“It’s simple. The gender gap is a function of women who rely on government as opposed to those who don’t,” Gingrich explained.
No doubt all that Kellyanne Fitzpatrick had told me was true. No doubt even a great deal of what Jack had said possessed a basis in fact. But the gender gap doesn’t exist because women are irrational. It exists because they are rational. Just as any economist or political scientist would predict, women vote their self-interest.
Journal entry:
The Nineteenth Amendment wasn’t a mistake after all. I can’t wait to tell Edita.
YOU GOTTA HAVE HEART
Before running into Gingrich, I had concluded that all the GOP could do about the gender gap was learn to live with it—that and take out ads in Redbook and Vogue. Now I thought I saw at least a couple of steps Republicans might take. The first would be to start treating single mothers with respect.
Society has played a rotten trick on these women, telling them that easy divorce, contraceptives, and abortion on demand would liberate them. They haven’t. They have liberated men, permitting them to skip out on the children they father—after all, when a single woman has a child these days, the father can tell himself that she should have used the pill or had an abortion. If every American followed the precepts of traditional morality, there would certainly be far fewer single mothers. But to the almost ten million women who are already single mothers, Republican talk about traditional morality can sound like mere sanctimony. Picture it. You’re a single mother, trying to cook all the meals, change all the diapers, and wipe all the noses by yourself. Then one day while you’re doing the laundry, a Republican appears on television to drone on about traditional morality. What do you do? It’s obvious. Pitch the flatiron at him.
Tommy Thompson, the Republican governor of Wisconsin, has demonstrated one way to replace sanctimony toward single mothers with tangible help. Thompson has reformed Wisconsin’s welfare system, cutting the state’s welfare rolls by more than half. Yet even as he has moved single mothers off welfare, Thompson has provided them with special assistances. One Thompson reform helps to ensure that dead-beat dads make their child support payments. Another makes certain that as single mothers undergo training and then enter the job market, they receive help in locating and paying for child care. Yet another ensures that teenage mothers receive child care and transportation for free. Wisconsin now spends more on single mothers and their children than it did before Thompson put his reforms into effect. The reforms aren’t perfect. Some children would no doubt be better off if their mothers stayed home. Still and all, Thompson’s reforms represent a serious effort to promote self-reliance among single mothers while treating them with respect. Republicans elsewhere could do a lot worse.
After according respect to single mothers, the second step for the GOP would be obvious. Accord the same respect to single old ladies.
Forty-five percent of women sixty-five or older are widowed. More than two thirds of them live alone, many cut off even from their own families. My brother and I saw this with our own mother just a couple of years ago. We always thought of ourselves as close to her. When my brother moved from the East Coast to Seattle, and then, some years later, I followed him west, moving to California, it never occurred to either of us that we were leaving her behind. Then she fell ill. There she was, a widow in a retirement complex in North Carolina, all the way on the other side of the country, suddenly unable to care for herself. When we were able to move her to Seattle, where she would be close to my brother and his family, she told us that her friends in the retirement complex envied her. “You’d be surprised how many people here never see their children or grandchildren,” she said. Exactly.
Now, the problem of caring for the elderly is complicated—and the GOP scarcely needs a writer like me mouthing off about new programs. I wouldn’t even know how to estimate the costs. (All I can tell you is that the program I kept imagining while my mother was sick—free around-the-clock care by nurses with the compassion of nuns and the expertise of MDs—wouldn’t be cheap.) But it has crossed my mind that the GOP might propose a few faith-based initiatives, programs that would shift resources for the elderly from federal bureaucracies to private organizations, including religious groups. Of course no Republican wants to see church groups taken over by the feds. But since the church workers who called on my mother were always a lot more cheerful and friendly than the county social workers the hospital sent, I can’t help thinking that religious groups might be able to provide old people with better care than can the government. In other words, faith-based initiatives might work.
