Red and Blue America
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Red and Blue America
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Political Split Is Pervasive By David Von Drehle First of three articles The past decade has been one of the most eventful in American political history, from the Republican takeover of Congress to the presidential impeachment, the resignation of two speakers of the House, the deadlocked presidential election, the 2001 terrorist attacks, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and more. And yet, like a bathroom scale springing back to zero, the electorate keeps returning to near-parity. It's happening again: A little more than six months before Election Day, numerous polls find President Bush in a very tight race with Democratic challenger Sen. John F. Kerry among a sharply divided electorate. A large number of voters -- seven in 10, according to one Pew Research Center poll -- say they have already made up their minds and cannot be swayed. What explains it? From Congress to the airwaves to the bestseller lists, American politics appears to be hardening into uncompromising camps, increasingly identified with the two parties. According to a growing consensus of political scientists, demographers and strategists, the near-stalemate of 2000 -- which produced a virtual tie for the White House, a 50-50 Senate and a narrow Republican edge in the House of Representatives -- was no accident. This split is nurtured by the marketing efforts of the major parties, which increasingly aim pinpoint messages to certain demographic groups, rather than seeking broadly appealing new themes. It is reinforced by technology, geography and strategy. And now it is driving the presidential campaign, and explains why many experts anticipate a particularly bitter and divisive election. Political scientists and practitioners often speak of "Red-Blue America," evoking maps of the 2000 election returns; indeed, the phrase is used so loosely that it has spawned a competing pundit class devoted to knocking down oversimplifications of the idea. In articles Monday and Tuesday, The Washington Post will publish portraits of Americans from the reddest of red zones, the home district of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), and the bluest of blues, the San Francisco neighborhood of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). But first, it's useful to examine the Red-Blue division -- what it is, where it came from, how it has deepened and what it might mean. Hans Noel, a political scientist at the University of California at Los Angeles, is the author of a paper called "The Road to Red and Blue America." In an interview, he said, "Most people say they are 'moderate,' but in fact the country is polarized around strong conservative and liberal positions." For the first time in generations, he said, those philosophical lines correspond to party lines. The once-hardy species of conservative Democrats -- so numerous in the 1980s they had a name, "Reagan Democrats" -- is now on the endangered list, along with the liberal "Rockefeller Republicans." "It has taken 40 or 50 years to work itself out, but the ideological division in America -- which is not new -- is now lined up with the party division," Noel said. At the same time, more and more Americans in a highly mobile society are choosing to live among like-minded people. University of Maryland political demographer James Gimpel has documented the rise of a "patchwork nation," in which political like attracts like, and ideologically diverse communities are giving way to same-thinking islands. A recent analysis sponsored by the Austin American-Statesman, comparing the photo-finish elections of 1976 and 2000, made this clear. While the nationwide results were extremely close, nearly twice as many voters now live in counties where one candidate or the other won by a landslide. Person by person, family by family, America is engaging in voluntary political segregation. Bush and Kerry embody the role of mobility and personal choices in creating the Red-Blue nation. Two Establishment scions, similar in background and education, who parted ways after being at Yale University together, one headed to Red country and the other to Blue. Millions of voters have now made similar choices, which in turn echo and reinforce their initial beliefs and preferences. As John Kenneth White, author of "The Values Divide," put it in an interview, "The reds get redder and blues get bluer." This reality is already visible in the presidential campaign. Kerry supporters routinely attack Bush with the familiar Red stereotypes -- he is, according to the charges, ignorant, belligerent, a cowboy, a religious zealot. Likewise, Bush supporters brand Kerry as elitist, a snob, lacking conviction and unpatriotic. Onto those stereotypes the campaigns have begun layering issues well-known for firing up the Red and Blue camps: taxes, gay rights, abortion and the United Nations, to name a few. Occasional speeches may pay homage to broad, unifying themes, but the campaign day to day seems intended to deepen, rather than erase, the rift. This suggests candidates resigned to a tight finish. Indeed, Bush political chief Karl Rove has predicted a razor-thin margin in the 2004 race almost from Day One of the administration, never wavering even when his candidate was riding near-record approval ratings. Twenty years ago, Republican President Ronald Reagan swept 49 states in his reelection landslide. Today, the sheer number of voters who already tell pollsters they will not consider voting for Bush suggests how difficult it would be to win that sort of broad mandate. Instead, strategists for Bush and Kerry are focused on a short list of hard-fought states. As it becomes more difficult to reach across the party line, campaigns are devoting more energy to firing up their hard-core supporters. For voters in the middle, this election may aggravate their feeling that politics no longer speaks to them, that it has become a dialogue of the deaf, a rant of uncompromising extremes. Finally, because the Red-Blue divide so often follows very personal values -- matters of philosophy, spirituality, morals and taste -- the coming election appears primed to leave the losing faction not just disappointed, but angry. There's a reason why the last two presidents, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, have driven their opposition into fits of loathing: Politics in Red-Blue America is less the art of compromise than a clash of cultures. Parallel Universes Actually, Red zones and Blue zones are demographically similar in many ways. Lots of Red voters live in Blue country, and vice versa. Gallup pollsters have emphasized what they call "purple states," a geographically diverse atlas in which the total votes cast for Bush and Vice President Al Gore in 2000 produced a statistical deadlock: Florida, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Wisconsin. The notion of two tribes unhappily sharing a country is gaining strength among analysts, however. "It's huge," Noel said. "People in these two countries don't even see each other." And that's partly because of political segregation. Consider the 1960 presidential election -- another