How deep the divide?
Scholars and pundits don't agree on the meaning of red and blue--or whether the nation is deeply split
This embrace-the-divide-to-conquer strategy receives, at best, mixed reviews from prominent neoliberal and centrist thinkers. "The trends in secularism and education might give metro Americans a political advantage over the long run," says Stanley Greenberg, a former Clinton pollster and now an adviser to the Kerry campaign. But Greenberg strongly rejects Sperling's strategy both as a flawed political strategy for the Democrats and as a bad prescription for America. "The problem is that metro areas contain many diverse worldviews," he says. "The assumption that metros will all come together is a stretch."
Contention. And as a presidential election strategy, he notes, Sperling's approach seems to wish away the fact that the Electoral College has a bias for rural states. "We can keep replicating 2000, coming out 49/49 with his strategy," Greenberg continues, "but most of what he would hope to achieve would take a long time and still divide the nation." Greenberg would rather see the Democratic candidates play down cultural issues, abandon interest-group pandering, and accentuate innovative policies that maximize opportunities for all Americans.
Ted Halstead, president of the New America Foundation and coauthor of The Radical Center: The Future of American Politics, believes that Sperling's remedy would only aggravate the extreme partisanship that already turns off so much of the alienated center of the electorate. "I think it's not only overly simplistic but a mischaracterization of what some of the most dynamic parts of the country are, and it's certainly not a very encouraging strategy for Democrats," he says. The great, disenchanted center, Halstead believes, would like to hear more about those kinds of innovative policies that Greenberg alludes to. The winning formula, he believes, is to blend flexibility and fairness, whether in healthcare policy or in future Social Security plans.
Whether the promotion of such innovative policies would allow one party or the other to forge a new and lasting majority coalition may not come to a fair test in this election. Concerns about foreign policy and national security will very likely trump economic and social policy issues. And if the foreign-policy debate can be framed within the broad terms of the existing culture war--and particularly around the question of the character of the leader--it is doubtful that the great divide will even begin to be closed. America's two nations, red and blue, real or largely chimerical, are likely to be with us for some time yet.
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