The most thought-provoking article I read in the aftermath of November 6 was not about objectives, strategies or outcomes. It was about belly buttons.
There is, it seems, a legitimately scientific undertaking called the Belly Button Biodiversity Project, run by scientists with North Carolina State University and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. According to Rob Dunn, a biologist at N.C. State, the project began as an offbeat way to draw attention to the topic of science: the project would culture the bacteria in people’s navels and report on the cool life forms we carry around in them.
The surprise that turned the PR stunt into straight-up research was the discovery that the cargo in our navels differs dramatically for each umbilicus. “As we looked at belly buttons, we saw a terrible, yawning richness of life,” Dunn said. In the study, though each navel might carry fifty species of bacteria on average, the fifty varied wildly from person to person, with the scientists cataloging literally thousands of species among a sample base of dozens of abdomens. “The belly buttons reminded me of rain forests,” Dunn observed.
Better still, the scientists could find no reason as to why this is. They crosschecked gender, ethnicity, geography, even innie-versus-outie, yet found no explanation for why particular bacteria grew in particular navels. “We know these species are important; they affect your health and odor each day,” Dunn said. “We just don’t have a clue what determines who they are, yet.”
To understand why this year’s elections didn’t turn out the way a lot of folks anticipated may require some navel-gazing.
Let me digress to marine biology for a moment. If you were ever to anthropomorphize a toad, I think it would resemble Dick Morris, the former Clinton advisor turned GOP soothsayer. The man has tangibly amphibian features and, given his frequent appearances on the Fox News Channel, is at ease in muck. Never known for any particular prescience in his punditry, he went way out on a limb, or perhaps a lily pad, prior to the election, to pick a winner. “A landslide for Romney approaching the magnitude of Obama’s against McCain,” croaked Morris. “On Sunday, we changed our clocks. On Tuesday, we’ll change our president.”
At least Dick knows what time it is now.
Tuesday evening, watching the glum menagerie on Fox work through at least a couple of Kubler-Ross’s grieving stages, I heard Dick Morris say one correct thing. As West Coast numbers piled atop the Obama majority, seeming to cause Morris’s face to sink into his chins, he offered this by way of explanation: “This is not your father’s America.”
By God, for once Dick Morris was right. It’s not. Much the way that my father’s America was not like his father’s America, nor his, his, nor his, his, all the way back to when John Haden got off the boat in Virginia 200 years ago.
America does change. America evolves. Sometimes it results in evolutionary dead ends, such as tolerating slavery and mandating Prohibition, but throughout its history, the republic’s social and economic changes generally have strengthened it to survive.
As the republic changes, so must those who seek to lead it. Mitt Romney might have won in another era, but he was ill suited to attract support in 21st century America, determined as he was to win by relying on the 20th century Republican base. For example, Ralph Reed of the Faith and Freedom Coalition boasted that evangelicals constituted 27% of the electorate this time around, and that they came in for Romney 78% to 21%. Well and good, but weren’t these voters located mostly in states already predisposed to vote Republican?
President Obama took the Latino vote nationwide by 44 points over Governor Romney, and that was useful in key states such as Florida, Nevada and Colorado. The GOP did well among whites, old folks and independents, but the Democrats scored with African-Americans, women, young people and Hispanics, and in populous states with more electoral votes, the latter combination paid off.
What in your father’s America was vilified as “miscegenation” is hailed today as “multiculturalism,” at least on the blue side of the ballot. Talking Points Memo’s publisher, Josh Marshall, repurposed a piece he wrote about racial politics 15 years ago which holds up today. “The Republican Party has increasingly relied on the support of constituencies that feel embittered and resentful toward minorities and the poor,” he opined. “Any genuine effort to aid minorities or the poor would instantly alienate a substantial portion of the Republican base. [They] can’t be the party of both black opportunity and anti-black resentment, no matter how big the tent. The Democrats tried it; it didn’t work.”
Even as national Republicans mull the possibilities of moving toward the center, here in Alabama the party of resentment still holds sway, with nary a Democrat to be found serving at the statewide level. Unfortunately, it’s not an anomaly. Out of fifty state governments, one party or the other controls 37 this year. While voters may be demanding bipartisanship in Washington, they seem to perceive it less necessary in their own hometowns.
At some point the political changes underway at the national level will filter down to the Heart of Dixie. Here in the belly button of the beast, we will come to terms at last with the rich diversity of our citizenry and acknowledge it, rather than trying to play one side against the other. It will happen because at some point soon, the breadth of our problems and the paucity of the resources available to solve them will require our political leaders to respond with sagacity rather than ideology. And, as the old spiritual says, won’t that be a day?