The New President and the New West

By Jonathan Weber, 11-04-08

	Caption: President-elect Barack Obama. Photo by Emily Haas.

Here in Montana, and across the Rocky Mountain West, the election of Barack Obama represents the startling culmination of social, cultural and political changes that have been underway in this region for many years. You’ve heard a lot of this by now: the Mountain West, increasingly populated by amenity-seeking coastal migrants and Latino immigrants, and with an independent-minded electorate that’s resistant to Republican over-reaching on social issues, is no longer solid red, but rather “in play.” And if the breadth of Obama’s victory ultimately rendered the electoral votes of Colorado and New Mexico and Montana and Nevada superfluous, the deeper significance of the changes remain. 

It certainly didn’t play out the way any pundit might have predicted a couple of years ago. Obama, for starters, is hardly the “Western” candidate that many Western Democrats imagined would be the standard-bearer for the inevitable breakthrough. “You guys have a nice deal around here,” Obama said in Missoula last spring, with all the wonder of a first-time tourist. He joked about going fly fishing (a river runs through it, after all!), but it’s hard to picture him in waders.

Like almost any Chicago pol, Obama has always favored (gulp) gun control. He may be from Hawaii (more the Far East than West anyway), but he cut his teeth at Harvard Law, and found his home (both physical and spiritual) in the black (and blue) communities of the East and Midwest. He’s certainly no Brian Schweitzer, no calibrated, awe-shucks, hunter-next-door centrist who figured out how to win as a Democrat in a red state. Pragmatic and cautious, yet a man of the left at heart (as the Europeans would say), Obama has little experience or interest in many core “Western” issues. The Endangered Species Act? Water wars? Wilderness? I’ve never heard him sound so canned as when he talked of the need to preserve open space for sportsmen.

Obama, the junior Senator from Illinois, does know a bit about agriculture, and he knows a lot (maybe too much) about ethanol. He’s thought it through on energy policy, which is definitely the central economic issue for the Mountain West. He’ll probably chart a middle course on expanded oil and gas drilling, but he’s no friend of big coal, and will surely be a energetic advocate for wind and solar and geothermal and, yes, ethanol. Yet despite this area of expertise, as a “Westerner” he hardly holds a candle to John McCain, let alone Sarah Palin.

It would be easy to say that Obama swept the Western battlegrounds not because of his appeal to Westerners, but in spite of it. He swept much of the country, after all, for reasons that fundamentally defy regionalism. The economic meltdown and the war in Iraq are national, ney, global issues; disdain for President Bush and his Western crony, Dick Cheney, crosses all geographic lines. This election wasn’t about the West; Colorado and New Mexico and Montana and Nevada were just along for the ride.

But I don’t think that quite captures it. Obama’s appeal in the West actually explains a lot about his appeal in the rest of the country, and in that sense the region is very much a bellweather, and likely an important electoral battleground for many years to come.

Let’s start with race. The West is comparatively color-blind, because there are comparatively few black people, and if a lot of folks have wondered whether white voters in much of the rest of the country would ultimately pull the lever for a black man, that’s never been a big question here. Turns out, most Americans, like most Westerners, either aren’t racists, or are willing to look past skin color when it matters most.

The race issues in the West have more to do with Latino’s, and immigration, and while conventional wisdom (and past experience) suggest that Latino’s don’t like black candidates, that has always seemed somewhat counter-intuitive. The economic and political interests of racial minorities are quite aligned in most respects, and Latino support for Obama feels like the natural course of events. McCain at times has made a show of being centrist on immigration, but Latino’s - not to mention native Americans - seem to have little doubt as to who is really their friend. They stated this most emphatically in Colorado and New Mexico, and I can certainly imagine this being the front edge of a long-term national shift.

Now let’s consider religion. The Christian right has been central to the Republican coalition since 1970s, and while pockets of the Western electorate - especially Mormons in Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming - are single issue voters on abortion and gay marriage and prayer in the schools, the dogma of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell and James Dobson has always sat uneasily with libertarian-minded Western Republicans. But it sat nonetheless, until now. This, too, represents an important cultural shift towards tolerance and religious diversity in a part of the country which, compared with the coasts, is actually quite monolithic.

On energy policy, the “Drill, Baby, Drill” camp will always be well-represented in the Mountain West. And yet, the opportunities inherent in wind power, ethanol and clean coal are manifest in this region more than most places, as are the environmental costs of a one-dimensional energy policy. If Americans were as crass in their desire for cheap gas at any cost as the last eight years would lead one to believe, then George Bush and Dick Cheney would be heroes in Colorado and Montana. But, evidently, that is not the case.

Conventional political wisdom holds that America is a center-right nation, and Obama’s victory could easily be explained away as an aberration resulting directly from the financial crisis and a botched war. But with California, the Pacific Northwest, and the Northeast proving consistently that they are, at a minimum, center-left, and the old South sticking solidly to the right, that leaves the shrinking Midwest and the booming New West as the definers (if not the deciders) of the overall national political balance.

In that respect, Obama’s victory was very much about the New West - both the physical place, and the social space it has come to represent.