* * *
The Republican Party’s principal appeal to women, I suspect, will always remain just what the women in Arizona found in the GOP: a willingness to judge women and men alike according to their individual merits. If the women in Arizona had been Democrats, they would have had to take me seriously when I asked them about gender politics, producing paragraphs of feminist oratory. As Republicans, they were free to dismiss me as a fool. That was no mean liberation in itself.
Can the Republican Party ever close the gender gap? The outlook isn’t encouraging. What the GOP preaches is self-reliance. What single mothers and widows want is help. This is a standoff from which the Democratic Party is only too happy to profit, promising to shower single women with government largesse. All the same, the GOP ought to do its best to appeal to single women, making its case for self-reliance while providing whatever assistance it can. It might at least narrow the gender gap. Then again, it might not. But showing a little heart would do the party good.
Chapter Eight
ON THE BORDER OF THE
FINKELSTEIN BOX
Journal entry:
A retired schoolteacher: “Is this your first time in Fresno? It is? Well, you’ll find that people here are nothing like people in San Francisco or L.A. We’re more like people in Iowa. We pride ourselves on it.”
A Mexican baby-sitter: “Oh, if I could become legal, I would. But they won’t let me. And I can’t afford to pay the taxes anyway. My daughter and her children all live on the money I make in this country.”
Arthur Finkelstein, a Republican political consultant, uses a simple device to show his clients the way the country divides politically. As you can see, Finkelstein draws a lopsided box on a map of the United States. Inside the box, Republicans do well, while Democrats do badly. Outside it, Democrats do well, while Republicans do badly. In states whose largest centers of population lie inside the box, for example, no Democratic candidate for the Senate won a majority in the election of 1996 except Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, and her majority was so narrow—just a few thousand votes—that her Republican opponent, charging fraud, was able to persuade the Senate to conduct an investigation. (The Senate found a number of irregularities in the vote count, but sustained Landrieu in her seat.) In the same states two years later, in the election of 1998, five Democratic candidates for the Senate won majorities, but three of the five did so by less than 10 percent, while one of the five, Harry Reid of Nevada, did so by a bare one tenth of 1 percent. In states whose largest centers of population lie outside the box, by contrast, no Republican candidate for the Senate won a majority in the election of 1996, while two years later, in the election of just three Republican candidates for the Senate won such majorities, one of them, Peter Fitzgerald of Illinois, managing to do so by a mere 2.9 percent. Inside the box, Republican governors are entirely pro-life. Outside the box, Republican governors are often pro-choice.
A simple, lopsided box—yet it cleaves the country cleanly in two.
When I first learned about the Finkelstein Box, it brought to mind a valley in Switzerland where I skied when I was a bachelor. I stayed in a village called Rougemont. Three miles up the road was a village called Saanen. Everyone in Rougemont was a French-speaking Catholic. Everyone in Saanen was a German-speaking Protestant. Each day I’d wake up in Rougement, exchange a few words of French with the waitress over breakfast, spend
half a day skiing, then have lunch in Saanen, where I’d sit in silence, unable to exchange a few words with the waitress because I spoke no German. How remarkable, I’d think, that these people have preserved their separate identities. How quaint. How European.
But a cultural border here? In the United States? This country is supposed to be a melting pot. Immigrants are supposed to arrive from other countries, learn English, begin intermarrying with those already here, and become, well, American. The distinction between the two political identities, one Republican, the other Democratic, that the Finkel-stein Box delineates may not be as sharp as the distinction between the two cultural identities that I encountered in Switzerland. But it’s still a lot sharper than any distinction I’d ever thought existed in the United States.
Studying the Finkelstein Box, I noticed that it carved its way through the middle of California. Like the rest of the California coast, the San Francisco peninsula, which includes Silicon Valley, where I live, lay outside the box. Most of the towns of the central valley lay inside it. Why? What could be so different about the coast and the central valley? I decided to choose one town inside the box, then pay it a visit. My finger fell on Fresno.
