Who'd have thought the Democratic politician to best deal with Southern resentment and insecurity might be...Hillary?
Upstate New York, the state's Republican stronghold, is an area accustomed to being neglected in favor of the more populous downstate region. But Clinton has paid it special attention.
She once persuaded dozens of New York City chefs, restaurant owners and wine retailers to join her on a bus tour of upstate wineries and enjoy a four-course meal featuring New York produce.
She recruited investment bankers and the head of EBay to help arrange for rural small-business owners to learn how to use the online auction site to sell their products. She instituted an annual "farm day" reception in Washington to display the state's produce, including apples, oysters and wine.
Not bad. Very smart, actually. And pretty damn applicable. Hillary, by virtue of being a walking spotlight whose New York tenure was assumed to be the simple result of an affection for the Upper West Side, has turned her wattage on Manhattan's little-noticed younger brother, and reaped all the outsized affection that move makes. It's the glamorous girlfriend lavishing attention on the sullen 12-year old at Thanksgiving -- the kid's going to love her for it. And that seems to be exactly what's happened in upstate New York, where her approval ratings have gone from 27% to 49%.
But my interest, living on the absolute opposite end of the nation as I do, isn't in what Hillary has done to stroke Poughkeepsie's ego, but how that'll help her lay it on thick in North Carolina. What Hillary's doing reveals a very specific epiphany, namely, that much of this country feels outshined by the glamor of a few small spots, and the urban/rural voting divide is partially an outgrowth of rural resentment towards urban primacy. Hillary, it seems, gets that insecurity, and she's been testing out ways to address it. Not Republican ways, which demagogue urban areas and rail against Hollywood values, but integration techniques, where her "big-city" connections are leveraged to 1) take seriously the off-highway areas they'd never otherwise visit and 2) economically benefit them. That's not an ego massage, that's a first step towards rapprochement.
Smart stuff, and more so considering that the electoral map is endless red-filling sandwiched between two pita-thin slices of blue. If Hillary can rely on her innate liberal popularity to attract the coastal areas and use her experience with upstate New York to lavish attention on the Midwest and upper South, she could make for a very interesting and unexpected candidate indeed.
