I found Frank Rich's column in Sunday's New York Times interesting in relation to the urban elitism I have attributed to the incoming Obama administration and the media's coverage of it (as in this post). Rich's column is titled, "The Brightest are Not Always the Best." Rich's headline refers to David Halberstam's book, "The Best and the Brightest," about "the hubristic J.F.K. team that would ultimately mire America in Vietnam." In his new introduction for the 20th anniversary of the book Halberstam "noted that the book’s title had entered the language, but not quite as he had hoped. 'It is often misused,” he wrote, 'failing to carry the tone or irony that the original intended.'”
Here's an excerpt from Rich's column:
In his 20th-anniversary reflections, Halberstam wrote that his favorite passage in his book was the one where Johnson, after his first Kennedy cabinet meeting, raved to his mentor, the speaker of the House, Sam Rayburn, about all the president’s brilliant men. “You may be right, and they may be every bit as intelligent as you say,” Rayburn responded, “but I’d feel a whole lot better about them if just one of them had run for sheriff once.”
Halberstam loved that story because it underlined the weakness of the Kennedy team: “the difference between intelligence and wisdom, between the abstract quickness and verbal facility which the team exuded, and true wisdom, which is the product of hard-won, often bitter experience.”
Of course, it is not only those with rural pedigrees who have common sense and practical experience -- who may have "run for sheriff once." Nevertheless, there is a great deal to say for a little diversity across the rural-urban axis when you're running a country where rural residents represent a substantial minority of almost one-fifth of the population.
When I first saw the county-level map (select “county leaders” in upper left corner) from the ’08 Presidential election, I could hardly take my eyes off that red blob that is Arkansas, the state of my birth, my upbringing, and still--to some extent--my identity. It is no less than the buckle of the McCain belt.
Seeing the map measuring which counties and states voted for McCain by higher margins than they voted for George W. Bush four years ago was worse still.Arkansas is the reddest state, having doubled the margin of victory it gave Bush in 2004.It is far more red across all counties and regions than Arizona or Alaska, homes to those headlining the Republican ticket.
Here is how the NYT characterized Arkansas’s vote:
In Arkansas, which had among the nation’s largest concentration of counties increasing their support for the Republican candidate over the 2004 vote, “there’s a clear indication that racial conservatism was a component of that shift away from the Democrat,” said Jay Barth, a political scientist in the state.
Indeed, somewhat ironically, the only blue parts of Arkansas on this latter map (the one showing political movement; not just which counties supported whom in ’08) are the parts that (1) are historically most Republican, and so had room to move left, particularly under the influence of newcomers to these amenity-rich counties; (2) the parts with significant numbers of African American voters, mostly in the Mississippi Delta; and (3) the most urban place in the state -- the center of the greatr Little Rock metropolitan area.
To say that I am disappointed that Arkansas appears to be the epicenter of places that rejected Obama, and which did so decisively, would be an understatement. What the 2008 Presidential vote says about the Arkansas electorate is further complicated by the fact that both U.S. Senators from Arkansas are Democrats, as are three of four members of its congressional delegation.Every constitutional office in the state, from Governor on down, is currently held by a Democrat.This across-the-board support for Democrats by Arkansans—with the notable exception of Obama—makes racism seem a force of some magnitude.
But I would like to think that racism was not the only reason Arkansas painted itself so red at the level of the Presidential election.In fact, other factors were surely at play.One of these may have been Arkansans’ enduring loyalty to Hillary Rodham Clinton.This would be ironic since many there reviled her for remaining Hillary Rodham and for other manifestations of her feminist politics (e.g., having a career!) when she first moved to the state and married Bill Clinton some 35 years ago. Maybe, in the end, Arkansans became fond of Hillary, a fondness that generated a stiff loyalty that couldn’t be transferred to that “other” Democrat.
Also relevant is the fact that Obama didn’t set up a single campaign office in Arkansas, the only state he altogether ignored.Read a post on the topic here.Some of the Daily Yonder analysis of the rural vote in the South and Appalachia suggests that Obama lost big in these states because he failed to show up and connect personally with the voters, which is what the voters there seek.(Of course, Obama did show up in some rural places in the South and Appalachia, but not many. Read here about his efforts to reach rural voters). Some Yonder writers claim that voters expect to have a personal connection with the candidate, like Douglas Wilder achieved in Appalachian Virginia in his race for governor several years ago.This phenomenon could explain why Arkansas voters are willing to support both Democrats and Republicans for local and state-wide office, where parties have shared power in recent decades. It doesn’t take a great effort to visit each of the 75 counties at least once, and to do a fair bit of pressing the flesh.
