Redstate

By Pejman Yousefzadeh Posted in Democrats — Comments (10) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Matt Bai has written a piece discussing how Democrats can appeal to "King of the Hill" Democrats. As he explains:

If politicians and pundits are really so desperate to understand the values of conservative America without leaving their living rooms, then they should start setting the TiVo to record another animated sitcom, which Anderson mentions only in passing and which, despite its general policy of eschewing politics, somehow continues to offer the most subtle and complex portrayal of small-town voters on television: ''King of the Hill,'' on Fox. North Carolina's two-term Democratic governor, Mike Easley, is so obsessed with the show that he instructs his pollster to separate the state's voters into those who watch ''King of the Hill'' and those who don't so he can find out whether his arguments on social and economic issues are making sense to the sitcom's fans.

For those who have somehow missed ''King of the Hill'' during its nine-year run, here's a lightning-quick primer: It revolves around a classic American everyman, the earnest Hank Hill, who sells ''propane and propane accessories'' in the small town of Arlen, Tex. Hank lives with his wife, Peggy, a substitute Spanish teacher who can't really speak Spanish, and his son, Bobby, a sensitive class clown who exhibits none of his father's manliness. (''This is a carburetor,'' Hank tells his son. ''Take it apart, put it back together; repeat until you're normal.'')

The important thing here is that Hank Hill may be a Texan, but he and his friends could live in any of the fast-developing rural and exurban areas around Columbus or Phoenix or Atlanta that are bound to become the political weathervanes of the new century. The families in Arlen buy American-made pickups, eat at chain restaurants, maniacally water their lawns and do their shopping at the huge Mega Lo Mart. This could easily be the setup for a mean parody about rural life in America, in the same vein as ''South Park,'' but ''King of the Hill,'' which was created by Mike Judge (who is the voice of Hank and who also created ''Beavis and Butt-head''), has never been so crass. The show's central theme has always been transformation -- economic, demographic and cultural. Hank embodies all the traditional conservative values of those Americans who, as Bill Clinton famously put it, ''work hard and play by the rules.'' He's a proud gun owner and a Nascar fan. When Bobby announces that he has landed a job selling soda at the track, Hank solemnly responds, ''If you weren't my son, I'd hug you.''

As Arlen becomes more built up and more diverse, however, Hank finds himself struggling to adapt to new phenomena: art galleries and yoga studios, latte-sipping parents who ask their kids to call them by their first names and encourage them to drink responsibly. The show gently pokes fun at liberal and conservative stereotypes, but the real point is not to eviscerate so much as to watch Hank struggle mightily to adapt to a world of political correctness and moral ambiguity. When Peggy tells him he'll look like a racist for snubbing his Laotian neighbor, Hank replies, ''What the hell kind of country is this where I can only hate a man if he's white?'' And yet, like a lot of the basically conservative voters you meet in rural America -- and here's where Democrats should pay close attention -- Hank never professes an explicit party loyalty, and he and his buddies who sip beer in the alley don't talk like their fellow Texan Tom DeLay. If Hank votes Republican, it's because, as a voter who cares about religious and rural values, he probably doesn't see much choice. But Hank and his neighbors resemble many independent voters, open to proposals that challenge their assumptions about the world, as long as those ideas don't come from someone who seems to disrespect what they believe.

[. . .]

Easley polls surprisingly well for a Democrat among these voters, and he says he thinks that understanding the show's viewers might resolve some of the mysteries confronting his party about the vast swaths of red on the electoral map. Easley is reasonably progressive -- he raised taxes during his first term to protect education spending -- but he's also known as a guy who cracked up a race car during a spin on a Nascar course. When the governor, a former prosecutor, prepares to make his case on a partisan issue, he likes to imagine that he's explaining his position to Hank -- an exercise that might be useful for his colleagues in Washington too. For instance, Easley told me that Hank would never support a budget like the one North Carolina's Senate recently passed, which would drop some 65,000 mostly elderly citizens from the Medicaid rolls; Hank, after all, has pitched in to support his own father, a brutish war veteran, and he would never condone a community's walking away from its ailing parents. Similarly, Hank may be a lover of the environment -- he was furious when kids trashed the local campground -- but he resents self-righteous environmentalists like the ones who forced Arlen to install those annoying low-flow toilets. Voters like Hank, if they had heard about it on the evening news, would have supported Easley's ''Clean Smokestacks'' law, which forced North Carolina's coal-powered electric plants to burn cleaner, but only because industry was a partner in the final bill, rather than its target.

Interesting. Of course, this is all a roundabout way of saying that Democrats need to know how to appeal to rural voters--which should come as little surprise to those who have witnessed the last three election cycles. But it leads one to wonder how Democrats will be able to appeal to the "King of the Hill" crowd with people like Howard Dean at the helm of the party sneering--and encouraging others to sneer--at red state voters. And considering that Hank once said of Ronald Reagan "I miss voting for that man," the Democrats have a long road to travel before the "King of the Hill" crowd will give them a serious look.

UPDATE: This post argues quite persuasively that Bai just didn't get the show. (Thanks to Ann Althouse.)