November 5, 2004

Support for the concept of an emerging Democratic majority? From Amanda Paulson in the Christian Science Monitor:

Henry Kranz used to consider himself the Alex Keaton of his West Side Chicago family, the only Republican in a house full of Democrats. His first time at the ballot box, he voted for Republican Dick Ogilvie for governor.

Today, Mr. Kranz is more Toby Ziegler of “West Wing” than the Keaton character portrayed by Michael J. Fox. He and his wife joke about being “Swedish socialists” when they discuss issues like high CEO salaries. His top concern is healthcare, and he’s a confirmed pacifist.

Still, Kranz – who used to run a small press and sponsor poetry readings, and now works with nonprofits to encourage charitable giving – doesn’t think all the change has been his. Back when he voted for Ogilvie, it was because he valued the idea of “treading lightly on individual freedoms.” It’s a notion he still agrees with, but which he thinks the Republican Party has drifted from. He abhors proselytizing and has “real trouble with being my brother’s keeper.”

While there’s no archetypal Illinois voter, Kranz’s political journey is in some ways emblematic of the direction his state has gone. For decades, it was the classic swing state, voting for the winning presidential candidate 22 of 25 times in the 20th century. It went for Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Gerald Ford. From 1976 to 2002, Democratic mayors in Chicago were balanced by GOP governors in Springfield.

But lately, the state has grown steadily more Democratic and is no longer considered in contention in presidential politics. Voters went for Al Gore over George Bush by a surprising 12-point margin in 2000. Now, it’s just one more US state that has left the middle ground, the Midwest’s lone blue state in a Thomas Hart Benton landscape of purple and red.

A variety of factors is propelling the shift, everything from the Paul Simon effect – a reference to the popular late Democratic senator, elected by typically conservative downstate voters – to the lack of a Republican presence in Chicago, where just 1 out of 50 aldermen is from the GOP.

But perhaps most important, there’s the steady trend leftward in the suburbs. Indeed, for much of the past century, Illinois was the prototypical swing state because of the ring of humanity around Chicago. While the Democrats dominated in urban Chicago and the Republicans downstate, the suburbs ended up playing referee. They still do, but with rising numbers of Democrats in what were once Republican strongholds.

“The mix has stayed pretty much the same in the city and downstate, but in the suburbs it’s gone from being overwhelmingly Republican to being more competitive,” says Dick Simpson, a political scientist at University of Illinois-Chicago and a former Chicago alderman.

The Ultimate Campaign Simulation Game

The city, too, has been changing. Long a manufacturing hub, the City of Big Shoulders now has twice as many professionals and technicians as production workers. Instead of being a big brother to Kansas City or Detroit, Chicago now has a service-sector cosmopolitanism that makes it the heartland’s biggest answer to coastal cities like San Francisco. Ruy Teixeira, coauthor of “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” calls greater Chicago an “ideopolis” – a metropolitan hub with culture and diversity, where fewer people now pack meat and more practice law or perform in theaters. An economy oriented toward the production of ideas “tends to be fairly liberal, especially on social issues,” he adds. Now “those kind of voters really set the tone in a lot of the suburbs.”

Consider Monica Frigo, a young clerk who’s lived in suburban Park Ridge for 19 years. She remembers when her family was the only one in her neighborhood with a Clinton/Gore sign out front. Now, Democrats “are starting to come out of the woodwork,” she says, handing out Kerry/Edwards stickers at a town art fair. Plenty of residents are taking her stickers, including ones that say: “Republicans for Kerry.”

Many inner-ring suburbs, within Cook County, have become Democratic. But even in farther reaches such as DuPage County, which has sent very conservative Congressman Henry Hyde to the US House since 1975, Democrats are starting to have a presence. Two Republican house seats in the suburbs, Mr. Hyde’s and Phil Crane’s, are considered in contention this fall.

In Cook County – where those inner-ring suburbs are concentrated – the trend is even more extreme. In 1996, the suburbs accounted for just 25 percent of the Cook County Democratic primary vote. By 2004, it was 37 percent. The upshot: Al Gore enjoyed a stunning 40 percentage point spread over George W. Bush in Cook County. Four decades earlier, in another tightly fought race, John F. Kennedy’s margin over Richard Nixon there was 9 points.