TO FAR FRESNO
Journal entry:
As I drove south down the San Francisco peninsula, I listened, as is my habit, to the warm, comforting tones of Bob Edwards on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition. Then, going up through the Pacheco Pass over the Diablo Mountains, I lost the signal. When I came down into the central valley and hit the scan button, the radio made its way through half a dozen country music stations before it found a grainy NPR signal. Bob Edwards’s voice came and went, trading places with static. Finally I gave up, listening to Garth Brooks instead.
Country music. How did Finkelstein know?
Making the three-hour drive to Fresno, I kept a running list of first impressions, noting the ways the central valley differed from the San Francisco peninsula, as if I were a tourist, which, come to think of it, I was. First I noticed the difference in radio stations that I commented on in my journal. Then I noticed the difference in cars. On the peninsula, the preferred vehicles are BMWs, Mercedes-Benzes, Jaguars, and other prestigious foreign makes—even the odd Rolls-Royce shows up from time to time, wallowing down University Avenue in Palo Alto or nosing into a parking place at the Stanford Shopping Center. But after the turnoff for Route Five, the interstate to Los Angeles, foreign cars in the central valley all but disappeared, replaced by endless Fords, Chevrolets, Dodges, Buicks, and Oldsmobiles. The few luxury cars that I spotted were almost without exception big Cadillacs or fat Lincoln Town Cars, the kinds of cars that retired farmers buy, as if to compensate their bodies after years spent in the seats of tractors. For several miles I found myself stuck behind a pickup truck. Something about the truck seemed unusual. When a straw broke free from one of the bales of hay the truck was hauling, smacking against my windshield, I realized what it was. The truck in front of me was the first pickup I’d seen in months that was being used for a purpose other than show.
The most striking difference between the San Francisco peninsula and the central valley proved so all-encompassing that it took a while to sink in. Back in Silicon Valley, people made money. At least that’s the way I always thought of it. I knew, of course, that what they really made was computer equipment and, increasingly, software. But since so many people in Silicon Valley labored all day without ever making anything you could hold in your hands—true, you could hold a floppy disk containing the software in your hands, but all you were holding was the disk, not the software, not it—they might as well have been alchemists, transforming thoughts in their minds directly into money in their bank accounts. In the central valley, people didn’t make money. They grew food. For mile upon mile, I found myself passing orchards, vineyards, and fields of rice, cotton, and alfalfa. Granted, the agriculture that takes place in the central valley is among the most sophisticated on earth—Fresno County itself produces more than $3 billion a year in agricultural goods, more, as far as I can discover, than any other county in the nation. But driving through the central valley still felt appealingly simple and basic. All you had to do to see how people made their living was look out the window. I might as well have been touring Kansas. Before long I noticed a bumper sticker on a Lincoln Town Car that almost persuaded me I was. “Live Better,” the bumper sticker said. “Vote Republican.”
In Silicon Valley, of course, most voters would have found the bumper sticker ridiculous. Up and down Silicon Valley, from San Jose in the south to Burlingame in the north, city councilmen and women are predominantly Democratic. Silicon Valley is represented in the state assembly by five Democrats and just one Republican and in the state senate by three Democrats. Of the four members of Congress who represent Silicon Valley, three, Tom Lantos, Anna Eshoo, and Zoe Lofgren, are Democrats, while the fourth, Tom Campbell, is by any reckoning one of the three or four most liberal Republicans in the House. But in Fresno, following the advice on the bumper sticker and voting Republican amounts to a way of life. Although Fresno is represented in the state senate by a Democrat—it lies on the edge of a huge senate district, drawn to include large numbers of Democrats—it is represented in the state assembly by a Republican. The member of Congress who represents most of Fresno, George Radonovich, is a Republican so conservative that he supported the 1995 government shutdown even though it closed Yosemite National Park, a large portion of which lies in his district, and so popular that in 1998 he ran for reelection unopposed. The mayor of Fresno, Jim Patterson, is a Republican so conservative that before entering politics he made his living as a radio evangelist. By the time I reached the outskirts of Fresno I had counted another half dozen pro-Republican bumper stickers—in six years on the San Francisco peninsula, the only bumper sticker I could recall using the word “Republican” said “Friends Don’t Let Friends Vote Republican”—then, near the city limits, I came upon an enormous billboard proclaiming, “Democrats Promote Immoral Living.” When I tell you the billboard would have been unimaginable in Silicon Valley, I mean that literally. I spent the next several minutes trying to imagine it. I couldn’t.
