The image shimmered on my television set, and I knew I was supposed to be scared, very scared. But for some reason, I did not quake or tremble at the specter of “San Francisco Liberal Nancy Pelosi” as the next speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. This total lack of the proper reaction had me worried, so I called my favorite inside source, Ananias Ziegler, media relations director of the Committee That Really Runs America.
He soothed my worries about not being scared. “We were just trying to define her as a national figure before anybody else did,” he said, “and you know how campaigns go.”
He shifted the subject. “How are things out there in Azularado?” he asked. It took me a second to catch his wordplay, and I explained that even if Democrats now controlled the governor’s office as well as both houses of the legislature and a majority of the congressional delegation, there had been no talk of changing the state’s name from Red to Blue in any language.
“You know, we hadn’t been paying much attention to your part of the country until pretty late in the game,” Ziegler explained, “and so I’m still not sure what happened. Democratic governors all the way from Montana to New Mexico and Arizona, an organic grain farmer defeating an incumbent senator in Montana, damn near losing the Wyoming congressional seat and one in New Mexico. Colorado’s House delegation going from 5-2 Republican to 4-3 Democrat in just four years, and it came close to going 5-2.”
“Don’t tell me you were clueless,” I said, pushing hard. “Democratic National Chairman Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy wasn’t exactly a classified document.”
Ziegler sighed. “That’s true. But we never took it seriously. I mean, after his big Iowa whoop in 2004, who was going to take Dean seriously about anything?”
“I see your point,” I said. “But couldn’t you see what was happening on the ground?”
“We weren’t looking that hard,” Ziegler conceded. “We had the Democrats pegged as a party of gun-taking coastal elites. We figured we could take the Mountain West for granted. Look how well President Bush did there in 2000 and 2004.”
“So until 2006 we were ignored by one party, and taken for granted by the other,” I agreed. “Hardly a recipe for a happy region.”
Ziegler chuckled. “You’re right about that. We tried to nationalize the mid-term election by trying to convince people that if they don’t vote the right way, they’re supporting the terrorists. It worked before.”
“So why didn’t it work this time?” I inquired.
“Some of you folks have a strong libertarian streak,” Ziegler replied. “And you figure that the Iraqi insurgency is less of a threat to our Constitution and Bill of Rights than a president who claims the right to detain people anywhere in the world and hold them indefinitely.”
“There are quite a few people around here who think that way,” I agreed. “And I also noticed that President Bush appeared in more Democratic ads than Republican ones.”
Ziegler harrumphed. “I don’t think we need to get into that. Our bigger problem is that we’re getting boxed in, the way the Democrats were.”
“How so?” I asked.
“We had them tied to the Pacific Coast and the Northeast and the Great Lakes states, more or less,” Ziegler said. “We could count on the rest. But now we’re basically a Southern party. The place we’re strongest is the old Confederacy.”
“So the party of Abraham Lincoln is now the party of Strom Thurmond?” I asked.
“At the moment,” Ziegler conceded. “So we’ve got a big challenge in front of us out there in your big square states. You believe in a limited frugal government, but for some reason, you’ve quit believing that the Republican Party will deliver that.”
Ed Quillen of Salida (ed@cozine.com) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
