KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- With nearly 450,000 residents, Kansas City is Missouri's largest locality. It anchors this metropolitan area of 1.8 million people. But this traditional Democratic stronghold shares a state line with neighboring Kansas, a Republican powerhouse. Kansas City is also severed by the Missouri River, making north shore residents feel like unwelcome kin.
Speaking of outsiders, the growing African American and Hispanic populations here often feel excluded from the mainstream. This community has never effectively dealt with the prickly issue of race and difference. Kansas Citians are just too darned polite.
But not now.
Not after nearly four years of George W. Bush as president. Politics has been muscling into normally polite gatherings, uniting folks on ousting Bush.
On the evening of January 13, I joined a group of about two dozen people for a meeting of the Diversity Coalition, which was started several years ago by a retired optometrist named David Shapiro. At 93, he remembers being among the U.S. troops who liberated Jews and others from the Dachau concentration camp. He says he still has nightmares about it. The experience inspired him to become involved in the civil-rights movement and, later, to form the Diversity Coalition.
He calls about 100 people on a regular basis, inviting them to the meetings. He pulls many of the names from the list of those who write letters to the editor in the newspaper. (He looks up the phone numbers in the phone book.)
He asks me to facilitate the sessions, which I have been doing for years now. He jokes that he will increase my salary, adding another zero to the zero figure that he pays me to keep the meetings going.
On that cold January evening, we gathered in a converted classroom at Boone Elementary School in south Kansas City. We pulled our chairs around so we could see one another -- a group of white, black, Jewish, Asian, and Native Americans, ranging from senior citizens to teenagers.
We watched a 60 Minutes interview with former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill. People were animated during the discussion afterward, leaning into the large circle to speak, listening and pouncing when the rare opportunity of split-second silence arose for others to share more thoughts.
Over the months, the members of the group have favored different candidates. John Kerry and Dennis Kucinich have been top choices. The people who are the most proud to call themselves liberals back Kucinich all the way, and they wish Republicans hadn't effectively turned ``liberal'' into such a dirty word over the past 30 years.
The members don't seem to think much of Al Sharpton, Wesley Clark, and Joe Lieberman. Howard Dean and Dick Gephardt never moved the needle for them, either. That was despite the press -- mesmerized by Dean's money, organization, and feet-on-the street and by Gephardt's Missouri ties -- anointing those two the front-runners at different times.
Not surprisingly, the members of this group have little regard for the media. Too many newspapers, television stations, and radio stations are controlled by too few owners. The press has woefully failed our democracy in not telling how the Democratic candidates' messages are resonating with real people who have great fears about the future under Bush and are hurting in the heartland. Some of the men in our group have talked about the fact that so many folks in rural Missouri still have Bush-Cheney bumper stickers on their beat-up pickup trucks.
The folks in our group blame the rural voters' Republican leanings and the labeling of Democrats as the party against guns and favoring blacks, Hispanics, women, and gays. They also blame the media for carrying that message to America without the questions that a good watchdog, a truly free press, should ask.
People at the meetings have said the shared pain in America should cause folks to unite to seek top-to-bottom changes in the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives in November. They say Republican domination and the growing divide between the haves and have-nots isn't sustainable. Our country is being turned back into something like what it was circa 1920s, and that era didn't end well.
These folks -- and other Missourians -- now have a chance to make their voices heard. People in this state have a history of picking the right candidate in presidential elections. And the future of America could be decided Tuesday when voters go to the polls in the Democratic presidential primary. The winner, after all, bags this state's 74 delegates.
Everybody is wondering which Democratic contender has the mythical right stuff to beat Bush. The buzz has an Excalibur-like quality to it. Pulling the Democrats out of inaction, renewing the power of the party, and then wielding it to take the White House are all that matters. The hopes for a new champion seem almost Kennedy-esque, pulled from a period in American history when Americans dreamed of possibilities. These days, Senators Kerry and John Edwards -- and their strong showings in Iowa and New Hampshire -- make then seem like the Democrats' best Excalibur hope to defeat Bush.
People in Missouri want a new champion who will give them a better future. Right now they're tired of feeling afraid, but they're no longer afraid -- or too polite -- to say so.
Lewis W. Diuguid serves on the editorial board of The Kansas City Star. He has won several awards, including the 2000 Missouri Honor Medal for Distinguished Service in Journalism.