virtual dead heat. Democrat John F. Kennedy captured states in nearly every region of the country. By contrast, in 2000 Democrat Gore was shut out of the South, the Plains states and -- with the exception of New Mexico -- the Rocky Mountain West. The states Gore picked up from the 1960 Republican column were likewise concentrated in certain regions: the West Coast, the Great Lakes and New England. According to a recent survey by pollster John Zogby, voters in states that went for Bush were, by clear statistical margins, older, more likely to be married, less likely to join a union, more likely to be regular churchgoers -- mostly at Protestant churches -- and far more likely to be "born again" Christians. Another prominent opinion sampler, Stanley B. Greenberg, has made similar findings. Blue Americans, he concluded, are most likely to be found among highly educated women, non-churchgoers, union members and the "cosmopolitans" of the New York area, New England and California. "We have two parallel universes," White said. "Each side seeks to reinforce its thinking by associating with like-minded people." But Red-Blue is not just a matter of place. To an extent not seen in generations, the political parties occupy distinct philosophical space. There's scant room left in national politics for a liberal Republican or a conservative Democrat -- just ask Sen. James M. Jeffords (I), the former Republican from Vermont, or Sen. Zell Miller, a pro-Bush Democrat from Georgia. A generation ago, such figures were crucial to congressional deal-making. Now, they are ostracized. "I think it's more of a chasm" than a divide, Jeffords said in an e-mail. "There's very little room for moderate voices. . . . They are being silenced by the extremes. Three years ago, when I left the Republican Party, I said the president was moving too far to the right. I think he's proven me right, and now we've got gridlock." Miller, who has leveled similar complaints against the Democratic leadership, declined to be interviewed. Collapsed Coalition Experts cite a variety of factors to explain why Red-Blue has risen in its place. For example: ? Reagan happened. Republican presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford governed essentially as pragmatic centrists, but Reagan framed his presidency in ideological terms. He coaxed religious conservatives and Cold Warriors away from the Democratic Party while making it uncomfortable for liberals to remain in the GOP. "The signals coming out from Washington helped voters sort themselves out into parties that reflected their world view," explained Thomas E. Mann of the Brookings Institution. ? Peace happened. From the outbreak of World War II through the end of the Cold War -- a span of nearly 50 years -- the United States' foreign policy and military policy, two of the biggest responsibilities of the government, reflected the consensus of both parties. "In the 1950s, the country thought of itself as homogenous," said White, recalling sociologist Daniel Bell's influential 1960 book, "The End of Ideology." "The dominant discussion was about the need for unity in the face of a potent enemy." The collapse of the Soviet Union stripped much of the purpose out of centrism. ? Clinton happened. Though he campaigned as a moderate Democrat, and delivered on such longtime Republican goals as a balanced budget and welfare reform, Clinton's administration ultimately proved highly divisive. The first baby boomer presidency opened a new front in the culture wars that erupted in the late 1960s -- over sex, responsibility, the role of women, the nature of authority. ? Technology happened. The rise of direct mail, cable television and the Internet has enabled ideological soul mates to find one another efficiently, to organize, to concentrate their resources and to evangelize. Big Media -- especially network television and daily newspapers -- are rapidly losing their power to shape public consensus and marginalize ideological extremes. The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press recently found that the number of Americans getting campaign news from network television or daily newspapers has fallen by a quarter since 2000, and by a third for magazines such as Time and Newsweek. Meanwhile, the audience is growing for niche outlets such as talk radio, cable television and Internet sites. "People naturally reduce cognitive dissonance by seeking out information that reinforces their existing views," Mann said. "So there's no single cause" of the Red-Blue divide, "but a number of factors feeding into this." 50 Percent Plus One "In a democracy, to win you need a majority," UCLA's Noel said. "But you don't want a lot more than 50-percent-plus-one, because if your majority gets bigger, you have to share the spoils with more supporters. That's no good. So the natural process is to produce division." He continued: "If you look at the 2000 election, the divisions by state are pretty lopsided. But nationally, you get pretty close to a 50-50 split. That shouldn't be a surprise, because that's what these forces are designed for." An example of this was the decision by the parties after the 2000 U.S. Census to agree on new congressional districts that left 90 percent or more of the seats safely Red or Blue. This severely limits the chance that either party will develop a large congressional majority. It has also further entrenched the ideological standoff. As Mann explained, few House incumbents now have any incentive to reach across party lines to win general elections. Once they have their party's nomination, the lopsided districting virtually guarantees they will win. So the pressure is on them to toe the ideological line to avoid primary election challenges. Now the Republicans and Democrats have produced perfect archetypes of Red and Blue as their presidential nominees. Bush and Kerry started adult life from virtually the same spot: as well-bred, prep-school products who could be found, in 1965 and 1966, at Yale. Their fathers were in public service, and both young men sensed, to one degree or another, that they would follow. True, one came from a long line of Republicans and the other from a family of Democrats. But one of the functions of their exclusive training, according to author Kai Bird, was to prepare future leaders to govern in pragmatic, bipartisan ways. After graduation, however, their paths diverged. Bush left New England to live in Midland, Tex. He entered the oil business -- in which extracting resources was valued above conservation, regulation was seen as an affront to enterprise and everything depended on the readiness of bold men to take big risks. Texas was part of the Wild West, the Old Confederacy and the Bible Belt. In short, Bush immersed himself in a Red sea. Greenberg, author of "The Two Americas: Our Current Political Deadlock and How to Break It," recently summed up the essence of that world. "Faith in God and faith in entrepreneurs," Greenberg said. "The idea that faith should inform our public space, and that absolutes, rooted in the Bible, should guide us in our public life. The idea that America should be strong in promoting freedom and in control of our own destiny. Texas is actually a lot more complicated than that -- but not where