Demographic change accounts for part of the shift, with newer arrivals including Hispanic immigrants, middle-class workers, and professionals from more liberal states. But many moderate Illinois voters have also become increasingly disenchanted with a Republican Party they see moving away from them on social issues. The result is an emerging Democratic bloc that is often fiscally conservative – antitax, for instance – but culturally more liberal.

“As the national Republican Party has moved farther to the right, especially on issues like choice and guns…. They have lost many mainstream Republicans who are turned off by that kind of position,” says Michael Mezey, a political scientist at De Paul University in Chicago.

Luvie Myers is a case in point. She’s the mother of three teenagers, the wife of a consultant, who’s lived most of her life in Winnetka, an upscale suburb on Chicago’s North Shore. Throughout the 1980s, Ms. Myers was a Republican, voting twice for Reagan and for the first President Bush. “He was a class act. Patrician, sensible, educated, very experienced in government – a lot like someone who would live in Winnetka,” she says.

But she feels differently about Bush’s son, and abhors the current Republican Party. The turning point for her was the rise of the culture wars. “In the 1980s, those conservative people who spent all their time telling you how to live your life were kind of on the fringe,” she says. “Now you feel like the Republican platform has espoused these ideas that to me are institutionalized bigotry. I can’t stand it.”

How people feel about abortion and gay marriage has become a sort of litmus test, she says, and she has a harder and harder time relating to those people who come down on the opposite side of the debate.



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"Grab the broom of anger and drive off the beast of fear." ~ Zora Neale Hurston

"Life can be wildly tragic at times, and I've had my share. But whatever happens to you, you have to keep a slightly comic attitude. In the final analysis, you have got to not forget to laugh." ~ Katharine Hepburn

"A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song." ~ Maya Angelou

"If only we'd stop trying to be happy we'd have a pretty good time." ~ Edith Wharton

"Mistakes are the dues one pays for a full life." ~ Sophia Loren

"For most of history, Anonymous was a woman." ~ Virginia Woolf

"Woman must not be awed by that which has been built up around her; she must reverence that woman in her which struggles for expression." ~ Margaret Sanger

"Probably, hanging onto the past brings more destruction than any other single cause. ...It's the Muslim fundamentalists who worship the past and ignore the reformist spirit with which Muhammad viewed women. It's the backward-looking Christian literalists who interpret religious teachings in a way that consolidates their power..." ~ Gloria Steinem

"'Inherent differences' between men and women, we have come to appreciate, remain cause for celebration, but not for denigration of the members of either sex or for artificial constraints on an individual's opportunity." ~ Ruth Bader Ginsberg

"Feminism is and always has been about women acting in the world as full-fledged citizens, as real participants in the world of ideas and policy and history." ~ Susan Faludi

"As a woman, I have no country. As a woman, my country is the world." ~ Virginia Woolf

"...remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors... If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation." ~ Abigail Adams

"Bloody treason, murderous act
Not by women were designed.
Bells o'erthrown nor churches sacked
Speak not ill of womenkind."
~ Gearoid Iarla Fitzgerald

"We are coming down from our pedestal and up from the laundry room. We want an equal share in government and we mean to get it." ~ Bella Abzug

"Too often the great decisions are originated and given form in bodies made up wholly of men, or so completely dominated by them that whatever of special value women have to offer is shunted aside without expression." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

"There cannot be true democracy unless women's voices are heard. There cannot be true democracy unless women are given the opportunity to take responsibility for their own lives." ~ Hillary Rodham Clinton

"If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse gift will find a fitting place." ~ Margaret Mead

"Of my two 'handicaps' being female put more obstacles in my path than being black." ~ Shirley Chisholm

"Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company?" ~ Zora Neale Hurston

Nature

"Eventually, all things merge into one; and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs..." ~ Norman Maclean

"There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example - where had they gone?... It was a spring without voices." ~ Rachel Carson

