Editor's Note: This speech is from the second day of the DLC's 2002 National Conversation.
Remarks as delivered:
Thank you. It's very interesting for me to follow Senator Edwards and Congressman Gephardt. I should make an announcement quickly that if Al Gore runs for President, I will not challenge him in the Democratic primaries. But I will take your campaign donations.
I will be brief, but I thought I'd open with just this fact: In 1979, less than 15 percent of the office space in America was in American suburbs. Today almost half of American office space is in suburbs, and all these office parks that have been going up. That means we now have a whole tribe of Americans, who not only don't live in cities, they don't work in cities, they don't go to movies in cities, they don't go to restaurants in cities, they have no regular contact with urban life. Now the Democrats are strong in urban America, Republicans are strong in rural America, but this new tribe of people, which is a majority, is not red and not blue but purple America. These are the sprawl people, and these are the swing voters in the coming elections, which will shape the destinies of both parties.
Our imagination about suburbia is motionless. We are in the midst of a revolution in how suburbia is structured. Most of what we think about it is wrong. In the first place, it's growing incredibly quickly, still. This has been a great decade for cities, the 1990s, especially this one, but suburban metro areas have grown twice as fast as cities. More people live in Mesa, Arizona, than live in St. Louis, Cincinnati, or Minneapolis -- a whole tribe of new suburban people. We think of the suburbs of the place where people go with their families. There are more households in suburbia without kids than there are with kids. There are young people; there are seniors. I don't know if you've seen these senior leagues -- these softball leagues -- you gotta be over 70 to play in these softball leagues. Everybody's wearing a knee brace; it takes 6 minutes to beat out a double.
We think of suburbia as white. The majority of Asian-Americans live in suburbia, half of all Hispanics live in suburbia, 40 percent of all African-Americans live in suburbia.
We think of suburbia as Republican. Greenwich, Connecticut, the Main Line outside of Philadelphia, Winnetka, Illinois -- all went for Al Gore in 2000. In suburb after suburb, in the last election, they voted for a Democrat for the first time in their history. There are lots of Democratic suburbs now. New Jersey has become such a safe Democratic state because the New Jersey suburbs are safe Democratic areas.
The key friction in the future is not red-blue. It's going to be within suburbia, probably Democratic inner-ring suburbs versus Republican outer-ring suburbs. And if you want to understand the single center of gravity in American political life, I really recommend you go to a big, box mall. You stand in the middle of one of these parking lots, which are like an ocean of parking spaces -- you could set off a nuclear device in the middle, and it wouldn't touch the stores on either side. You look off in the distance -- there's an Old Navy big enough to qualify for membership in the United Nations. Then crossing in between it, diagonally across the parking spots, there are all these SUVs -- we've got a rule in the suburbs, the smaller the women the bigger the car -- so you've got a size 6 trophy wife in a Chevy suburban, and she's criss-crossing, you can barely ... see the PetSmart she's going to, or the Petco, or the Bed, Bath & Beyond, the Linen's & Things. But where she's heading is the Sam's Price Club, which is like Walmart on acid, because there you can get your 41 lb. tubs of laundry detergent, your 30 lb. bags of tater tots, your packages of 1,500 q-tips, which is 3,000 actual swabs, because there's cotton on both ends. (I always go to these stores thinking, I want to see the guy who shops for condoms here.) And you walk down the aisles, and you think, if there's an earthquake now, I'm going to be crushed to death by a mountain of falling juice boxes. But everybody in these places, in these Price Clubs, is having the same conversations, which is about how much money they're saving by buying in bulk. "You know we really should buy 5,000 popsicles, because someday we might have kids, and you know, they'll eat them." And so they decide to buy it, and then they pile it into their shopping carts, which are the size of 18-wheelers, and you see them heading towards the checkout line, it looks like the supply lines to Operation Overlord.
And then you go into Home Depot -- that's where the men tend to go. (You see the men doing the special lumber walk: when American men are in the presence of large amounts of lumber, they do this little waddling walk, [as] they're ... salivating over the barbecue grills.) They head for the yard machinery section, which are things which used to be called rider mowers, but now they're called lawn tractors, because they look like M-I tanks, with cup-holders, and the grills have been hardened in case of nuclear attack (they send up enough firepower; its like a space shuttle turned upside down), and they have names like the Thermidor or the Weber Genesis, because in America it's perfectly normal for us to name a barbecue grill after a book in the Bible. And then they eventually make the decision, which always revolves around what has the most cup-holders. As you know all important consumer decisions in America are based on cup-holders, and the really impressive cup-holders.
I strongly recommend that you frequently go and talk to these people if you want to understand American politics. You learn a couple things about them -- and now we get back to politics I'm afraid. First you learn that George Bush and Dick Cheney fit in here. They could walk into any Outback, any Olive Garden, any Macaroni Grill, any Chi-Chi's -- any of these suburban chain restaurants, which have the peppy servers, the unnecessary ceiling fans, and enough pesto dishes to feed Tuscany for centuries -- and they could fit in. And some Democrats hate Bush, they hate Cheney, they hate all those tassel-loafer guys with their country clubs, but sprawl people in this purple America, the values are the same. So my view is that a lot of Democrats may want to talk about Harken, and Halliburton, and say, "we hate these guys, if we can get the country to hate them as much as we hate them, we're going to win this election."
Well, having watched up close -- Republicans tried to get the country to hate Bill Clinton -- I can tell you, it ain't going to happen. You can possibly beat the Republicans on policy, but you will not beat them on personality. You will not get them to think that George Bush is dumb, or illiterate, because he fits in so perfectly, his values are so in tune with the sprawl people in these big-box malls.