Bush lives." When Bush extols "entrepreneurs," insists on tax cutting and deregulation, and promotes drilling and logging; when he professes a born-again faith and appeals to traditional norms on issues such as marriage and cloning; when he disdains intellectual subtleties in favor of plain-spoken verities, he is carrying the flag for Red America. Kerry went another way. After winning medals in Vietnam, he launched into the culturally progressive, antiwar politics of the East Coast. In Kerry's world, liberal values were worth paying for with higher taxes. There was less talk about celebrating entrepreneurs than about reining in "corporate interests." Kerry's Boston milieu was Yankee North and ivory tower, a magnet for the young and the wealthy, many of whom saw urban life as a model of multicultural America. Again, Greenberg's data confirm that these broad generalizations -- while imperfect -- rest on a foundation in reality. "Kerry chose a very cosmopolitan part of the country, globally connected," he said. "It is less comfortable with absolutes. One's faith provides personal guidance, but people are somewhat uncomfortable about applying this to civil society. Self-expression is a central value. Boston seems as much a ground zero to postmodernist Blue America as Midland is to Red America." Kerry hoists the Blue flag whenever he embraces environmentalism, labor unionism and regulation; when he emphasizes the complexities of issues and urges an internationalist foreign policy; when he gives precedence to tolerance over tradition and dissent over conformity. Both men try, at least in symbolic ways, to reach for the center. Bush reads to schoolchildren and preaches "love your neighbors" -- symbols of a warm, "compassionate" side to his conservative stances on taxes and morality. Kerry rides a Harley and speaks often of his combat days -- symbols of toughness amid his internationalism and social liberalism. But their basic colors show through. Veteran political analyst Ben Wattenberg said the crucial question in any election is, "Do the voters think the candidates are people like them?" This year, that question will be asked by two very different sorts of people, by a political system intent on pushing them apart.
For a Conservative, Life Is Sweet in Sugar Land, Tex. By David Finkel Second of three articles SUGAR LAND, Tex. -- This is the home of Britton Stein, who describes George W. Bush as "a man, a man's man, a manly man," and Al Gore as "a ranting and raving little whiny baby." Forty-nine years old, Stein is a husband, a father, a landscaper and a Republican. He lives in a house that has six guns in the closets and 21 crosses in the main hallway. His wife cuts his hair with electric clippers. His three daughters aren't embarrassed when he kisses them on their cheeks. He loves his family, hamburgers and his dog. He believes in God, prays daily and goes to church weekly. He has a jumbo smoker in his back yard and a 40-foot tree he has climbed to hang Christmas lights. He has a pickup truck that he has filled with water for the Fourth of July parade, driving splashing kids around a community where Boy Scouts plant American flags in the yards. His truck is a Chevy. His beer is Bud Light. His savior is Jesus Christ. His neighbors include Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), the House majority leader, who says of Sugar Land, "I think it is America." Pollsters and political consultants have a more specific definition of Sugar Land, as part of what they call Red America. The term is shorthand for the roughly half of the U.S. population that tends toward conservative values, the Republican Party, gun ownership, church as the preferred way to express faith, and moral absolutes. "You find communities like this all over the place," DeLay says of Sugar Land. "This is what the future is about." Stein has his own description of it: "My life." Sense of 'Utopia' It's a life that Stein concurs is, in many ways, the very stereotype of Red, from the guns to the truck to the vote he will be casting in this fall's presidential election. When a recent poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press concluded that the American electorate is "further apart than ever in its political values," one of its emblems could be Stein, who says that it would take "a frontal lobotomy" for him to vote for Sen. John F. Kerry, that "I would need to have my brain cleansed of all reason and thought." When Catholic University political professor John Kenneth White says that Kerry and Bush are navigating for votes in "parallel universes," the universe of Stein is the one in which the president is Republican, the U.S. senators are Republicans, the congressman is Republican, the county commissioner is Republican, the Inspector of Hides and Animals is Republican, the neighbors are Republicans, the friends are Republicans, and the mayor is a Republican named David Wallace, who says of Sugar Land: "When you drive around here, you get the sense that you're in Utopia." Brick homes, clean streets, good schools, plentiful churches -- "it's the typical white-picket-fence, 2.1-children atmosphere," Wallace says of Sugar Land. No litter, landscaped boulevards, approved-plant lists, recommended-rose lists, strict zoning, a town square called "Town Square," logos everywhere, and the ever-present smell of just-mown grass in a voting precinct that went Bush 72 percent, Gore 25 percent -- this is the landscape of Stein, whose path here can be condensed to this: In 1977, he bought a pair of hedge trimmers for $25. A month later, he went back to the same store and bought a second pair of trimmers, but now they were $30. That's when he angrily learned about inflation and began paying attention to politics. Then he learned about the notion of American weakness during the Iranian hostage crisis. Then he learned about responding to a politician's message when Ronald Reagan talked of America's greatness coming from its people rather than government. Then, about the time thousands of people were said to be in danger of losing their jobs because of an endangered species of owl, he decided there are two kinds of Americans, those who live in the world of "emotion and feel good," and those, like him, who live in "the real world." And now his version of the real world is a two-story house in a neighborhood of like-minded people, where he begins every day by turning on his computer. Time for the news. Some people get their information from the TV networks or the paper. Stein starts with the Drudge Report Web site, where he scans the headlines and clicks on one that says, "Rallying Cry For Dems: Vote Bush Out of Rove's Office." "This is the kind of stuff that pisses me off," he says. "They don't give Bush the respect he deserves. Not only because he's president, but because he's a helluva good man." Next he goes to a Web site called WorldNetDaily.com. He clicks on an article that says, "Poll: Bush's Approval Sinking," but dismisses it as untrustworthy when he sees the poll was done by CBS. "Of course I have a suspicion of CBS," he says. "Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw -- they don't have any credibility with me." Next he goes through a site called FreeRepublic.com, which calls itself "the premier