When I reached the city I missed my exit, inadvertently giving myself two chances to look over downtown Fresno, once driving south before I figured out my mistake, once backtracking north. From both directions downtown looked almost empty. Rising from the bare streets rose several blocks of modest brick and stone structures that probably dated from the early years of the twentieth century, a couple of boxlike office towers (lawyers and accountants have to have their offices somewhere), and a single modern building, pyramidal, glass-clad, and gleaming in the sun, that I later learned was Fresno’s city hall and one attempt at urban renewal. After backtracking, I got off the interstate onto Shaw Avenue. Shaw Avenue looked as full of traffic as downtown had looked empty. For miles, it took me past shopping malls, schools, fast-food restaurants, and video stores. The scene was one of prosperous suburbia. I turned left onto Fresno Street. At the intersection of Fresno and Barstow, I reached my destination, Hope Lutheran Church.
Pastor Donald Bentz, the father of a Stanford grad who once worked for me, introduced me to the three members of his congregation, each a Republican, that he had asked to join us for coffee in the church hall. One was a dentist. Another was a small businessman. The third was a retired schoolteacher, now serving, according to the card that she handed across the table, as the “Program Coordinator for the Republican Central Committee of Fresno County.” We spent a couple of hours talking about politics. All three wanted lower taxes and a stronger national defense. All three were disgusted with President Clinton. One considered Steve Forbes the best Republican candidate for president; two preferred George W. Bush. While we talked, I kept having a strange sensation. I seemed to recognize these people. I knew their opinions. I even felt comfortable with the cadences of their speech. Then it struck me. I had grown up with them.
Not with these very people,
of course. But with people so much like them—white, Protestant, decent, hardworking—that I might just as easily have been sharing a cup of coffee with the dentist, the small businessman, and the retired schoolteacher in the hall of First Congregational Church in Binghamton, New York, as in the hall of Hope Lutheran Church in Fresno, California. Once I thought of them, the parallels between Fresno and my hometown seemed so obvious that I was surprised they hadn’t occurred to me sooner.
Both Fresno and my hometown were Republican, of course. But that seemed almost the least of it. Like Fresno, the group of communities in which I grew up, the Triple Cities, were modest in size. (The population of Fresno is about 360,000. The population of the Triple Cities—a cluster of towns made up of Binghamton, Johnson City, Endicott, and a couple of suburbs, including Vestal, where we lived—was, when I was growing up, about 250,000.) The Triple Cities may have been a manufacturing rather than an agricultural center, but they felt the same as Fresno in at least two regards. One was that the Triple Cities were close to the land. From downtown Binghamton you could drive fifteen minutes in any direction, pull over, roll down your window, and hear a dairy cow moo. The other was that people in the Triple Cities earned their living by making objects you could see and touch. When I was little, the principal employer was the Endicott-Johnson Shoe Company. During the summers, when workers opened the windows, you could watch men stripped to the waist hauling stacks of hides around the factory floor. By the time I was a teenager, the dominant concern was IBM. I know that name may bring to mind images of high technology. But in those days IBM was manufacturing the first mainframes—big, bulky machines with moving parts—and the plants in which it did so bore a lot more resemblance to the old E.-J. shoe factories than to the pristine corporate campuses of Silicon Valley.
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