the GOP understands (and manipulates) the national mythology

[ulysses]

better than we do.

"George Bush, the rich, coke-snorting frat boy from Connecticut" would never have worked politically. Put the exact same specimen in Texas for a few years and associate him with oil, baseball and the death penalty? He's golden. The fact that he's purely a creature of the political machine is no matter. Ditto the drugs and the high-priced schooling. The money is now a positive. He owns a ranch.

When I was in school in Santa Fe, I was amazed for a while that the streets in the barrio were immaculate and well-paved while the ritzier addresses on the other side of town were located on, essentially, burro trails. Then someone pointed out to me that what folks were willing to pay for was the "feel" of "old Santa Fe". Rustica generica.

Never underestimate the power of image. In America, we're raised to believe that we're, deep down, cowboys. Ronald Reagan understood that better than anyone, and it was a lesson not lost on Bush the Younger, much as his father couldn't escape his essential "CIA wonk" being.

The nifty thing is that the west, in addition to being the cradle of this mythology, is also accessible to the left. There is a long, although now languishing, tradition of economic populism in flyover country (think Woody Guthrie, Jim Hightower) that the south doesn't have.

I think that economics wins over social wedge issues there if we make it so. I think the west is our future. We need to quit fighting the ghost of Nixon down here in the south and deliver a progressive message straight to the geographic middle of the country.