The Independent (UK)

By Rupert Cornwell in Washington

06 February 2004

It is a tale of two issues, two states, and two men who may well square off in this autumn's Presidential election. It is also a story that perfectly illustrates the fault line that runs not only through American politics, but American society and American life as well.

This week, a ruling in the highest court in Massachusetts - home to Senator John Kerry, the favourite to win the Democratic nomination - indicated that the state may become the first in the US to allow full same-sex marriages.

At about the same moment, lawyers in George Bush's state of Texas won a last-ditch stay of execution for Scott Louis Panetti, diagnosed as borderline insane , who had been due to be put to death for two murders committed 12 years ago.

Whether Panetti is spared will now be decided by the Texas courts, although the precedents are not in his favour. In Massachusetts, opponents of gay marriage may yet prevail, if they can persuade the state's parliament to amend the Massachusetts constitution to define marriage as an institution between people of the opposite sex.

But such provisos are beside the point. The two affairs illustrate perfectly the labels that each party is already trying to attach to the candidate of the other. Mr Kerry, who is out to prove he is no soggy and ineffectual "Massachusetts liberal", must have winced as he learnt the court's decision, which confirmed every public stereotype of his state - as a nest of "arrogant liberals", determined to subvert everything that made America great.

Then there is the Texas model of America. This is frontier America, with anything-goes business (as in Enron), where bad guys (such as Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden) are to be hunted down like outlaws, and where - as the Panetti case may show - justice tends not to bother with facts that get in the way of simple views of right and wrong.

In strict party political terms, neither state measures up to its image. Since 1990, the governor of Massachusetts has been a Republican, while the majority of the Texas delegation to the House of Representatives is Democrat.

But even so, these exceptions prove the rule. Massachusetts Republicans tend to be broad-minded, while old-stock Democrats in Texas, a threatened species propped up by fading Confederate memories, are mostly indistinguishable from Republicans. In the culture wars that dictate modern American politics, the two states are polar opposites.

The US is a country divided - but not so much on conventional lines between Republicans and Democrats, between economic supply-siders and fiscal conservatives, or between those who favour universal health care and those who do not. The real division is over values.

It pits the secular against the religious, the old-fashioned virtues of small-town America against the wicked ways of the big cities, and the belief that central government is a friend against the conviction that it is a foe.

"God, guns and gays" is how one analyst sums up these so- called "wedge issues". Mr Kerry supports gay rights and gun controls (although he has slaughtered his fair share of wildlife in the name of sport). Mr Bush wears his religion on his sleeve; but if the Massachusetts senator's Catholicism plays a guiding role in his life, he gives little hint of it.

Given, however, the deliberations over the fate of Mr Panetti, another "G" might be injected into the contrast between Texas and Massachusetts: the gallows.

Unlike Mr Bush, who, as governor of Texas, presided over more than 150 executions, Mr Kerry opposes capital punishment. In Texas, the death penalty, carried out even on the semi-sane and on minors, has become a kind of industry. Massachusetts has not executed anyone since 1947, and formally abolished the practice in 1975.

The personalities of the last two presidents have widened the schism. The womanising, eternally slippery Bill Clinton embodied everything conservatives hated most. The born- again Christian Mr Bush, with his cowboy swagger and callow smirk, is a mirror-image demon figure for the left.

The struggle between the two camps is visible everywhere. At one level, it is the historical split between the North and South; why else do political pundits ask whether a northerner like John Kerry can win votes in Dixie. Or study the voting geography of Election 2000, showing the East and West Coasts and the big cities in Democratic blue and the rest in Republican red.

Massachusetts, grouped tight around Boston, with its great seats of learning such as Harvard, falls into the first category. Over the last eight presidential elections only Rhode Island has been more solidly Democrat. Back in the Nixon landslide year of 1972, Massachusetts was the only state carried by that arch-liberal George McGovern.

By contrast, the presidential politics of Texas are bulls-blood red. No Democrat has had a sniff of victory there since the days of LBJ.

Thus the battle lines for Election 2004 are drawn. Will Republicans persuade a majority that Massachusetts liberalism is the political equivalent of cyanide? Or will the Democrats manage to brand Mr Bush as a reckless and ignorant Texas cowboy?

Cliches both - but also shorthand for an America politically and culturally divided almost exactly in two.


				*SAVE SCOTT PANETTI* *The Independent (UK)*



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