THE RACE for president has led many to believe that the nation has hopelessly divided itself. The label "Massachusetts liberal" alone can toss a candidate out of competition in 15 states. The other candidate has even more bashers. A country like this has few shared principles and little hope of coming together.
Pundits and demographers have crafted a dramatic mythology of total division in the past few years. The exaggeration has been repeated so many times that many Americans believe the country has split itself intractably down the middle. Entire states have closed their minds. The whole country is marked solid red or solid blue, and if we're lucky, we'll avoid a civil war.
Certainly, President Bush and his policies have proved divisive. Completely new national challenges have forced voters to draw solutions from ideology instead of previous experience. But this race's divisionist rhetoric and attack geography distort the larger picture. On a holistic level, our factions and regions do not stand as far apart as many commentators would suggest. In fact, voters everywhere demonstrate open-mindedness. Even in the bluest states, Republican ideas can still win the day, and vice versa.
In the division mythology, certain states will never endorse certain political positions or elect the candidates that espouse them. Specifically, most of the Northeast and Northwest have written off Republicans, and much of the South has closed the door to Democrats. The division rhetoric can become so intense that voters forget that even in states considered "solid" for one party or the other, the loser will often win 40 percent of the votes -- a significant share.
Indeed, the fact that a state has not warmed to a particular national candidate does not mean it will never cozy up to a party's ideas.
Many will assume that the states already in the Kerry column have an allergy to conservatism and would never elect a Republican. Pundits write off New York, Vermont, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Maryland, Hawaii and California as states that have fully rejected conservative ideas. But all those states have Republican governors. And while they may not all hail from the same faction of the GOP as President Bush, their elections all show that those electorates -- supposedly dyed blue in the wool -- can vote for parts of Republican ideology.
Similarly, Democrats control governors' mansions in such solidly pro-Bush states as Oklahoma, Kansas, Indiana, North Carolina, Wyoming and Virginia (and until recently, Kentucky and Mississippi). This year, Democratic candidates for governor are running neck-and-neck with Republicans in two Bush bastions, Montana and Utah.
The gubernatorial races alone prove that Americans have more political imagination than the division rhetoric would have voters believe. And while many claim that a Massachusetts liberal like Kerry could never win in states like North Carolina, South Carolina, Alaska and Oklahoma, Senate candidates who champion many of his ideas are doing just fine there.
In all those red states, Democrats are running solid campaigns in close races. Though (like all politicians) they break with their party line at points, all those Senate candidates highlight traditional Democratic issues like health care, education and Social Security -- ones John Kerry talks about in his own campaign.
But none of those candidates is going to this week's Democratic convention. They openly say that though they share plenty of positions with the presumptive Democratic nominee, perceived closeness to Kerry could poison their campaigns at home.
As these examples show, the stigma attached to attack geography has become so universally assumed that campaign staffers now consider it fact. But in a more substantive sense, division myth has a harder time tabooing ideas. After all, after five Southern Democrats announced their retirement a few months ago, pundits had called the Senate for the GOP. But after looking at the numbers and political realities, they declared Democrats back in the race. Susceptibility to repeated name calling did not mean that Americans were as ideologically fixed as many had assumed.
Certainly, our nation faces new, divisive issues. An unusually divisive president has forwarded divisive solutions to them. But the rancor that understandably surrounds presidential politics has so far failed to overwhelm normal American political behavior, marked by a willingness to cross party lines. In spite of the fight for the White House, a wider look shows that Americans still bear to the center, adapt beliefs to context and cast ballots with an open mind.
That's exactly the way that one nation, indivisible would have it.
Michael Slaven is a Cavalier Daily columnist. He can be reached at mslaven@cavalierdaily.com.
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