Or, maybe Arkansans has more than its share of bigots because the bad news doesn’t stop with the vote in the Presidential race.Arkansas is also home to a successful referendum that prohibits unmarried, co-habiting persons from adopting or fostering children. The referendum was aimed at would-be adoptive parents who are members of the LGBT community. You can read the New York Times coverage here, coverage linking the decision to Arkansas voters’ antipathy toward Obama.Here’s an excerpt from Robbie Brown’s November 9 story:
Many experts did not expect the measure to pass with Democrats nationwide flooding the polls to support Mr. Obama for president. Prominent politicians, including former President Bill Clinton and Gov. Mike Beebe, a Democrat, publicly opposed the ban. Critics ran television advertisements of foster children pleading with voters not to make it harder for them to find families.
But conservatives mounted a grass-roots campaign, mainly through church groups, that framed the state’s case-by-case approach to adoption requests as an affront to traditional family values.
Brown's story also quotes Jay Barth, a professor political science at Hendrix College in Conway.
"I think white Arkansas Democrats felt cross-pressured in this race. . . . They didn't want to vote for what they viewed as Bush's third term, but they also couldn't bring themselves to vote for Barack Obama. . . . One response was just to bow out of voting, and their absence probably helped this [adoption qualification] proposal succeed."
This op-ed piece by Dan Savage also appeared in the New York Times and was one of the most emailed items on Nov. 12.Savage talks about how unfair the law is to members of the LGBT community, while also providing relevant data about the need for adoptive parents in Arkansas.He offers some hypotheticals to illustrate how dreadful the consequences of this new law are likely to be:
Right now, there are 3,700 other children across Arkansas in state custody; 1,000 of them are available for adoption. The overwhelming majority of these children have been abused, neglected or abandoned by their heterosexual parents.
Even before the law passed, the state estimated that it had only about a quarter of the foster parents it needed. Beginning on Jan. 1, a grandmother in Arkansas cohabitating with her opposite-sex partner because marrying might reduce their pension benefits is barred from taking in her own grandchild; a gay man living with his male partner cannot adopt his deceased sister’s children.
It is easy to attribute these election outcomes to rural voters, to the folks who are varyingly stereotyped as (1) uneducated, anti-government, and close-minded or (2) traditional, hard-working, salt-of-the earth types.In fact, attributes of rural societies are probably relevant to both outcomes – McCain’s landslide and the landslide to ban gay and lesbian families from adoption.After all, the initiative about adoption qualifications passed with 57% of the vote.An initiative to ban gay marriage passed in 2004.
As for the apparent antipathy of many Arkansans toward members of the LGBT community, a study of the 2004 election showed that gay marriage was a critical issue for rural voters in the race for the Presidency.The Daily Yonder wrote about it here, discussing the study by political scientist Peter Francia.Here’s an excerpt:
Francia runs through the usual list of differences: rural Americans attend church more often than urban residents; they are more likely to adopt a literal interpretation of the Bible; rural residents are more likely to be married, to own a gun and to own a house. Rural residents in 2004 were twice as likely as urban residents to support the Iraq War. But rural residents are also more culturally conservative — and in 2004, 71 percent of rural residents said their cultural disagreements with Democrat John Kerry led them to vote for George Bush.
The most important factor in how rural residents voted in 2004 was gay marriage, Francia found. More than tax cuts, guns or the Iraq War, opposition to gay marriage moved rural voters. Francia wrote, “In short, gay marriage appears to have been the dominant cultural issue of 2004 and was important in understanding the success of George W. Bush among rural voters."
So, does rurality explain these election outcomes in Arkansas?Is Arkansas so rural that Obama, not a social conservative (compared to Bush anyway) and not “one of them” (like the Clintons, especially Bill) hadn’t a chance? Was the adoption qualification initiative a done deal as soon as it hit the ballot?
Well, a story in the NYT earlier this year characterized Arkansas as twice as rural as the national average.(Read a related blog post here).In fact, 55 of Arkansas’s 75 counties meet the Office of Management and Budget’s definition of non-metropolitan, meaning the total population of each is under 100K, and no city in any of them has more than 50K. Those counties are home to 43.3% of the state’s population.Forty-six percent of the state’s residents live in places that meet the Census Bureau’s definition of rurality, i.e., places with fewer than 2,500 residents or open territory.Eighty-one percent live in places that have fewer than 50,000 residents.
