[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 25 (Monday, February 13, 2017)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1127-S1128]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




       PERSPECTIVE OF RURAL AMERICA TOWARD THE ROLE OF GOVERNMENT

  Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, there is a very good radio reporter in 
smalltown Iowa named Robert Leonard, or ``Dr. Bob,'' as he is known, 
who interviews me every month. I recently read an opinion piece he 
wrote in the New York Times where he gives his take on the perspective 
of rural America toward the role of government. This perspective is 
often lost in policy debates in our Nation's Capital. In this piece, 
Dr. Bob gives very thorough and intellectually honest commentary that 
more people should read.
  I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the New York 
Times article entitled, ``Why Rural America Voted for Trump'' by Robert 
Leonard dated January 5, 2017.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                [From the New York Times, Jan. 5, 2017]

                   Why Rural America Voted for Trump

                          (By Robert Leonard)

       Knoxville, IA.--One recent morning, I sat near two young 
     men at a coffee shop here whom I've known since they were 
     little boys. Now about 18, they pushed away from the table, 
     and one said: ``Let's go to work. Let the liberals sleep 
     in.'' The other nodded.
       They're hard workers. As a kid, one washed dishes, took 
     orders and swept the floor at a restaurant. Every summer, the 
     other picked sweet corn by hand at dawn for a farm stand and 
     for grocery stores, and then went to work all day on his 
     parents' farm. Now one is a welder, and the other is in his 
     first year at a state university on an academic scholarship. 
     They are conservative, believe in hard work, family, the 
     military and cops, and they know that abortion and socialism 
     are evil, that Jesus Christ is our savior, and that Donald J. 
     Trump will be good for America.
       They are part of a growing movement in rural America that 
     immerses many young people in a culture--not just 
     conservative news outlets but also home and church 
     environments--that emphasizes contemporary conservative 
     values. It views liberals as loathsome, misinformed and weak, 
     even dangerous.
       Who are these rural, red-county people who brought Mr. 
     Trump into power? I'm a native Iowan and reporter in rural 
     Marion County, Iowa. I consider myself fairly liberal. My 
     family has mostly voted Democratic since long before I was 
     born. To be honest, for years, even I have struggled to 
     understand how these conservative friends and neighbors I 
     respect--and at times admire--can think so differently from 
     me, not to mention how over 60 percent of voters in my county 
     could have chosen Mr. Trump.
       Political analysts have talked about how ignorance, racism, 
     sexism, nationalism, Islamophobia, economic 
     disenfranchisement and the decline of the middle class 
     contributed to the popularity of Mr. Trump in rural America. 
     But this misses the deeper cultural factors that shape the 
     thinking of the conservatives who live here.
       For me, it took a 2015 pre-caucus stop in Pella by J. C. 
     Watts, a Baptist minister raised in the small town of 
     Eufaula, Okla., who was a Republican congressman from 1995 to 
     2003, to begin to understand my neighbors--and most likely 
     other rural Americans as well.
       ``The difference between Republicans and Democrats is that 
     Republicans believe people are fundamentally bad, while 
     Democrats see people as fundamentally good,'' said Mr. Watts, 
     who was in the area to campaign for Senator Rand Paul. ``We 
     are born bad,'' he said and added that children did not need 
     to be taught to behave badly--they are born knowing how to do 
     that.
       ``We teach them how to be good,'' he said. ``We become good 
     by being reborn--born again.''
       He continued. ``Democrats believe that we are born good, 
     that we create God, not that he created us. If we are our own 
     God, as the Democrats say, then we need to look at something 
     else to blame when things go wrong--not us.''
       Mr. Watts talked about the 2015 movie theater shooting in 
     Lafayette, La., in which two people were killed. Mr. Watts 
     said that Republicans knew that the gunman was a bad man, 
     doing a bad thing. Democrats, he added, ``would look for 
     other causes--that the man was basically good, but that it 
     was the guns, society or some other place where the blame 
     lies and then they will want to control the guns, or 
     something else--not the man.'' Republicans, he said, don't 
     need to look anywhere else for the blame.
       Hearing Mr. Watts was an epiphany for me. For the first 
     time I had a glimpse of where many of my conservative friends 
     and neighbors were coming from. I thought, no wonder 
     Republicans and Democrats can't agree on things like gun 
     control, regulations or the value of social programs. We live 
     in different philosophical worlds, with different 
     foundational principles.
       Overlay this philosophical perspective on the American 
     rural-urban divides of history, economy and geography, and 
     the conservative individual responsibility narrative becomes 
     even more powerful. In my experience, the urban-rural divide 
     isn't really so much a red state versus blue state issue, 
     it's red county versus blue county. Rural Iowans have more in 
     common with the rural residents of Washington State and New 
     Mexico--places I've also lived--than with the residents of 
     Des Moines, Seattle and Albuquerque.
       Look at a national map of which counties went for Democrats 
     and which for Republicans: Overwhelmingly the blue counties 
     are along waterways, where early river transportation 
     encouraged the formation of cities, and surround state 
     capitals. This is also where most investment in 
     infrastructure and services is made. Rural Americans 
     recognize that this is how it must be, as the cities are 
     where most of the people are, yet it's a sore spot.
       In state capitols across America, lawmakers spend billions 
     of dollars to take a few seconds off a city dweller's commute 
     to his office, while rural counties' farm-to-market roads 
     fall into disrepair. Some of the paved roads in my region are 
     no longer maintained and are reverting to gravel. For a 
     couple of generations now, services that were once scattered 
     across rural areas have increasingly been consolidated in 
     urban areas, and rural towns die. It's all done in the name 
     of efficiency.
       In cities, firefighters and E.M.T.s are professionals whose 
     departments are funded by local, state and federal tax 
     dollars. Rural America relies on volunteers. If I have a 
     serious heart attack at home, I'll be cold to the touch by 
     the time the volunteer ambulance crew from a town 22 miles 
     away gets here.
       Urban police officers have the latest in computer equipment 
     and vehicles, while small-town cops go begging.
       In this view, blue counties are where most of our tax 
     dollars are spent, and that's where all of our laws are 
     written and passed. To rural Americans, sometimes it seems 
     our taxes mostly go to making city residents live better. We 
     recognize that the truth is more complex, particularly when 
     it comes to social programs, but it's the perception that 
     matters--certainly to the way most people vote.
       To make matters worse, jobs are continuing to move to 
     metropolitan areas.