conservative news forum," and then moves on to a site called sftt.org. "Soldiers for the Truth," he says, scrolling through another list of articles and watching a video of what the site says is a U.S. Apache helicopter targeting and obliterating three Iraqis. "Another guy moving right there," one voice on the video says, all business. "Good. Fire. Hit him," another voice says. "It's amazing, the military, the men and women who are serving us," Stein says. "You think about the sacrifices, the idea of spending Christmas in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in West Africa, in these hellholes. In the civilian world, they get some injury, carpal tunnel syndrome, and they want to go sue their employers, and these guys . . . I'm so proud of them. I'm so glad they're on our side." Next he goes to Military.com, where there's a photograph of an American soldier holding a wild-haired Saddam Hussein on the ground moments after his capture. "Look at the contrast," Stein says. "There's the American soldier coming to liberate the country, and there's the tyrant who ran the rape rooms and the children's prisons. That inspires me." Next he goes to AmericanRhetoric.com, where he has listened to an "awesome" speech by Bush, an "amazing" speech by Reagan, and a "great" speech by Martin Luther King Jr. from a time before "things got so distorted," and then he goes to townhall.com, which calls itself a "conservative news and information" site, where he begins hopscotching from Pat Buchanan to Robert D. Novak to Ann Coulter. This is how Stein gets his information, along with watching Fox News and skimming the local paper, to which he once canceled his subscription because he was so offended by an opinion column about Bush that began, "The Boy Emperor picked up the morning paper and, stunned, dropped his Juicy Juice box with the little straw attached." He recognizes that the information he seeks out reinforces his beliefs rather than challenges them, but "I feel I'm more informed than most people," he says. "Most people don't read all of this." Living in a 'Bubble' Stein's lunch is a brisket-and-sausage barbecue sandwich in a restaurant where he wonders what people categorized by pollsters as Blue Americans would think about him. "I would guess they would say I am mean-hearted and mean-spirited. They'd probably think I'm for big business at the expense of poor people. They'd think we want to hurt the poor, hurt the environment, do away with the school system. They'd think that we believe everybody should be able to own Uzis or any kind of gun, and that we want to impose God on them," he says, and then says what he thinks of them: "Some of what they're saying may be found on good intentions, but a closer look will show it's really not going to work. Their solutions come from government rather than from themselves. . . . Every year they take more and more and more money. And when you see some of these programs, and you're paying thousands of dollars into them, at some point resentment begins to build." Stein's dinner is hamburgers with American cheese, salad and Tater Tots. He gas-grills the burgers while the salad is assembled by Patrice, Stein's wife of 23 years and counting. They met when he saw her standing on an apartment balcony and presumed to tell her how to water her plants. Now, three children later, he oversees their business's landscape crews and she manages the office. He hunts on weekends, and she makes gumbo with deer sausage. He drives the truck, she drives the minivan. He takes the La-Z-Boy, she takes the couch. According to a recent poll by Zogby International, 70 percent of voters in states that voted for Bush say marriage should be between a man and a woman, and the Steins, who agree on most everything, agree on that, too. "Anything else is not marriage," Stein says. "In my opinion, it's wrong. It's not just that I don't like it. It's wrong." The heart of the issue isn't homosexuality, they say -- "My attitude toward them is I really don't care," he says; "Would it change how I feel about someone? I don't think so," she says -- but God-given, Bible-based morality. Even if the relationship involved one of their daughters, Stein says, "We wouldn't have a wedding." "Eww, that's allowed?" says Carolyn, 14, who has been listening. "No," Patrice says. "Let's have a party, and a big ceremony, and if they want to call themselves married they can," Stein says as Carolyn dips a cracker into a 40-ounce jar of peanut butter. "But, well, it wouldn't be a marriage, and I'd say to her, that's not a marriage." Now Carolyn begins paging through a copy of Teen People. "There's got to be a point as you go from Ozzie and Harriet to the most total perversion there is, to child molestation, or bestiality, where there's a line, that from here on it's right on one side and wrong on the other," Stein continues. "Where homosexuality falls, maybe it's inside the line, but somewhere we have to say: No farther. Our society, our culture, our religion, our history all revolve around the family. The traditional family unit. There are variations, sure, but go too far, and somebody has to say that's wrong." Where is the line? That's what the Steins are thinking about when Carolyn interrupts them. "Ouch," she says, holding up a finger with a fresh paper cut. "My second one this week," she says and explains that she got the first one when she and other members of a school club were at the house of a woman who provides emergency foster care for children in crisis, that helping the woman is their project this year, that the project is so different from last year's project -- Let's Keep Sugar Land Beautiful -- that there are kids everywhere in the house and old furniture and writing on the walls, that they were wrapping gifts for a birthday party when a piece of wrapping paper sliced into her hand. So life isn't perfect in insular Sugar Land. There are children who need emergency foster care. There was a Christmastime double murder a few planned communities away from the Steins', and the suicide of an Enron executive just up the street. There is a teacher at the high school with leukemia for whom Patrice donates blood, and a homeless woman with a "Food Please" sign to whom Britton gives money to as he rolls past in his truck. There was the night the Steins were upstairs, and "we hear this crash downstairs, and my heart started racing because it sounded like somebody kicked the door in," Stein says. "I said, 'Okay, I'm going to go downstairs and run straight to the closet and get my gun,' and that's what I did." He ran downstairs to get a gun to save his wife and three sleeping daughters, and even though the noise turned out to be the clatter of a falling cookie sheet, he now keeps a gun upstairs, always within easy reach, because sometimes, even in Sugar Land, bad things happen. But not often. "I don't know," Patrice says. "Maybe I just want to live in a little bubble or something." In this bubble, then, the conversation turns to the time one of the girls and her friends were alone in the house watching a video of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," and Britton and Patrice, coming home after having dinner out, decided to play a joke. "It was Patrice's idea," Britton says. "I