Apart from these numerical thresholds, Arkansas may also fairly be seen as culturally rural. My guess is that most Arkansas natives who live in one of the state’s metropolitan areas are one, perhaps two generations removed from a more truly rural experience.Sixty-one percent of Arkansans were born in Arkansas (compared to 52% of Californians and just 41% of Coloradoans).As of 2000, 89% of Arkansas residents had been living in the state at least five years.(See Arkansas Census Facts here).In part because of the lack of population churn and in part because of the absence of a major city—a truly cosmopolitan place on the scale of Dallas or Atlanta—Arkansas has not been widely influenced by urban views and values.
Having said that, I am guessing that a higher percentage of voters in Little Rock, where an out LGBT community of some size exists, opposed the initiative. Obama did win Pulaski County (greater Little Rock), and it is one of just a couple of Arkansas counties that he carried by a wider margin than Kerry did in '04. Across the state, however, tolerance and acceptance of difference seem to be in relatively short supply.Maybe, as Obama expressed it in the big rural gaffe this spring, given the tough lives many of these rural folk have led (I’m paraphrasing), you can understand why they cling to a particular religious interpretation and antipathy to those who are not like them.
Urban, heterogeneous spaces and the change they tend to accommodate—along with the tolerance they ultimately engender—are not widely present in Arkansas, which may surely is a partial explanation of the state's conservatism.The state's historic lack of heterogeneity may be changing, however, as Arkansans have been pressed in the past decade to accommodate the ethnic and cultural differences represented by a huge influx of mostly Latina/o immigrants.(Read my academic analysis of the phenomenon here). Will this ultimately soften them up—and open them up to accepting difference, even celebrating it?
Homophobia and racism have been tempered in our nation in recent years, I believe, as more individuals have had opportunities to live and work among persons of color and LGBT folks.As Arkansans increasingly have those experiences, intolerance fed by ignorance will surely fade.
All the news on the front page of the November 27, 2008, issue of the Newton County Times is basically good news. Reading it caused me to reflect on some of the really terrific things about how rural places work.
The top story is "Educational focus set by extension office in 2009." The lede is:
Forages, food and nutrition head the list of subjects the Newton County Cooperative Extension Service will focus on next year, according to a report delivered by office staff to members of a community council Thursday, Nov. 20.
Although I grew up hearing about the extension agent and being a member of 4-H for a time, I never knew what extension agents did until I got involved in rural studies. Now I read reports like this with great interest -- and a greater appreciation for the role of this agency.
Other front-page stories include:
"Food drive filing county's pantry." The story reports that the Newton County Christian Food Room expects to distribute over 6,000 pounds of food over the holidays. Most of that food will come from individual donations. This is accompanied by two photos, one of volunteers at the food room and the other of Ritter Communications employees. Ritter is offering an incentive for customers to participate in the food drive by giving them a discount commensurate with the amount of the donation. This is an especially heartening story in my eyes because the county had no such institution when I was growing up there.
The other story is about the opening of a new bank building. What was formerly the Newton County Bank and is now the Bank of the Ozarks will have some competition from the Jasper branch of the First National Bank of Green Forest. A new 4,080 square foot building sits overlooking the Little Buffalo River to house the branch, which opened in a temporary facility two years ago. Green Forest, population 2,717, is in neighboring Carroll County.
Photos from the annual meeting of the Jasper Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber has 170 members.
Read Monica Davey's report in the New York Timeshere. An excerpt follows:
As the rest of the nation sinks into a 12th grim month of recession, this state, at least up until now, has been quietly reveling in a picture so different that it might well be on another planet.
The number of new cars sold statewide was 27 percent higher this year than last, state records through November showed. North Dakota’s foreclosure rate was minuscule, among the lowest in the country. Many homes have still been gaining modestly in value, and, here in Fargo, construction workers can be found on any given day hammering away on a new downtown condominium complex, complete with a $540,000 penthouse (still unsold, but with a steady stream of lookers).
Davey reports on many other indicators, including the state's 3.4% unemployment rate. Indeed, the state currently has about 13,000 job openings. With that many unfilled jobs, North Dakota's population (642,200in the 2000 census) may soon be on the rise.
