Minor Landscapes and the Geography of American Political Campaigns
Posted by Shannon
Tags: geography, Politics, rural, urbanIn any case, the entire political premise of the last eight years seems to have been one of landscape: big city dwellers near the Great Lakes and the ocean coasts simply don’t understand small town communities, and they’re embarrassingly out of touch with the everyday big skies of lonely ranchers on the plains. But while this might be true – and I don’t think it is, frankly – reversing this belief is surely even more alarming: the idea that someone whose background includes ranches and small towns should go on to lead an urban nation in an urban world seems questionable at best – and potentially dangerous in actual practice.
October 14th, 2008 at 3:29 am
Something not mentioned in the references to politicians who “‘don’t understand the west,’ which is simply cultural code for not understanding small town life and for being out of touch with the moral hardships of the American countryside” is that it can also be cultural code for being different, as in of different ethnicity or religion.
But I’m more struck by the reference to ‘World of Warcraft’ players, and such. This is not germane to Manaugh’s topic, but I wonder if within a few years politicians like Howard Dean and Barack Obama will seem hopelessly old-fashioned. Sure, they used and developed social networks, and excelled at on-line fundraising. But they used those tools to draw people in to their mainstream campaigns, and to raise money to buy TV time.
Maybe future candidates will connect, on-line or in successive meetups, with “micro” groups (although as the author points out there are more WOW players than farmers) and that’s what their campaigns will consist of. Not connecting with those groups and urging them to “take time out to join my campaign” and donate money for broadcast commercials. Rather, connecting with enough such groups and subgroups that it turns into the overt equivalent of a whisper campaign.