WYOMING--Democrats in Range War in the Equality State
A typical Wyoming neighborhood.
Wyoming! No shit, my home state, where for the last three decades bounties have been paid on Democrats’ ears, is today ground zero of the Obama/Clinton grudge match. Both have been spotted in the state scrapping for the state’s twelve, count them, twelve delegates. Hillary was up in Casper, Barack stumped in Laramie and so did Bill.
It’s a big state with a tiny population. There are places in the state where you can stand and there will not be an occupied building in a radius of 100 miles. Yes, I said places, plural. The words “wide open spaces” were invented for the place. Dispersed across that vast landscape (but concentrated in Cheyenne, Casper, Laramie and a half a dozen other “cities” each with under 25,000 residents) were an estimated 515,004 folks in 2006. By contrast Vermont, with the next lowest population among the fifty states was estimated to have 623,908.
To say that the local citizenry is surprised by the attention would be an understatement. Almost every news article I checked out on the Wyoming Caucuses, lead with a quote from an astonished local Democrat like this one in the New York Times, “ ‘I have never had a period of compressed political intensity like these last 48 hours,’ Kathleen M. Karpan, a longtime Democratic activist and former Wyoming secretary of state, said Thursday.”
Actually the most astonishing thing about the quote above was that Ms. Karpan actually managed to get herself elected to state wide office at some point as a Democrat. You see, the Democratic Party in Wyoming has been a more endangered species than the gray wolf, another species gun loving locals itch to take pot shots at. Both are widely considerd verimin in this conservative state.
It wasn’t always this way. When I was groing up-in a respectable Republican household, mind you-Democrats were at least competative. With a base among the state’s blue collar workers in the coal, oil, railroad, lumber and construction industies, Democrats got themselves elected Governor, Senator, or as the states lone Representative. The tide began to turn in the late Sixties when this hawkish, defense oriented state recoiled at growing anti-war sentiment in the national party. It was excerbated as the state’s coal and railroad industries deeply cut back on employment through the use of new technologies. Boom and bust cycles in all of the extractive industries meant many blue collar workers had to leave the state while others breezed in and out without setting down roots. Finally, movement conservatives were able to use cultural attachments to guns-Wyomans are the ones that Charleston Heston had in mind when he said that to take away guns you would have to “pry it from our cold dead hands.”-and ingrained Western mistrust of the “damn gub’ment” to smash the local Democratic Party and dominate the state with virtual one party rule.
Meanwhile the tiny populattion of Wyoming presented an astonishing run of hyper-conservative actors on the national stage beginning with former Reagan Administration Secretary of the Interior James Watt, who believed it was unnessesary to preserve natural resources because the end of time was coming anyway. Former Senators Malcom Wallop and especially Alan K. Simpson, who was once widely touted as a possible Vice-Presidential candidate, exerted extrodinary influence. But of course Wyoming greatest gift to the nation is the Dark Sith Lord Dick Cheney himself.
So I am watching the Wyoming caucuses with more than passing interest. By the way, the Clinton camp is “lowering expections.” They couldn’t get much lower. Obama is projected to be a big winner. In the whitest state in the union.
Early returns from the caususes just posted by the AP show, “Obama led Clinton 57 percent to 40 percent with 6 of 23 counties reporting as they vied for the next prize in their extraordinarily tight Democratic presidential nomination race.”
The times, they are a changin’.