"If you have men who will exclude any of God's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men." ~ St. Francis of Assisi

"I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men." ~ Leonardo Da Vinci

"God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand straining, leveling tempests and floods; but He cannot save them from fools." ~ John Muir

"The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders." ~ Edward Abbey

"We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it... Our delight in the sunshine on the deep-bladed grass to-day might be no more than the faint perception of wearied souls, if it were not for the sunshine and the grass in the far-off years which still live in us, and transform our perception into love." ~ George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)

"Those who dwell, as scientists or laymen, among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life." ~ Rachel Carson

"When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world." ~ John Muir

Freedom

"The will of the people is the only legitimate foundation of any government, and to protect its free expression should be our first object." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"A nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood of ideas in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people." ~ John F. Kennedy

"I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." ~ James Madison

"When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion." ~ C. P. Snow

"Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth." ~ Albert Einstein

"Necessity is the plea of every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves." ~ William Pitt

"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." ~ Benjamin Franklin

"No matter how big a nation is, it is no stronger than its weakest people, and as long as you keep a person down, some part of you has to be down there to hold him down, so it means you cannot soar as you might otherwise." ~ Marian Anderson

Truth

"Rules are not necessarily sacred, principles are." ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt

"If somebody tells you you ought to quit, it's because they're afraid you won't." ~ Bill Clinton

"The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice." ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance." ~ Robert F. Kennedy

"I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. That is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant." ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye." ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery

"Find things that shine and move toward them." ~ Mia Farrow

"The first question which the priest and the Levite asked was: If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me? But the good Samaritan reversed the question: If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?" ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Abuse of Power

"We can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth in a few hands, but we can't have both." ~ Louis Brandeis

"Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things." ~ Russell Baker

"O, it is excellent to have a giant's strength; But it is tyrannous to use it like a giant." ~ William Shakespeare

"I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be." ~ Thomas Jefferson

Violence

"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it." ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

"When men talk about defense, they always claim to be protecting women and children, but they never ask the women and children what they think." ~ Patricia Schroeder

"I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity." ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

"What difference does it make to the dead whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?" ~ Mohandas Gandhi

"Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind... War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today." ~ John F. Kennedy

"Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God." ~ Jesus

"Every gun that is fired, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children." ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

"When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?" ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

"I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent." ~ Mohandas Gandhi

"The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding; it seeks to annihilate rather than convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love. It destroys community and makes brotherhood impossible. It leaves society in monologue rather than dialogue. Violence ends by defeating itself. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers." ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Hypocrisy

"And thus I clothe my naked villany with odd old ends stol'n forth of holy writ, and seem a saint when most I play the devil." ~ William Shakespeare

"And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing... in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men... But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret..." ~ Jesus

"Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man & his god, ... legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"Persecution is not an original feature in any religion, but it is always the strongly marked feature of all religions established by law." ~ Thomas Paine

"I believe a woman has a right to an abortion. That's a decision that's up to the pregnant woman, not up to the pope or some do-gooders or the Religious Right.... There is no place in this country for practicing religion in politics." ~ Barry Goldwater

"Being pro-choice is trusting the individual to make the right decision for herself and her family, and not entrusting that decision to anyone wearing the authority of government in any regard." ~ Hllary Rodham Clinton

Politics

"I never was surer of my position that no self-respecting woman should wish or work for the success of a party that ignores her political rights." ~ Susan B. Anthony "In America, anybody can be president. That's one of the risks you take." ~ Adlai Stevenson

"On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron." ~ H.L. Mencken

"All political movements are like this - we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies. With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority. There's oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility." ~ Doris Lessing

Pretended Patriotism

"Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism." ~ George Washington

"Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism - how passionately I hate them!" ~ Albert Einstein

"True patriotism hates injustice in its own land more than anywhere else." ~ Clarence Darrow

"When a whole nation is roaring Patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and purity of its heart." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them." ~ George Orwell

"To (say) that we are to stand by the president right or wrong is not only unpatriotic and servile, but it's morally treasonable to the American public." ~ Theodore Roosevelt
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