There's something deeper at work here. The rigidity is startling.
As governor, Bush was admired for his bipartisan approach. Power corridors used to echo to raucous deals and compromise.
Now Republicans and Democrats inhabit different worlds. And not just figuratively, but literally. For you find the same wary distance spreading across American communities – a new segregation, this time political, forms an expanding gulf between red Republican areas and blue Democratic ones. It's a profound shift. Twenty-five years ago, Americans largely lived in mixed Republican/Democrat neighbourhoods.
Now political writers like Bill Bishop in Austin find fully half live in either overwhelmingly Democratic areas or in solid red Republican communities that surround them. "State legislatures have gotten much more adept at gerrymandering congressional district, so they're overwhelmingly one party or another," Bishop says.
"But at the same time, people are doing that themselves. So we're gerrymandering ourselves into like-minded communities, and so the effect is each party, as their base becomes more firm and more polarized, to move to either the left or to the right, and there's less reason for anyone in Congress to compromise over anything. And that's, in fact, what's happening."
The stereotype of rock-rib Republican Texas collapses inside Austin, amid coffee shops and the 1960s-style academic neighbourhoods, both anti-war and anti-Bush to the core.
"They're older houses, there are front porches, lots of trees, lots of people out walking their dogs, and the little shops are nearby," Bishop says. "There's just a look that anyone in the United States knows that this is a Democratic neighbourhood, and no one gets mixed up about it."
Stroll one county over and it's a different world.
Politicians call Democratic Austin "metro" while the Republican suburb of Williamson is firmly "retro."
In Williamson, life is back to the future, clinging to a romanticized past of 1950s family values; the yellow ribbons show support for troops abroad, and dissenting signs are not seen.
In this new segregation, people cling to their own kind.
"It's more a question of Americans not knowing Americans who are unlike themselves," Bishop says, "so we always think that there are people out there who disagree, but they're outsiders. They're somehow apart from us, and if only people would agree with the majority, us, whoever we are, in Nebraska or California, then things would work out OK. It's just weird."
Group polarization
More and more isolated from neighbours with opposing views, people tend to grow more rigid in their politics.
"There's a social phenomenon called group polarization," Bishop says. "What happens is when a group of people who think the same thing get together, by the end of their conversation, they tend to think a more extreme version of what they thought to begin with.
"If you think about that happening at a molecular level around the United States over and over and over again in community after community and neighbourhood after neighbourhood, then you have a picture of a nation that is polarizing internally at kind of the molecular level of society.
"I think it really is a problem in that I don't see people with the willingness, or even now the ability, to see the other side, and the urge of people to demonize opponents without even ever talking to them is just rampant."
David Halberstam agrees it's an alarming phenomenon. He's studied the changes in decades since the 1950s and finds personal attacks and smears getting worse in this divided America.
"You can feel it, and you can feel how if you don't like 'x' or 'y,' the candidate, and you're with somebody who likes 'x' or 'y,' you have to fight to make a judgment on your friends because they like the candidate you don't like," Halberstam says. "That's what I mean about it being meaner. Because we not only have red and blue and we've probably had it for quite a while, but because of Iraq and 9/11, the red is redder and the blue is bluer. The divides are greater."
The Iraq war has split down the middle an America still scarred and fearful following Sept. 11. It also reignited what historian Halberstam called America's second civil war, the Vietnam divisions.
"The Vietnam tensions don't go away," Halberstam says. "Instead of sort of being tempered and beginning to go off and be replaced by other... by other issues, they're intensified one more time. I don't think it's a new division. I think it's a freshening up of an old one."
Meaner than it used to be
Halberstam was the pre-eminent Vietnam correspondent. He was savagely attacked by President Lyndon Johnson when he famously questioned the war. Now he says personal attacks on opponents on talk radio, in books, and in political ads are far more reckless than in the 1960s.
"It's infinitely meaner than it used to be. It's not a very pleasant time to watch a campaign. There's so much distortion and the ads are... the ads are really ugly," he says.
"I do not, did not, think that I would live in a time in America where one candidate had gone to a war and the other candidate had not. But the other candidate who sat it out in the National Guard would unleash a series of commercials, in effect trying to invalidate the candidate who had gone to war's medals and service. I find that so troubling and just an America that is in a way unrecognizable to me."
What about attacks on Bush? He's portrayed sometimes as a man, particularly by the satirists, as unbelievably stupid, the frat boy.
"I think it's a terrible mistake to portray the president that way, to portray him as stupid, to portray him as careless. I mean, he's not stupid, and he's not careless," Halberstam says. "The more you respect an opponent and the more you try and understand how and why it happened, if there's someone you don't like, what does he or she represent about a society, I think that's more helpful. If you start out at peg one and you get all the way to the president of the United States, somebody's doing something right and you better find out what it tells you about (a) the candidate and (b) your country."
In Waco, Democrat Chet Edwards works the large Hispanic community, which might just save his chances.
Hostility to Mexican-Americans
Mexican-Americans also find an extraordinary new hostility in the air.
Carlos Guerra was a leading activist against Texas segregation in the 1960s that ghettoized Hispanics and blacks. He finds it stunningly ironic that white Republicans and Democrats now practise a new segregation against each other.
"There's no question about it. This is easily one of the bitterest and most divisive elections I've ever seen, and I've been watching them closely since 1960,"
Guerra says, "You're not going to see them at the same table. You're not even going to see them at the same restaurant, you know, and yeah, when they do talk, it's to scream epithets at each other. And the geographical divisions have become so profound, they don't even see each other anymore. There's virtually no contact."
Guerra says the growth of the new red and blue segregation leaves Hispanics further marginalized, on the edges of society.
"There was some integration there for a while, but now it's getting back to the way it was," Guerra says. "You go to some neighbourhoods and the only Mexican-Americans you're going to see, you know, are domestics, you know, service workers. And this is the sort of segregation that, you know, you see throughout, and it's increasing. You know, there's this great divide that's separating. Mexican-Americans that wind up economically on the short end of that, and no, we're invisible. "
As for national politics, there was hope televised debates might restore some civility, but the grassroots rot may be hard to reverse.
"There's a joy missing, and there was a time when we could actually have a good time having a political discussion with people who disagreed with us, but that's been replaced by this fear of discussion, and that fear of disagreement, and as a nation, we literally pull away from those occasions when we have to have a discussion with people who disagree with us," Bishop says,
"I think it drives people with a sense of the complexity of issues out, people who want to debate, but don't want to lose three quarts of blood in a debate, want to be able to respect the person on the other side," Halberstam says. "We're not an easy country to make work. We're huge, you can put the map of Europe on us.
"We assume that what works and binds us in Maine, California, Florida, the state of Washington, with our generations, our whites, blacks, Hispanics, that we can make a one out of this, and we've been pretty lucky, but all this – but this new stuff tears at that, and it unnecessarily fragments us because it satirizes, creates factions. It exacerbates the differences and seizes on the differences and makes them more important, diminishes the things that bind us together. It's a very negative thing."
America has come out of mean seasons before. President Reagan famously spoke of morning again in America. But with differences this dark and a new war to divide, this feels more like a night of political chill that will linger for some time.
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| QUICK FACTS: |
Voting age population (VAP) in 2000:
205,815,000
Eligible voters (VEP) in 2000:
193,199,543
Voter turnout (% of VEP) in 2000:
54.5%
Numbers of seats up for election (2004):
House: 435 (all of them)
Senate: 34 (of 100)
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