-Caveat Lector- <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/"> </A> -Cui Bono?- .....far and wide! Gore's Liberal Secret 2.07.00 | by Lindsay Sobel When President Clinton goofed during the State of the Union address, solemnly paying tribute to Vice President Gore for his effort to "make our communities more liberal," he got a lot of laughter. And even more when flubbed it again. But the guffawing audience didn't know how very true Clinton's Freudian blunder was. Clinton was talking about Gore's Livable Communities initiative, which purports to curb sprawl and preserve open spaces. It is a proposal marketed to soccer moms while secretly aiding the welfare moms too. In other words, it panders to swing voters while benefiting the liberal Democratic base -- minorities and the urban poor. It is also wonky and green -- vintage Gore. Here's the soccer mom narrative. For decades, Americans have moved out of cities for the peace and open space of the suburbs. But as more people move out, suburbs become clogged with traffic and blighted by strip malls. Sprawl eats up surrounding farmland (not to mention other undeveloped areas such as the Florida Everglades), and cars pollute. Gore's initiative, based on a philosophy called "smart growth," buys land for preservation and improves public transportation. It also proposes funding -- though at the budgetary equivalent of pocket change -- to fix city schools, combat crime, and clean up toxic waste sites in cities to ready them for developers. It's intended to suck suburbanites back to cities. Smart growth advocates -- a cult-like group of environmentalists and urban planners -- are elated to have a national figure touting their bubbling movement. They argue that as cities become more attractive, people move back in, traffic clears, and venerated "green spaces" are preserved. And it saves government the cost of building new roads, sewers, schools, post offices, and other amenities that already exist downtown. Suburbanites love smart growth. No wonder. Newspapers have been running photographs of choked highways, and "road rage" has become part of the lexicon. In 1998, voters passed almost 200 growth-related ballot initiatives; twenty-nine governors have advanced smart growth in major speeches. Politicians in New Jersey, Oregon, and Maryland have become green idylls. Based on this momentum, as well as polls and focus groups, Gore pollster Celinda Lake predicts that smart growth could be a political slam-dunk -- so long as it's framed with suburban swing voters in mind. Here's the calculation: The Democratic base lives in the city, and the Republican one on the periphery. As more voters move to the suburbs (50 percent live there now, according to one measure), Democrats must earn their votes or risk becoming obsolete. If Gore wins the Democratic nomination as expected, he's going to need every suburban vote he can get. So he's working it. In numerous speeches in the last two years, he has felt the pain of parents who have to read their children a bedtime story from their cell phones while stuck in traffic. (Swing voters have cell phones.) With smart growth, he burbles, "Our kids will see horses, cows, and farms outside books and movies." Oregon Congressman Earl Blumenauer -- who rides his bike to the Capitol and uses words like "greenfrastructure" -- wonks wildly that in our sprawling suburbs "you have to burn a quart of gas to buy a quart of milk." It is certainly true that sprucing up cities will help suburbanites. But the secret -- unceremoniously blurted before Congress and the nation -- is that livable communities efforts would achieve the liberal goal of helping poor minorities trapped in the inner cities at least as much as it would aid suburban road ragers. Here's why: Sprawl has devastated cities, causing them to hemorrhage jobs and businesses. With the wealthy moving out, cities have lost their tax base, causing city services and schools to deteriorate. In large part, minorities have been left behind, poorer and more isolated than before. If done right, livable communities initiatives could make city living more attractive, bringing jobs, businesses, and tax dollars back to the cities. (In fact, many of the tenets of smart growth sound eerily like liberal solutions to poverty marketed to a different crowd.) Ideally, smart growth might also the resegregation trend in housing and schools. (For an explanation of sprawl's racist roots, click here.) http://www.prospect.org/webarchives/00-02/sobel0207.html#roots Though he hasn't said much about it, it's clear that Gore had "liberal communities" in mind when he proposed his initiative. Christopher Edley, Jr., who has spent an illustrious career advocating old-style liberal solutions to racial isolation, is one of the Gore campaign's top policy architects. And while Gore's publicly feeling suburbanites' pain, he is privately meeting with urban and minority grass roots groups. Though they acknowledge how much smart growth could do to help inner cities, pollsters warn that saying so could destroy smart growth's appeal. "Clinton became president through his ability to retract the Reagan Democrats into the Democratic fold," says David Rusk, a former politician and author of a book on the politics of sprawl, "For many Reagan Democrats, the specter of poor black folks being a part of their community is pretty menacing." Maybe so. But now that the cat is out of the bag, advocates might as well groom it and let it preen on the couch in the living room. Smart growth is one of the few ideas that can simultaneously benefit rich and poor, suburban, urban, and rural, black, white, and Hispanic. When there are so many issues that pit groups against each other, maybe "liberal communities" wouldn't hurt. Watch the American Prospect Magazine for more articles on sprawl. http://www.prospect.org/webarchives/00-02/sobel0207.html Bard <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soap-boxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'�with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds�is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. 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