Now having watched them, there's another thing that's happened to these people in the last few months. They've had a series of very significant hinge moments -- psychological transformations -- 9-11 most importantly, but also others: the Catholic Church, the financial scandals. All these things have one thing in common, which is predators: the strong preying upon the weak. People with bombs, people with the robes of authority, people with insider knowledge, preying upon the weak, who lack those things. And what you notice, in recent conversations with people in this purple America -- these swing districts -- they're worried about our institutions, they're worried about the pillars of our society, there's a sharp drop in confidence that society's coming in the right direction, they're worried about authority, and we've seen in the last several months, a re-legitimization of central authority. We need to organize our power to crush the predators, who have their power organized.
Government has become more important in conversations, the White House has become more important, the CIA, the FBI, the SEC, concentrating power in the Office of Homeland Security, has dispelled a bunch of myths about the 1990s. One, that information technology would all unite us in a global family of the Internet. Two, that it's going to decentralize power away from institutions and empower individuals -- that hasn't happened. And third, that politics is about local, voluntary, non-conflictual institutions. Politics is still about power, and its still about authority. And if we all have to talk like James Carville, "it's the authority, stupid."
Now authority, I think George Bush has actually done a magnificent job concentrating and marshalling authority in the realm of foreign affairs. We will, I'm convinced of it, based on nothing more than conversations and the way people talk in the White House, be at war within a year with Iraq, and the Democratic party is going to have a very interesting time having this discussion, about going into a country that hasn't yet done anything to us, and replacing its government with one we're more friendly with.
The Republicans in their heart of hearts would like to have a debate about this, but they're nice and docile -- you can trust them to be quiet. But the Democrats are going to have an interesting fight, and I think it's going to be bigger than the Desert Storm fight. But I think the president so far has marshaled authority in foreign affairs. It doesn't take a genius to see he hasn't been as effective at marshalling and projecting authority on domestic policy.
If Teddy Roosevelt were running the Republicans he'd be in hog heaven right now. He'd get to fight a war and crush these Wall Street bad guys all at the same time. Which is his fantasy of a good time. But the GOP is no longer Teddy Roosevelt's party (despite my efforts); it's a more Jeffersonian, libertarian party. When it comes to domestic policy, the instinct is still decentralization: get power away from Washington, distrust central authority.
And so there is a series of Republican [domestic] policies, which are very good, I think; they just happen to be totally out of step with this moment, and these hinge moments -- the flat tax, capital gains tax cuts, deregulation, shrinking government, school choice, social security partial privatization. I happen to think a lot of them are good policies. (I'm almost appalled, frankly, at how many false friends social security reform seems to have had, who are now heading for the tall grass.)
But those things, good or not, are impossible now. And worse, to a lot of voters, and to a lot of people in these big-box malls, they feel like they come from a by-gone era. And so while I'm convinced that the GOP was the smarter party for the last 25 years, the intellectual momentum in the party has come to a halt. I'm a conservative, but there's just not the vibrancy there was. And its being felt politically: Today USA Today had a Gallup poll -- the economy has ridden to the top of voters concerns, above terrorism. For the first time you're beginning to see real movement in what they call the generic ballot -- "which party do you want to control Congress next time around?" In the Gallup poll, out today, the Democrats were up by 5 points, it had been either Republicans up, or tied. Don't applaud, I'm weeping here. The truth is there's a wave of economic anxiety sweeping across the country, and sprawl people don't want to demonize big business; they don't care about Harken and Halliburton, they just have this crucial question: "What are you going to do to get me out of this? Out of this sense of anxiety. What are you going to do to assert authority so the bad guys don't disorder my life."
And at the moment it seems the Democrats have the more aggressive answers. So you Democrats, and I'm not one, have been handed this incredible gift, this perfect storm of political conditions, to make a comeback: corporate scandals amidst the most corporate administration in history. You've got one of these scandals -- Ken Lay -- that not only involved a corporation, but one close to the president of the United States. I mean, it's the freakishness of that.
I'd hate to finish on a down note, so I'm going to finish on an upbeat note, of how you might blow it. And I have a few bits of advice.
One, use the phrase, "evil big business" a lot. Corporate greed. Attack people because they work for for-profit corporations rather than for Greenpeace -- because the sprawl people, they're in business; when they hear "corporate greed," it's like the Socialist Youth League in college, and they don't want any part of that. And they're in no mood for either a culture war, which conservatives might launch, or a class war the liberals might want.
Second, in your good feelings about the way things are going in American politics, its really important to get in bed with your own special interests. If you're going to have a homeland security bill in the Senate, or in Congress, it's really important that you put more emphasis on protecting the incompetent workers in that agency rather than protecting the American people's lives, which I'm afraid is what's happening.
Third, fail to develop a superpower mentality. America, with 4.7 percent of the people in the world, accounts for 30 percent of the GDP. We spend more on defense than the next 15 countries combined. Never before in human history has the disparity between the top nation and the next nation been so great. This is a unique moment for all Americans, and so you have to think in terms of the military power, the military opportunity of that, about the FBI, and you have to think about the CIA, about foreign affairs. Because though Sen. Kerry spoke about it yesterday, but we didn't hear too much about it today, but with this war in Iraq, and the unique American destiny in the world, and how it's going to play out over next year or two, foreign affairs is not going to go back into the cupboard behind prescription drugs; its going to be front and center. And when [future] generations judge us, its going to be about how we handled this incredible power we have in the world. And Democrats have to have a big vision about that, and I hope you don't get one.
As an American, I admire the DLC quite a bit, what it's done, the tremendous success of the organization. As a journalist, I'm incredibly interested in the DLC, I always come to these events, because you hear so much. As a conservative, I'm rooting against you, and so if I've said anything true or useful to you, please ignore it.
Thank you.