was laughing so hard I just about wet my pants," Patrice says. "I got my gas-powered leaf blower," Britton says. "I got it good and warmed up in the garage so it would start first try, and I came inside and got to the bottom of the stairs and started that thing up." "And the girls thought it was funny once they stopped shrieking," Patrice says, laughing, as is Britton, as is Carolyn, who closes her magazine, which has a cover photo of the actor Orlando Bloom and the headline, "What Really Turns Him On." "Orlando Bloom?" Patrice says, seeing it. "Whatever happened to good old names? Like Rock Hudson. And Tab Hunter." Now she and Britton are laughing, but not Carolyn, who doesn't know anything about Rock Hudson and Tab Hunter, including that they were gay. "Hey, remember that old joke?" Britton says. "What would happen if Rock Hudson and Gomer Pyle got married?" Patrice and Carolyn look at him. "Rock Pyle." Now no one is laughing. A Churchgoing Family According to the Zogby poll, 51 percent of Red State voters attend church at least weekly. In Blue America, it's 34 percent. In Red America, 32 percent go to church on holidays, rarely or never. In Blue America, it's 46 percent. Into the minivan go the Steins. Past the community swim club, where the Modifications and Deed Restrictions Committee meets once a month. Past the country club, where one of the members, referring to Sugar Land's large number of Indian residents, keeps saying, "That's with a dot, not with a feather." Past the turn to the high school, where the SAT scores are reassuringly above average. Into the church parking lot, which is filling rapidly, past the "Monument to the Unborn," which Stein helped install near the church's entrance, and into the front row, where Britton and Patrice can be found every week. They are front-row Catholics, seated all the way to the right. Their daughters are somewhere in the middle, along with 200 or so other teenagers who are the focus of this Mass, called Life Teen. There's a guitar. There are drums and amplifiers. There's a choir of girls any parent would be proud of, led by one with glowing blond hair long enough to cover the "Notre" on her Notre Dame sweatshirt and teeth so white they can be seen clear across the church. "And so we are a big church," the pastor, Drew Wood, says, looking around as the service gets underway, and so they are: 1,000 seats, five Masses each weekend, each Mass filled to overflowing. "I know some people say it's just me and God, I never go to church, and that's very sad," he continues. "That's not what God wants. He wants people to go to church." It isn't only the Catholic church that's full, it's all of them in Sugar Land. The seats are full at Christ United Methodist, 900 per service, where the Rev. Tom Pace III, when asked what concerns are on the minds of his congregants, says, "family issues"; and it's that way at the 1,800-member River Pointe Community Church, where the Rev. Patrick Kelley's answer is, "How do we grow strong, healthy, balanced families in today's culture?" "Once you say, 'I believe what the Bible tells me,' that brings certain responsibilities, and one of them is going to church," Stein is saying now, after the service. There has been a lot of singing, including a solo by David Wallace, the mayor, during which people closed their eyes and raised their arms into the air, charismatic-style. There has been a sermon calling marriage "a noble, sacrificial way of the cross," and communion, during which Patrice, a Eucharistic minister, offered wine to a long line of communicants, including her husband, to whom she said, "The blood of Christ," as she raised the cup to his mouth. "Amen," he said to her, and now the two of them are walking outside. "There were times when we didn't go to church much," Patrice says. "But it kind of changed when we had kids. They don't come with a set of instructions. They need some guidance. They need morals and examples." "Belief in a superior being," Stein says. "Forgiveness. Goodness. Service." "Where do they get the information that leads to their morals?" Patrice wonders about people who don't go to church. "What's their higher being?" Stein wonders. "There's a sense of community," Patrice says of what else a church offers. "You're around like-minded people," Stein says. "Good people." Here comes one now, the mayor, hurrying out of the church with his wife, and Stein, seeing him, says that if anyone is an example of what God can do, it's David Wallace. That two years before, Wallace was just about dead at the bottom of a swimming pool and that the only thing that brought him back to life was the power of people praying for him to live. It's a story that Wallace will expand on later. He will say he remembers floating on his back and looking up at a bird, and next it was eight hours later and he was in a hospital. "I drowned," he will say. "When they found me I was flat on the bottom of the pool. My lungs were filled with water. My heart had stopped." He will say he was put on a ventilator, his wife was told he would not survive, a prayer chain was begun, and "literally within an hour of being found at the bottom of the pool I had thousands and thousands of people praying for me." He will say that "in the medical community, even to this day, they can't figure out why I lived," and then make clear the single, indisputable reason he did: "The faith community." That's what he will say, but now, walking with his wife, what he says is, "Hello, Britton, Patrice. We're trying to think of a restaurant to go to." "C'mon over for pork loin," Stein offers, and Wallace smiles and says he wishes he could, and the Steins get back in their minivan for the short ride home. They pass the road that leads to Tom DeLay's, where Stein has done some landscaping over the years. They pass by hundreds of road-bordering live oaks that were planted by the community association, whose executive director, Sandra Denton, describing her job, says, "We spend a lot of time making sure the trees are lined up straight." "Schools, churches, grocery stores," Stein says, almost back home now. "It's all close by." 'The Life I Wanted' It's Wednesday afternoon now and Stein is there with two friends, Craig Lannom and Lance May. They are three husbands, three fathers, three Bush votes, three guys watching ESPN and drinking some beers. Round Number One: "They make me feel like I have no hope. They make you feel like, why wake up in the morning?" Lannom says of Blue Americans he sees on TV or hears on the radio. "It's like every time I hear Al Franken speak, the world we live in is sooo bad, everything is going sooo wrong. Is it really that bad?" "We see life as it is," May says. "They seem bitter," Lannom says. "They just never seem happy. Every time you hear them talking, they're bitching about something." "They're whiners," Stein agrees. Round Two: "I have a cappuccino maker," May confesses. "You have a what?" Stein asks. Round Three: "It's early in the morning, when the sun comes up behind that bank of fog," Stein says, describing his favorite thing about hunting. "It's when you're fishing, and you look around, and you're the only guy around," May says. "Fly fishing in Colorado. It was a religious experience," Lannom says. Round Four: "I