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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
The roadkill on the highway west of El Paso, our southernmost interstate, is mostly jackrabbits and coyotes. For miles, the blacktop is hemmed by cattle pens, and the smell of sunbaked dung sweetens the air. Beneath the near-hundred-degree heat of a cloudless late-summer sky, the scrubby West Texas landscape is ash-dry, except in the startlingly green oases created by irrigation or the flat muddy cuts of the Rio Grande. Everything about the place--"out here," as people say, or "down here"--announces itself, totemically, as belonging to America's southwestern border and seems to imply a set of choices and attitudes, a particular way of life. But those choices and attitudes do not translate as obviously as might be imagined into political inclinations.
While George W. Bush can count on his home state on Election Day, the arithmetic changes twenty minutes out of El Paso, where the interstate slips into New Mexico and twenty minutes later slices through the city of Las Cruces. New Mexico was the most closely divided state in the 2000 election, rejecting Bush in favor of Al Gore by just three hundred and sixty-six votes, and Las Cruces, which has a huge state university and a large Mexican-American population, is predominantly Democratic. So it was to Las Cruces that Bush flew from his ranch on the last Thursday of August, to commence a week-long campaign swing leading up to his speech at the Republican Convention in New York.
At eight-fifteen in the morning, the time ticket-holders to the rally had been warned that the doors would close, and an hour before Bush was to take the stage, a local congressman, Steve Pearce, was warming up the overwhelmingly white crowd, denouncing John Kerry as an unreconstructed enemy sympathizer cut from Jane Fonda's cloth, and praising Bush's leadership. "There's lots of wonderful things going on in Iraq," he said, "and the media refuses to cover them." A Texas swing band called the Desperados took over for a while, cranking out "San Antonio Rose," "Cherokee Maid," and "Faded Love," and then Pearce resumed his harangue, characterizing the Democratic Party as subservient to the United Nations and hostile to the notion of individual responsibility. "If poverty causes crime, then affluence causes kindness, and you know in your heart that's not true," he said. Pearce got the biggest cheers for an untruth of his own: "There is one candidate who will keep the words 'under God' in our pledge." In fact, this is not an issue in the campaign, since both candidates oppose removing the words, and neither would be in a position to protect them if a court should find them unconstitutional.
The Desperados kept the arena awake with the song "Take Me Back to Tulsa" until a giant video screen lit up with a live shot of the Presidential motorcade--a trio of armored limousines, led by motorcycle cops and flanked by squad cars--pulling into the parking lot outside. When Bush appeared in person, moments later, he seemed surprisingly ordinary. "I'm here to ask for the vote," he told the audience. "I believe it's important to get out and ask for the vote. I believe it's important to travel this great state and the country, talkin' about where I intend to lead the country." He made this sound like an original idea, and perhaps a controversial one, and the way he repeated the words "I believe" carried an air of defiant conviction: I'm not here offering myself to you because that's how it's done in a democracy but because that's just how I am, and...
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