The presidential candidate stood on the back of the
train in Helper, Utah, and declared: “The fuel for our machine age
economy will be absolutely dependent at some time or other upon
this great West.”
The candidate was Harry Truman; the
year, 1948. Besides being prophetic, the speech was significant
because it was the last time any major presidential candidate
visited Helper on the campaign trail. This campaign season, even
Mitt Romney, Utah’s favorite presidential hopeful, has not gone
anywhere near Helper – or Price, or Green River, or 90 percent of
the rest of rural Utah.
Just a year and a half ago, there
was a glimmer of hope that Truman-style campaign visits would
return to the West. With Democrats gaining ground in Republican
strongholds, the West has become a swing region, and it got a
collective voice in the nominating process when five of its states
agreed to hold caucuses or primaries on Feb. 5. The Democrats moved
their Nevada caucus to the front end of the nominating calendar,
and the Republicans moved Wyoming’s to the beginning of theirs. All
of these factors combined, it seemed, would force the candidates to
spend more time in the region addressing its particular issues. Or,
at the very least, they’d start wearing jeans, cowboy hats and bolo
ties.
Things haven’t turned out that way. Romney’s only
visited Utah seven times this year, in spite of the fact that he
has raised millions in the state. He and the other 16 candidates
have visited Iowa six times as often as they’ve visited the entire
Interior West. Even when the candidates do land on the rural West’s
runways, they rarely talk about the region’s specific issues.
In other words, we’re still campaign flyover country. But
that doesn’t diminish the West’s significance in the coming
election – this is swing-region battlefield territory. Since the
candidates aren’t doing much to court the region’s voters,
High Country News Senior Editor Ray Ring, in
this issue’s cover story, has offered his assistance. He does so by
writing the kind of speech we believe the West needs to hear.
Like Truman’s spiel 60 years ago, Ring’s dream campaign
speech focuses on the vast energy resources the West provides to
the nation. Truman encouraged the development of fossil fuels,
which have powered American TVs and toasters while stoking the
West’s economies and ravaging its landscapes. Ring’s ideal
candidate would also encourage energy development in the West, but
of a different sort.
Ring’s speech launches
HCN’s political coverage for 2008. We won’t
deluge you with every detail of the ongoing horse race; there’s
plenty of that to go around already. Rather, the pages of the
magazine and the Winning the West section of hcn.org will provide
insightful coverage, commentary and analysis of the Western
political scene as a whole.
Meanwhile, we’ll be watching
to see if any of the candidates ever wakes up to the West. Who
knows, we might even get to hear a speech like Ring’s delivered
from the back of a train, in some small town among the mountains
and the valleys and the coalmines and the drill rigs of the
West.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline An energy oasis in the political desert.
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