Davey attributes North Dakota's "cheery circumstances" to an array of factors including a rise in the state's oil production and a good year for farmers, as well as a "conservative, steady, never-fancy culture that has nurtured fewer" booms and slumps.
Read another post here, from December 2007, about the state's boom.
But as with so many reports in the national media, that angle is not expressed. The headline is attention grabbing: "College May Become Unaffordable for Most in the U.S.," and it appeared in the New York Times on December 3. It has been one of the most emailed stories on the Times website since it appeared two days ago.
Tamar Lewin's story reports on the biennial report of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education. It shows college tuition and fees rose 439% between 1982 and 2007. Meanwhile, the median family income during that period rose only 147%. This means student borrowing is up sharply
“If we go on this way for another 25 years, we won’t have an affordable system of higher education,” said Patrick M. Callan, president of the center, a nonpartisan organization that promotes access to higher education.
* * *
“The middle class has been financing it through debt,” he said. “The scenario has been that families that have a history of sending kids to college will do whatever if takes, even if that means a huge amount of debt.”
The story also discusses the consequences for families whose incomes are in the bottom fifth in the nation. For them, a year at a public university costs 55% of median income. Community colleges are hardly more affordable for these families, consuming 49% of the poorest families' median income.
A couple of things are striking about this information in relation to rural youth. First, of course, poverty rates are higher and more enduring in rural communities than in urban ones. This means rural youth seeking a college degree are more likely to be affected by rising tuition costs, and that those costs are more likely to represent a higher proportion of a rural family's income.
Second, rural families may be less likely to embrace an ethos that children should go to college, whatever the cost. Again, this is related to the current education gap between metro and non-metro populations. While one in five urban residents over the age of 25 has a college degree, only one in eight rural adults in that age group does.
Lewin also notes another report released this week from the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges. It said that public higher education remains affordable, with tuition around $6,000/year for a public research university, about $3,200 for community college. But that group expressed concern that these schools will not remain affordable unless states adequately support them. It also called for public universities to "explore a variety of approaches to lower costs — distance learning, better use of senior year in high school, perhaps even shortening college from four years."
The tough times facing automobile dealerships -- particularly those dealing in American made vehicles-- have been highlighted in news coverage the past few days. The New York Times reported earlier this week on the topic in a story by Clifford Kauss. NPR stories in the past few days have echoed the theme, also discussing the impact that falling car sales are having on local government revenues.
Clifford Krauss's NYTpiece highlights the difficulties facing two dealerships owned by Bruce Thomas, one for G.M., the other Chrysler-Dodge-Jeep, in Quincy, Florida, population 6,982. Here are some excerpts :
In this small town outside Tallahassee, Mr. Thomas had 50 employees only two years ago when his two dealerships sold an average of 24 new vehicles a month. But now Mr. Thomas is lucky if he sells three new vehicles a week, and he has had to dismiss 10 of his remaining 40 employees in recent days.
Thomas says he expects the situation to worsen.
Krauss explains that rising unemployment and falling home and stock values have brought down dealers like Thomas, even as gasoline prices have come down. The credit crunch is hurting dealers, too, as they rely on credit to keep their lots stocked.
An NPR story on December 1 featured the dateline Monroeville, Pennsylvania, population 29,349. There tax revenues associated with car sales are down 15-20%, which has forced cuts in local government spending.
Another NPR story yesterday focused on the mid-Atlantic states. Frank Langfitt's report features, among others, Chevy dealer Barry Williams in Elkton, Maryland, population 11,893. He says he is confident he will survive, though he realizes many dealers will not:
Williams' experience is typical of dealers across the country. He says the recession and credit crisis have knocked out 40 percent of his business.
"I've used the analogy of Katrina," says Williams, sitting in his near-empty showroom in Elkton, Md. "I'm in New Orleans right now, and the storm is coming and I didn't get out."
Implicit in these stories is that many of the 900 new-car dealerships (among almost 21,000) that are expected to close this year are in micropolitan places, places where these businesses have often represented a disproportionate chunk of the local economy in terms of jobs and taxes. And, as Clifford Krauss recognized in his story, these dealerships often represent still more than money and jobs in non-metropolitan places: "Most of them are deeply rooted in their communities, and each is a slice of Americana — their big flags flying, their radio advertisements compelling attention and their Little League sponsorships and other charity helping to improve the lives of local people."
For an earlier report on the trouble facing car dealerships, listen to this Nov. 4 story.
