Blue state delusions

Steve Winn does some musing on the Red State, Blue State cultural divide in the country---you get to do so some musing if your column is called "The Culture"---before he reviews a one-man show by a 24-year-old guy named Dan Hoyle ("For Blues to Get Back on Track, Understand Florida," Feb 17, 2005). Seems that Hoyle was so traumatized by his experience campaigning in vain for Kerry last year, that he's made a show out of it. Hoyle provides an anecdote from his door-to-door campaign: a black man greeted him at the front door of a house in Florida and asked, "You say you're from California? What the fuck do you know about Florida?" Winn doesn't give us Hoyle's response.

 

Late in the campaign last year, some D5 candidates sent an urgent email message urging us to do some phone banking to voters in crucial states to get them to vote for Kerry. I got a chuckle out of this idea at the time, trying to imagine what a San Francisco progressive would say to someone in the hinterland who was leaning toward Bush: "Hi, I'm a D5 progressive in San Francisco, and I want to tell you why you should vote for John Kerry." The assumption behind the phone bank idea is that SF progressives have a special moral and political insight into the political life of the country, a dubious notion, since their grasp of what's going on in their own city seems less than firm to me.