feel it's safer out here. I feel it's more stable. More my kind of people," Lannom says of the appeal of Sugar Land. "Where the grass is green and the trees are trimmed," Stein says. "You live in planned neighborhoods where your investment is fairly safe," May says. "The first time I put my trash out, I put it by the curb, and my neighbor came out and said, 'We don't curb our trash here in Sugar Land.' " Lannom says, laughing. "I had some cinch bugs in my front yard or something, my neighbor says, 'Craig, I want to talk to you about your brown patch.' " "It's so predictable here," Stein says. "But that's not bad, though," Lannom says. "No, that's not bad," Stein says. Time to go. The lovely drive home is under what Stein calls a "bluebird sky." In a few hours, Carolyn will have soccer practice. On Friday, Stein is supposed to go quail hunting. In a few weeks, when the pear trees bloom, work will get so busy Stein will be running from morning till night. "They'll be snow white," Stein says of the blooms, in anticipation. He is, at his core, a sentimental man, Patrice says, and Stein wouldn't disagree. "I mean, she's my soul mate," he says of Patrice. "They're everything to me," he says of his daughters. "I'm very thankful," he says of his life in which nothing, so far, thank God, knock on wood, has gone wrong. "This is the life I wanted and created with help from God, from Patrice, from the kids. We have a vision of what we want life to be." It's a vision visible through the windshield, right now, as he parks the truck. There's his house. Inside is his family. What more is there? "Yeah, I like my life," Stein says, approaching the front door. "Absolutely." A Liberal Life in the City by the Bay By David Finkel Last of three articles SAN FRANCISCO -- This is the home of the Harrison family, who describe Bill Clinton as "intelligent," "charismatic" and "a good representation of America," and George W. Bush as "frightening," "a total imbecile" and "monkey boy." A family of four, the Harrisons live in a house decorated with crucifixes in the bedrooms and a hot-pink feather boa in the foyer. Tom Harrison, 62, is a union official. Maryanne Harrison, 60, runs an after-school program. Heather Harrison, 29, is a teacher. Matthew Harrison, 28, is an electrician. They are fourth- and fifth-generation San Franciscans whose home was built for the family in 1917. Their neighborhood is filled with restaurants that are cafes, and stores that are boutiques, and their neighbors include straight people, gay people, rich people, homeless people, married people, single people, and the House minority leader, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D), who says of this place: "I think it is more American than most places in the country." Pollsters and political consultants call it Blue America, shorthand for the roughly half of the U.S. population that tends toward liberal values, the Democratic Party and what one consultant calls "morality writ small." It is where abortion is ultimately seen as a personal choice, faith is more often an individual expression than a collective one, and marriage is less a union of two genders than of two people, which is one of the reasons San Francisco is considered the bluest place of all. Twenty-seven weeks from today, those values will be at the center of a presidential election in which, for many voters, the political choice of Bush vs. Sen. John F. Kerry is a surrogate for a broader referendum. "On lifestyle issues -- marriage, church, sexuality, gay rights, guns. And cultural preferences," says John Kenneth White, a professor of politics at Catholic University. "And the war, too, in the sense that on things like the Patriot Act, how important is security? Another issue is the Ten Commandments." Is the United States to be guided by the rigid morality of the Ten Commandments, or by something more elastic? By the desire for national security or civil liberties? By the feeling that leaders are authoritative or authoritarian? What is the proper definition of marriage? Of family? Of the true American life? That's what White and others say the November election will help decide, an election in which four of the voters will be the Harrisons of San Francisco, who know that in their version of America, the Blue version, some days can feel as bright as a pink feather boa and other days as dark as a bruise. Defining 'Blue' The similarities between Stein and Tom Harrison go deeper than that: Stein drives a pickup truck; so does Harrison. Stein is a landscaper; Harrison was a longtime gardener for the city of San Francisco before recently going to work as assistant business manager of his union local. They even sound alike when talking about, in Stein's case, Blues, and in Harrison's case, Reds. Stein: "They're whiners." Harrison: "They've got the same dreams and hopes and desires and needs that everybody does. They're people. They're human beings. Except they've got one gear that goes backwards." So much for common ground. "They're eating well," Harrison continues. "They've got a roof over their heads. They're feeding their kids. They've got everything. There are no luckier people. How can they complain? About anything?" And yet they do, he says, griping about taxes, about the size of government and about politicians as though every last one of them were a one-dimensional cartoon. He, on the other hand, thinks that "politicians tend to be good people" and that government isn't too big, and even though a third of his paycheck goes to taxes, he pays them gladly and would willingly pay more because of what he sees around him every day. Such as the homeless man he once saw under the freeway: "He goes to step off the curb, and he stumbled, but he kept his balance -- and he blessed himself. It just killed me. It was Jesus Christ. In front of me. The poor guy. Somebody's child," he says. So he gave somebody's child a dollar. He intended it as a quiet act of charity. Now, however, he has come to think of it as an act of futility, or, worse, vanity, because beyond that one man were dozens of homeless people in the neighborhood, thousands in the city, millions in the country. This is why he believes in what others might contemptuously call Big Government, he says, because some problems are too vast to be solved by churches, charities, faith-based initiatives or individual dollars fluttering out of car windows. "A responsibility to the citizens," he says, defining a government's obligation. That means not only militias and border protection, he says, but also compassion. "They're not responsible for a person once he gets back on his feet. But if he can't, a government has to have some type of plan to help them. They deserve it. They're human beings, and they're citizens of this country," he says, and then he goes on to explain how one person can develop beliefs so utterly different from another: "I guess it has to be life experiences." His include a father who worked two soul-stripping jobs and died the sad death of an alcoholic, a wedding to Maryanne ("Oh, man, she was a knockout"), and a day 13 years later when he told Maryanne he needed help. He was, it turned out, his father's son, in terms of both work ethic and alcohol. He had been drinking, heavily and secretly. Now, after