Read Abby Goodnough's story about Starksboro, Vermont's consultation with Middlebury College students here. Here is an excerpt:
Like other New England towns rich in history and tradition, Starksboro, 20 miles south of Burlington and population 1,900, is eager to preserve its uniqueness in the face of growth. But hoping to head off the conflict that often stymies planning, this fall it tried a new approach.
Starksboro asked students from nearby Middlebury College to spend the semester interviewing its residents to document what they value most about the place. It intends to use their thoughts to influence decisions about its future.
Here's a telling quote from one student involved in the project:
“I’m guilty, like most of us, of really romanticizing Vermont life and Vermont towns,” said Max Kanter, a junior from Phoenix. “Now I have a sense of the challenge they have to stay afloat.”
The story touches on many rural and New England themes and is well worth a read.
Shai Oster reports in the Wall Street Journal today about a new wave of migration in China. In many cases, this migration is taking workers from construction and manufacturing jobs in cities -- work that is drying up in the slumping economy--back to the rural provinces from which they initially came. The headline is "China Fears Restive Migrants as Jobs Disappear in Cities," and here is an excerpt.
China's roaring industrial economy has been abruptly quieted by the effects of the global financial crisis. Rural provinces that supplied much of China's factory manpower are watching the beginnings of a wave of reverse migration that has the potential to shake the stability of the world's most populous nation.
Fast-rising unemployment has led to an unusual series of strikes and protests. Normally cautious government officials have offered quick concessions and talk openly of their worries about social unrest.
* * *
As the government tries to calm tensions in the cities, it also fears that newly unemployed migrants returning home could upend the already-strained social system in the countryside.
* * *
For workers accustomed to a decade of double-digit growth, China's sudden downturn has come as a shock to the system. Migrant workers -- estimated to make up a tenth of the country's population -- have powered China's economic success in the three decades since free-market reforms began.
Oster reports that while the percentage of farmable land in China is about what is in the United States, 730 million Chinese residents--more than twice the entire U.S. population--live in rural parts of the country. According to Joshua Muldavin, a professor at Sarah Lawrence College, many migrant workers left their villages over the years because some 80-100 milion rural residents have no land or only enough land for subsistence farming. The "large-scale return of peasants could add tens of millions to that," Muldavin estimates, suggesting that the significance of the reverse migration "can't be exaggerated."
Jim Robbins reports in the New York Times on 1 December. Here is the lede:
The Montana Supreme Court ruled here recently that the 16-mile-long stream, Mitchell Slough, is open to the public and that the landowners are not entitled to fence it off as part of their private sanctuaries.
Among the wealthy landowners who will be affected are Charles Schwab and Huey Lewis. Read the rest here.
NPR's Day-to-Day program today featured a story speculating about what the Obama administration's Federal Communications Commission might do about the digital divide. Here's an excerpt that addresses the issues facing rural communities:
About 10 percent of Americans still have no access to broadband at all. Many of those people live in rural areas. Wally Bowen, who runs a small Internet company in Asheville, N.C., says the reason is money.
"The cable companies don't find it cost effective. Phone companies have to reconfigure their landlines with additional technology," Bowen says. "There's been some of that, but it's pretty limited."
* * *
"There are parts of the country where it'll still be uneconomic for a phone company, a cable provider, a wireless provider to offer service. The smart use of government funds — to the extent we care to put them into broadband infrastructure — would be to bring broadband where it isn't."
Listen here to the entire story, which debates the merits of a public-private partnership to achieve greater broadband access in rural places.
The stories on the front page of the Nov. 20, 2008, issue of the paper do not implicate any criminal justice issues. Indeed, the only marginally law-related story is about a problem with the regional landfill, which has prompted the solid waste district to hire a Little Rock lawyer to deal with state officials on this regulatory matter.
In other news:
Early voting in the runoff election for County Judge ends
A community Thanksgiving worship service is announced
A holiday toy drive and the 18th Annual Newton County Christmas Parade are set
A live music finale will be held at the Ozark Cafe
The Jasper School Homecoming royalty is announced
Even the Sheriff's report features little news--property checks, a few motor vehicle accidents, and one response to a "breaking and entering in progress." The County Sheriff, elected to his second term, ran a quarter page ad thanking the voters.
In other signs of the season, the back page is full of photos of youthful deer hunters with their prey.
Now this is what country living is supposed to be like.
