Less than two months ago, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack sat in the offices of this newspaper and talked about the nation’s opioid troubles.
Vilsack has one of those great American stories. Born in an orphanage, he rose to a position on the presidential cabinet. He married a woman he met in college and moved to her Iowa hometown. He later became a two-term governor of that state.
But this day he focused on a problem plaguing too many Americans, an addiction to painkillers and heroin. Vilsack became President Obama’s point person in addressing this.
Sure, the epidemic — almost 13,000 Americans died of heroin overdoses last year — proves non-discriminating, touching all parts of the country, rural and urban. Vilsack had a grasp of that.
But he also remembered a boyhood during which his mother battled addiction.
Once you’ve seen that up close, affecting a loved one, years don’t dampen the image. For the president and nation, then, he accepted the problem’s macro view and sought to make it better.
More recently, Vilsack found another concern. According to a story in The Washington Post, he hoped to find a kindred spirit in Vice President Joe Biden, a man he had known for decades.
In the receiving line at an event, Vilsack told Biden:
“We need to speak more directly to our folks in rural America. And we have to spend time there.”
Vilsack saw the same electoral maps that you did, the ones with those impossibly broad swaths of red running across the innards of the United States.
True, these maps prove deceptive because the vast rural areas of the nation have, by definition, fewer voters of any type per square mile. You fill in Wyoming as a massive bloc of red while the relatively tiny borough of Manhattan in New York goes blue, and you’re bound to be misled.
It remains instructive, though, that so much of the non-urban United States — Rust Belt, Grain Belt, Bible Belt, most other belts — has abandoned the Democratic Party.
Have a look at the electoral map in 1948, when Missouri’s own Harry Truman sought a full term as president. Setting aside the four Southern states that went to Strom Thurmond on the Dixiecrat (read, noncivil rights) ticket, the red and blue look largely flipped from that of 2016.
Vilsack makes the case that the Democratic Party has largely overlooked these rural stretches, has lost track of the sweeping middle America whose people it claims to most closely represent.
Nonsense, say many Democrats, who point not to maps the color of blood but to the fact that their presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, outdistanced the winning Republican by a couple of million more popular voters.
Except to raise money on a couple of occasions, Clinton barely stepped foot in Missouri, had only the hint of an organization, and that showed in races all up and down the state’s ballot. And Missouri is a state with some “blue” bona-fides in its recent history.
As Democrats settled into their new normal as a minority party in Congress, they fended off any perception of bi-coastal leanings and leadership attempts by new blood from the nation’s heartland.
The House Democrats picked as their leaders a 76-year-old and a 77-year-old, both of whom can smell salt water from their home districts.
Vilsack, who earlier served as mayor of Mount Pleasant, Iowa, population less than 9,000, spent his gubernatorial years driving lanes lined on either side with corn fields.
If he believes his own party has lost touch with the middle of this nation, it might be worth a listen.
Ken Newton’s column runs on Tuesday and Sunday. Follow him on Twitter: @SJNPNewton.