a day of abstinence because of a flu, spiders were crawling out of the flowered curtains and cats were coming up the side of the bed. "Vicious black cats," he says 24 years later, seeing them clearly, sounding still amazed at what he had become. Maryanne took him to a hospital with an alcohol detox unit, and when he came home after 30 days of listening to people of all types describing their own spirals, it was as someone more sensitive to what can happen in even a very good life. "See, you can't have one hard-and-fast rule for everybody. There are grays. Each person has his own bottom," he says. This is the philosophy he has come to, one result of which is an attempt at tolerance toward whatever a person wants to do, even if he wouldn't necessarily do it himself. Such as Heather's choice for her wedding, to have a day so exquisite it will cost $30,000. "Pretty fancy," he says. Or what Matthew is telling him now about his plans for a dinner in three days, when he will present his girlfriend, Ruby, with a 2-carat diamond engagement ring he has been saving for over the past year. "What I'm thinking," Matthew says, "is I'll order some sparkling cider and drop it in the glass." "I just hope she doesn't choke on it," Tom says. A Wide World "Gay people, they don't pick an easy road. They have a hard life," she says. "But if that was his calling, I wouldn't stand in the way." She is in the kitchen as she says this, where so much of her family's life has taken place. In the Harrison house, nothing is just there. Everything has a story. The oak table, in the family for generations, is where every marriage proposal has been announced and dissected, including hers. The counter is where Tom was standing last summer, making coffee, when Heather's boyfriend, Carlo, told him that he would like to marry Heather -- "if it's okay with you." The spot near the stove is where Tom hugged Carlo and said "Of course," and it's also where Maryanne's mother was bending down to light the pilot light when a little explosion burned off her eyebrows. "Both of them," Maryanne says. "And her eyelashes." "And her mustache," says Heather, who is at the table, looking over her wedding planner. Even the stairway that leads down to the front door has a story: Maryanne's mother was standing on the top step when she learned that her husband, whom she had asked to leave in a fit of anger, decided that he was never coming back. Down she went, tumbling to the bottom in a dead drop, and a panicked Maryanne called her father, who rushed over, picked up his wife, carried her to their bed, laid her down, tucked her in and left. And "they never talked again," Maryanne says. "They hated each other." She was 4 when that happened. Now she is a person who laughs often and loudly. Now she is bright clothing and gold nail polish and hair colored to match by a gay man named Frank, so close to the family that he was the first person she asked Tom to call after Heather's birth. But back then she was beginning a childhood she describes as "guilt personified." It was a small, safe, shy, insulated, very Catholic, stay-in-the-neighborhood life. Up the hill to St. Vincent de Paul school in the morning, down the hill in the afternoons to a mother who began loathing Christmas and an older brother who became increasingly melancholy. Up the hill on Sundays to Mass, down the hill to the stairs, the kitchen, the oven, the counter, the table. This is the way it was until high school, when she suddenly found herself in a new school in a different part of town, sitting to next to Cinderella Washington, the first dark-skinned person she ever befriended, who seemed paralyzed one day when someone in the class said that when black people move into a neighborhood, home prices immediately drop. "I remember looking at her and seeing this look on her face," Maryanne says. "She didn't say anything. So I did. I said, 'I disagree with that.' " Four words -- and rather passive ones at that, especially compared with how Maryanne speaks her mind now -- but they were the beginning of her transition, she says, "the seed." Her learning moved away from just school books. She remembers telling her very Republican father what she had dared to say, and his response: "Don't be a flag waver." And so she learned to temper a father's advice. She remembers class trips to orphanages and the roughest parts of the Tenderloin district, and so she learned about varieties of sadness different from her own. She met Tom and learned about love, got married and learned about intimacy, worked in the AIDS-devastated Castro district and learned to disagree with her church. Her world got wider and wider until she became the person she says she is now: someone who thrives on, rather than insulates herself from, diversity. She has been to a Chinese wedding. She has been to a Buddhist wedding and a Buddhist funeral. She has Passover Seder every year with the neighbors next door. "See, I love that," she says. "I love that. People interest me. They fascinate me." Another story: "Who is Maryanne?" she remembers someone once asking her, when Tom was in the hospital and she introduced herself at an Al-Anon meeting. "I was stumped," she says. "I didn't know." And though she's still figuring it out, she says, some of the answer came when Tom was released and she found herself suddenly feeling married to a stranger. Several times over the next year, she says, she thought seriously of leaving and getting a divorce, but each time found herself weighing the desire for instant relief against a belief that marriage is a "sacrament." She knows plenty of people who have divorced, and good for them, she says, but her choice each time was to stay. "And thank God I did," she says. Shaping Views "What else? We had to discuss the budget, the size, the feel of the wedding. Do we want traditional? Small? Formal? Casual? Indoor? Outdoor? "I got the person to do our hair, the photographer, the cake, the videographer. "We had to do church stuff. We had to take a FOCCUS test, 150 questions, like 'Does your future spouse's drug use bother you?' 'Are you afraid to be naked in front of your future spouse?' I wanted to say, 'I'm afraid to be naked in front of me.' " Needless to say, there's a little anxiety in the life of Heather Harrison. "What else?" she continues. "Shoes. Jewelry. Bridesmaid dresses. Bridesmaid gifts. Favors for the guests. Invitations. Seating assignments. Table names, because we don't want numbers. What else? Oh, wedding bands. We had to plan the Mass. The honeymoon. The guest book. A pen. Flowers. Limousines. A band. Registering. "What's left?" "Do you guys have a song?" asks Matthew, just back from picking up his ring, which he got from a Cantonese-speaking jewelry designer who bowed in gratitude when Matthew got his first look and said, "My God. Perfect." "We're going to do 'Unforgettable' by Nat King Cole," Heather says. "The old one or the new one?" asks Matthew, who gave the jeweler $8,500 and then gave the ring to his parents for safekeeping. "Well, I like the old one. He likes the new one." Palpable anxiety -- though nothing could match Tom and Maryanne's wedding day, when they ran in circles accommodating Maryanne's parents and taking care of Tom's father, who the night before