[[Page S1128]]

     Small-town chamber of commerce directors and mayors still 
     have big dreams, and use their perkiest grins and tax 
     abatements to try to lure new businesses, only to see their 
     hopes dashed, time and again. Many towns with a rich history 
     and strong community pride are already dead; their citizens 
     just don't know it yet.
       Many moderate rural Republicans became supporters of Mr. 
     Trump when he released his list of potential Supreme Court 
     nominees who would allow the possibility of overturning Roe 
     v. Wade. They also think the liberal worldview creates 
     unnecessary rules and regulations that cripple the economy 
     and take away good jobs that may belong to them or their 
     neighbor. Public school systems and colleges are liberal 
     tools of indoctrination that go after what we love and value 
     most--our children.
       Some of what liberals worry about they see as pure 
     nonsense. When you are the son or daughter of a carpenter or 
     mechanic and a housewife or secretary who lives paycheck to 
     paycheck, who can't afford to send kids to college, as many 
     rural residents are, white privilege is meaningless and 
     abstract.
       It's not just older people. The two young men at breakfast 
     exemplify a younger generation with this view. When Ted Cruz 
     campaigned in a neighboring town in 2015, I watched as a 
     couple of dozen grade-school pupils sat at his feet, as if 
     they were at a children's service at church. His campaign 
     speech was nearly a sermon, and the children listened wide-
     eyed when he told them the world is a scary place, and it's 
     godly men like him who are going to save them from the evils 
     of President Obama, Hillary Clinton and their fellow 
     Democrats.
       While many blame poor decisions by Mrs. Clinton for her 
     loss, in an environment like this, the Democratic candidate 
     probably didn't matter. And the Democratic Party may not for 
     generations to come. The Republican brand is strong in rural 
     America--perhaps even strong enough to withstand a disastrous 
     Trump presidency.
       Rural conservatives feel that their world is under siege, 
     and that Democrats are an enemy to be feared and loathed. 
     Given the philosophical premises Mr. Watts presented as the 
     difference between Democrats and Republicans, reconciliation 
     seems a long way off.

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