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There are millions of people who have now graduated from college who weren't even born the last time a Democrat carried the West -- 1964.
However, the West is not like the old Solid
South,
where winning the Democratic primary was the
same as winning the general election. If you add up all the
governors, the other elected state officials like
secretaries and treasurers, the state senators and
representatives and the U.S. senators and representatives
in the West, you come up with 699 Democrats and 723
Republicans. That's hardly a one-party system.
But you'd never know that from the presidential election returns of the past two decades. That could be changed, though, if the Dukakis-Bentsen ticket followed this advice.
Water: Always start your speech by noting that Water
is the very lifeblood of the American West.
Then
announce that the federal government has a continuing
role to play in the development of this vital
resource.
As long as you perform this genuflection toward the
Western water establishment, it doesn't matter what you
actually do in office. Jimmy Carter made a terrible mistake
once by telling the simple truth -- that there were better
ways to spend federal money than on more dams and more
canals to irrigate more surplus crops. Everywhere this side
of the 100th meridian, he was hated for his hit list
of water projects.
Ronald Reagan tells Westerners what they want to hear about water -- but as far as the actual building of dams, Reagan's water policies are indistinguishable from Carter's. Reagan says the right things, though, and so will Dukakis, if he wants to win.
Stand tall: Again, it is the perception that counts, not the reality. Just as during the Carter years, Americans are being held hostage in levantine nations.
But Reagan talks tough, even though if he, like Carter, is at a total loss for a solution. Any solution would be immensely complicated, no doubt, and that's confusing. We don't like to be confused because we like to think we live in a much simpler world, where the cavalry always arrives.
Don't be ethnic: Emphasizing your ethnic roots plays well in the East, but not here. Why?
If Salida is typical of Western towns, you can figure it out just by taking a walk. The main part of town was always WASP; it's full of frame and brick homes that look solidly midwestern. On the other side of the tracks, you find stucco houses with big porches and huge gardens -- that's where the Italian immigrants were made to live.
Across the river, close by the slag heaps, is a separate settlement, Smeltertown. That was for the Greeks. In their heydays, Leadville and Cripple Creek had scores of ramshackle suburbs for immigrants from southern Europe, who were discouraged from living or shopping among the WASPs.
Bringing up such ethnic roots in the West is a reminder of this and other parts of our history that we'd rather forget: Populists, Wobblies, Big Bill Haywood, Joe Hill, Harry Orchard, Bloody Bridles Waite, Ludlow, etc.
We like to think that the West was built by blue-eyed rugged individualist pioneers. When you talk about your roots, you remind us that most of the West was built by immigrants, fresh off the boat, who got ten cents an hour for backbreaking twelve-hours days of mining coal or smelting ore. We don't want to think about this.
The winning of the West ought to be simple for any presidential candidate. All he has to do is pay homage to our myths. What he actually does won't matter. Ronald Reagan knows that, and if Michael Dukakis is as smart as people say he is, maybe he'll figure it out before November.
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