Matt Bai: Democrats, look West

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Democrats, look West

A new breed of 'progressives' is shifting the party's center of gravity from the South and Northeast.
By Matt Bai
September 23, 2007


As pundits have already noted more times than John Edwards has uttered the words "two Americas," Democrats may well make history this presidential season by nominating, for the first time, either a woman or an African American. What the party will not do next year, however, for the 39th straight time since the massive territory of California won its statehood in 1850, is to select a nominee who hails from the West Coast.

For the record, Sen. William Gibbs McAdoo of California came closest, having narrowly lost the nomination twice in the 1920s. But, frankly, he was no more a Californian than Hillary Rodham Clinton is a New Yorker. Other than that, the nearest the party has come to nominating a true Westerner in the last century would be South Dakota's George McGovern or Texas' Lyndon Johnson, neither of whom would likely have known the Pacific Ocean had it carried them away while they were sleeping.

This is a telling omission. The Democratic Party, still tightly tethered to its 20th century zenith and the governing agenda that grew from it, continues to look to politicians from the old-line industrial states (New York, Illinois) and the manufacturing and farming South (North Carolina, Tennessee) even as unassuming San Jose quietly replaces Detroit on the list of the 10 largest American cities. In fact, since the modern party was born in Martin Van Buren's time, Democratic politics at the highest levels has always been controlled by a power axis joining urban Easterners with populist Southerners.

And yet, under the surface, something is in fact changing in the party's geographic balance. The candidates may give the impression of a party centered east of the Mississippi, but, in every other way, the Democratic universe is tilting West. The shift is most obvious in Congress, where industrial-state Democrats such as Charles Schumer and Rahm Emanuel now answer to a couple of Westerners, Harry Reid of Nevada and Nancy Pelosi of California. Its effect is even more profound at the activist level, however, where the power and energy in Democratic politics now runs increasingly along an East-West current.

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http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-bai23sep23,0,6023565.story?coll=la-opinion-center