www.economist.com/world/na/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1280837
THE Financial Times is not normally given to puffing George Bush. But on Monday it splashed a picture on its front page that, from the White House's point of view, more than made up for all those sniffy editorials about the budget deficit. A rugged-looking president is dressed in jeans and a sweat-sodden T-shirt. In his gloved hands he carries branches that he has just lopped off trees. On his head, protecting him from the searing Texas sun, he wears a white cowboy hat. Bill Clinton spent his vacations in Martha's Vineyard, sucking up the salt air and bantering with the likes of Ted Danson. Mr Bush prefers to labour on his Texas ranch, clearing brush, chopping down trees and defying the 110-degree heat. This is a man with deep roots and solid values, the White House whispers, a man who is at home in the heartland. Mr Bush is not the first president to repair to the heartland for reinvigoration. Teddy Roosevelt liked nothing better than trekking out west, where he slipped into cowboy regalia and slaughtered wildlife. Lyndon Johnson spent his holidays on a ranch not too far (in Texas terms) from Mr Bush's place. Jimmy Carter liked to unwind on his peanut farm in Plains, Georgia (where he once did battle with a "killer rabbit"). Even Mr Clinton was once forced to leave the beach: in 1995, with an election looming, his pollster, Dick Morris, told him that people wanted to see him hiking in the country rather than frolicking with celebrities. Why is it deemed so important to holiday in the heartland? The centre of America certainly contains many wonderful vacation spots, but Plains, Georgia, and Crawford, Texas, are not among them. The simple reason is that Americans regard the heartland as more than just a geographical expression (the country's central and rural areas). It is a moral condition: an embodiment of the authentic American tradition of self-reliance, family values and community spirit. The inhabitants of the heartland are descendants of the rugged pioneers who carved a great civilisation out of mountains and prairies. They continue to make their living by doing proper work--by wrestling with nature rather than shuffling symbols on a screen. Mr Bush is well aware of his electoral success across "real" America, while Al Gore was left with the celluloid bits. Hence the value of that gritty picture in the FT (even if it was largely seen by stockbrokers lounging around Long Island). But is the heartland really such an embodiment of self-reliance? Sadly, its true characteristics are not vigour and independence but economic decline and government handouts. The small communities that are supposed to embody the American spirit are, in fact, haemorrhaging jobs, people and wealth. The worst poverty in America is probably not in the inner cities but in the countryside--in places like Mississippi, Arkansas and Kentucky. Six of the country's ten poorest counties can be found in the area stretching from Texas (where Mr Bush is so hard at work) to California's central valley. Rural people make barely 70% of the salaries of their urban counterparts. Ever since the dustbowl of the 1930s, the heartland has been hopelessly dependent on government handouts. Last year the country spent $25 billion on direct subsidies to farmers, and billions more subsidising water, power and infrastructure. Twenty-five cents of every dollar in farm revenue comes from the government. Paul Krugman, an economist at Princeton, calculates that the "blue" states (ie, the phoney coastal ones that Democrats win) subsidise the red Republican states to the tune of $90 billion a year--and that was before the recent farm bill. The secret of the heartland's success in securing such largesse is simple: political clout. Wyoming, with a population of half a million, has as many senators as California, with a population of 34m. They are robbing the heartland of its spirit of initiative and entrepreneurship. Rural ghettos now suffer from all the dependence-induced pathologies of their urban cousins. They are also creating a sort of state-funded feudalism that is the very antithesis of the American tradition of rugged individualism. Huge quantities of government money flow to a handful of landowners, most of them in Texas and California, who preside over vast armies of ill-educated and poorly paid migrant workers. If you want morality, go to the Hamptons What about the heartland's much-vaunted moral qualities? Here again the image of small-town piety bears little relation to reality in rural America. The states that Mr Bush won in 2000 boast slightly higher rates for murder, illegitimacy and teenage childbirth than the supposedly degenerate states that voted for Mr Gore. In recent years the worst increases in both crime and drug abuse have taken place in the heartland. In the past five years, bank robberies jumped by 82% in small towns, compared with 17% in America as a whole. Many rural communities are plagued by drugs, particularly amphetamines and OxyContin (an opiate pain-killer). In the 1990s the percentage of drug-related homicides tripled in rural areas but halved in big cities. The true story of the American heartland is more complicated--and more tragic--than the one that the White House is trying to tell. The taming of the heartland is one of the great achievements of the human spirit (albeit one marred by the brutal treatment of the native population); But a combination of economic change and disastrous social policies is turning a rural idyll into a rural ghetto. A president who really cared about the heartland would devote a little serious thought to its problems, rather than just treat it as a backdrop for his re-election campaign.
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