It's My Party (23 page)

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.

The parallels between the Triple Cities and Fresno extended into the details. People in the Triple Cities, like people in
Fresno, drove American cars and listened to country music—I can still remember my piano teacher’s irritation when the classical
radio station in town switched to an all-country format. Downtown Binghamton even looked like downtown Fresno. It comprised
a few blocks of brick and stone structures that dated from the early years of the twentieth century, a couple of modest office
towers, and a modern government complex that represented the city’s principal attempt at urban renewal after a mall opened
on the edge of town, drawing all the retail business out of town with it.

Here I was in Fresno, California, a city in which I had never set foot, and I felt, if not exactly at home—I had gotten lost
coming in, after all—then certainly more comfortable and at ease than I had ever felt on the San Francisco peninsula, where
I had lived for six years. Now, I like the San Francisco peninsula. Silicon Valley is endlessly fascinating. But whereas I
enjoy the people I meet there, the people I was meeting in Fresno were people I
knew
. How could this have happened?

“It’s not just party membership that the box tracks,” Arthur Finkelstein told me over the telephone the day after I visited
Fresno. “It’s psychographics.”

“Psychographics” is a term of art used in the disciplines, if they may be called that, of advertising and marketing. It describes
the interrelated attitudes, values, lifestyles, opinions, demographics, and so on that lead people to buy one product instead
of another. If you are a large food corporation, for example, you might develop psychographic research showing that people
who live in cities, listen to classical music, and watch soap operas tend to purchase whole wheat bread instead of white.
Arthur Finkelstein has applied psychographics to politics. Inside the Finkelstein Box, he has discovered, lie people with
a certain set of characteristics. They tend to live in regions dominated by towns and medium-sized cities rather than by large
urban centers. They are for the most part white and Protestant. They tend to go to church regularly, to drive American cars,
to listen to country music—and to vote Republican. I may think pronounced regional cultures better suited to Europe than to
the United States, but there is a pronounced regional culture inside the Finkelstein Box all the same. I reflected that culture
myself. These days the Triple Cities lie outside the Finkelstein Box. But when I was growing up there a quarter of a century
ago, Arthur Finkelstein assured me, my hometown lay inside the box. Hence the reason Fresno seemed so familiar. In driving
there, I had returned to the country I knew in my youth: the heartland.

“But why?” I asked Finkelstein. “Why should listening to country music, driving American cars, and living in medium-sized
towns all go with voting Republican?” Finkelstein gave me the reply of an honest man. “I don’t know,” he said. “They just
do.”

They just do.

Here we find ourselves once more confronting the lesson that David Brady took such glee in teaching me. When he and I talked
over the history of the Republican Party, you will recall, David insisted that people belong to political parties for all
sorts of reasons, a lot of which don’t have anything to do with politics. Often, David argued, people inherit their party
affiliation right along with their ancestry and religion. Arthur Finkelstein makes an argument that is related but distinct
enough to stand on its own. Party affiliation, Finkelstein claims, represents one more element in the constellation of characteristics
with which a person expresses his culture. People in Rougemont, Switzerland, speak French, attend Catholic churches, and eat
Gruyère cheese. People in the Finkelstein Box drive Fords and Chevrolets, listen to Garth Brooks, and vote Republican.

* * *

As the party on the inside of the Finkelstein Box, the GOP is the party of the great American interior. As far as it goes,
that sounds reassuring. Every party needs a political base. The heartland would seem a good one. Yet there is a problem here.
Cultures are durable. While living just walking distance apart, the people of Rougemont and Saanen, Switzerland, have maintained
their separate identities for centuries. Thus if the GOP represents the culture of the heartland, then those who belong to
a different culture—those, that is, whose psychographics place them outside the Finkelstein Box—will persistently elude it.

To some extent the Republican Party has already learned to live with this situation. The GOP makes do without the support
of the media—you will notice that the major media centers, New York, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles, all lie outside the
box. And Republicans have learned to win at least occasional support from white Catholics, heavy concentrations of whom lie
outside the box, in the Northeast and upper Midwest.

Yet one group outside the box has the GOP alarmed.

“I noticed that there are odd slivers of certain states lying outside the box,” I said when I spoke to Arthur Finkelstein.
“What’s going on with the southern tip of Florida and the southern edges of Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas?”

“Hispanics,” Finkelstein replied. “Those are all places where there are lots of Hispanics, and Hispanics are definitely outside
the box.”

The difficulty that Hispanics pose for the Republican Party has all the inescapability of a mathematical proposition. It can
be stated in just four points.

Point one: The Hispanic population is growing more quickly than the population as a whole—since 1990, Hispanics have increased
their numbers by 38 percent, rising to 31 million, while other Americans have increased their numbers by just 9 percent. By
2005, Hispanics will make up 14 percent of the population, passing African-Americans, who make up 13 percent, as the nation’s
largest minority. Then, by the middle of the twenty-first century, a date that my children will see even if I do not, Hispanics
will account for a full one quarter of the population.

Point two: Hispanics vote Democratic. For the last two decades, Hispanics have consistently given Democrats between 65 and
75 percent of their vote. Some Hispanics, notably Cubans, vote Republican, but they make up only a small proportion of the
Hispanic whole. Even when Hispanics live inside the Finkelstein Box—300,000 live in Fresno County—they occupy, so to speak,
a box within the box, voting Democratic. It is Hispanics, for example, who ensure that Fresno is represented in the state
senate by a Democrat.

Point three: During the 1980s the Republican Party achieved rough electoral parity with the Democratic Party for the first
time in half a century. If the GOP cannot persuade a sizable proportion of Hispanics to become Republicans, then the GOP will
revert to minority status and stay there.

Point four: Broadly speaking, as my friend John Morgan points out, the Republican Party represents the descendants of those
who arrived in America during the colonial or federalist periods. Of all the immigrant groups who came afterward—the Irish,
the Italians, the Jews, the Slavs—the GOP has failed to make even one—just one—a loyal part of the Republican constituency.
This doesn’t necessarily doom the GOP to fail with Hispanics. But it certainly isn’t encouraging.

* * *

In California, where the trend toward a large Hispanic population is further advanced than elsewhere in the nation, Republicans
have responded to Hispanics in two ways. Both bear examining. First a few words of background.