had fallen drunk in a bathtub. "It was embarrassing," says Tom. "I was exhausted," says Maryanne. So go weddings, but Heather, like her parents, believes in the importance of weddings, ceremony, marriage, all of it. "It's a sacrament," she says the next day, using her mother's same word with the same sense of gravity. Heather is in her classroom when she says this, the place where her version of Blue has evolved from an upbringing into a philosophy since she began teaching five years ago. Unlike at St. Vincent de Paul, which she attended with the children of doctors and architects, this school, St. James, has a tough reputation. She teaches 20 students in fourth grade, the majority of them children of immigrants who work as maids and construction workers and live for the most part in single-parent households: There is a squinting boy in the front row in need of glasses, which Heather first mentioned to his mother 31/2 months ago. Finally he's getting them; now Heather is telling his mother about the need for a toothbrush. "And the kid: 'Oh, my dad's gonna pick me up today,' and I have yet to see him. Imagine the disappointment. 'It's going to be so cool. You're going to see my dad.' It's never happened." And the boy in need of help with his multiplication tables. "I said to his mother, 'You've got to practice with him.' 'Well, I work three jobs to be able to put food on the table. I don't have time for love and hugs and homework.' What do you say to that in response?" She imagines what some would say, that these are the effects of a liberal immigration policy, or examples of government coddling, or the consequences of a loosening moral code, and on her most frustrating days she wants to agree. "There are days I hate my job," she says. "I'm sick of the parents. I'm sick of the complaints. It's a thankless job. I could count on one hand the number of genuine thank-yous I've gotten." But on most days, she says, she feels differently. "No one asks to be poor," she says. "No one wants to work three jobs. No one wants to be a bad parent." This is the philosophy she has come to -- "Love thy neighbor," is how she distills it -- and she tries to carry everywhere she goes. When St. Vincent de Paul recently offered her a comfortable teaching position, she turned it down because "I find it more rewarding here." When she and her fiance went house-hunting over the bridge in 83.9 percent white Walnut Creek, she couldn't wait to get back to San Francisco. "I don't like just white people," she says. The lessons are with her in church, too, where, on Sunday now, the day Matthew is to propose, she is in her usual spot, left side, sixth row, next to the center aisle, when the priest uses his sermon to attack what's happening at City Hall as "the whims and the grandstanding of some politicians and judges." For the moment she says nothing, and when the priest says, "For church, for marriage, for families, let us pray to the Lord," she endorses the sentiment with prayer. So do Tom, who is an usher, and Maryanne, a Eucharistic minister. But later, after church, out for breakfast, the three of them talk about how deeply they disagree, not only with what the priest said but with what Pope John Paul II said the day before, that same-sex unions "degrade" what marriage is supposed to be. "I don't believe he would have said that," Maryanne says, referring not to the priest or the pope but to Jesus. "They were 12 men hanging around together," Heather says, thinking of the disciples and a statistic she saw as she prepared to be a teacher. "Hmm. It's 10 percent of any class. Do the math." Two blocks away, meanwhile, at home, Matthew is finalizing his plans for tonight. He has abandoned the idea of the ring in the glass. Instead, he is writing a poem, to be inserted into a card, to be presented during dinner, the last line of which will be "Ruby, my love, will you marry me?" That's the plan. He will hand her the card, and when she gets to the last line of the poem she will look up and see Matthew in front of her, down on one knee, holding out the ring. The ring, he now thinks. Where is the ring? Back at the cafe: "If they started marrying gay people in our church, men and men, women and women, I wouldn't care," Heather says. "I agree," Maryanne says. "I'm not going to condemn it," Tom says, and he is about to say something else when he is interrupted by his cell phone. "Hello? "Go in my closet. "Turn to the left. "With your right hand, push my slacks apart and look down where my shoes are. "Okay. "Goodbye." The ring has been found. 'We're a Great Family' Well into the evening, Tom, Maryanne and Heather are waiting to find out what happened. They know that Matthew planned to take Ruby downtown to the Tonga Room, where the tables surround a pool of water and a band plays on a floating barge. They know that he dressed up in a new black shirt because Maryanne ironed it for him. Maryanne passes some time fiddling around in the kitchen. Tom celebrates an anniversary, 24 years to the day without alcohol, with a Dr Pepper. Heather checks a wedding list of 200 people ranging from a just-married gay couple to the most non-Blue person they know, an old family friend who can seem so sour about gays and immigrants that they imagine when he goes to a restaurant, the maitre d' announces, "Bitterman, party of one." At last, toward 10, they hear the front door open. "Well?" Maryanne calls out as the sound of footsteps comes up the stairs. "Did she say yes?" Here's Matthew. Followed by Ruby, who's holding out her left hand. "She said yes," Matthew says, and with that everyone takes turns hugging Ruby, whose last name is Gomez, whose parents don't speak English, whose father gave his blessing to Matthew through an interpreter, whose mother dressed her children in dresses and ties the day they crossed the border from Mexico, who keeps looking at her ring and saying, "I love it. I love it." "They are truly the American dream," Maryanne will say later of Ruby's family, but for now she listens to Matthew fill in the details: that he did it after the egg rolls were served and before he could be drowned out by the band on the barge. "I must have had 20 glasses of water," he says. "The best part is when you get up in the morning," Heather says to Ruby, looking at her own ring. "Well, well, well," Tom says. "How nice is this?" "I think we're a great family," Maryanne says. "So do I," Ruby says, and so it goes into the late hours. A Blue life, then, that in November will translate into five votes for John F. Kerry and five votes against George W. Bush: Ruby leans against a stove where a woman once lost her eyelashes. Heather excuses herself after a while to call her fiance. Tom excuses himself as well and heads off to a bedroom where he hasn't seen spiders in 24 years. Matthew and Ruby make their way down a stairway where a marriage once tumbled to its end. And Maryanne sits at a table where one more marriage proposal has been celebrated, thinking about how many versions there are of love, families and lives. Maybe hers does fit what others would call the Blue version, she says, but on this very nice night she has a more personal way to describe it. "Oh, I love my life," she says.
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