NEW YORK CITY -- The new U.S. electoral map looks like the old Yugoslavia. Whoever takes the presidential oath next January will have to deal with this stark, disturbing fact of American politics: The country is divided as much by geography as by party.
On the coasts, West and East, there was not much of a contest on Nov. 7. It wasn't close in California, where Al Gore triumphed by more than a million votes, nor here in New York, which the vice president carried by 60 percent.
That vast continent in between was equally one-sided. George W. swept every state, Tennessee and Arkansas included, where people speak with a Southern accent. Westward, he broke the 60-percent barrier in Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Texas.
The political geography carries enormous freight for the next man, Bush or Gore, to take the presidential oath.
If it's Bush, he will need to govern from a city that voted 85 percent for Gore, covered by a media rooted in Washington and New York, capitals notorious for Democratic loyalty and at least some degree of East-Coast elitism.
If it's Gore, he will need to lead a continental nation the great expanse of which voted for the other guy. Boarding Air Force One, he will be able to fly from Washington to the California border without passing a single state that voted for him.
If these two worlds -- the bi-coastal nation of pro-choice, somewhat hip, ethnically diverse Democrats and the inland nation of culturally conservative Republicans -- are to live and act as one, it will take a leader who matches his strength with humility. He will need to convince both followers and opponents that his first and foremost interests lie in meeting the needs of both.
The danger is that both winner and loser will proceed in the direction he took in carving out his half of the electorate on Nov. 7.
Bush, an Ivy League-educated Texan of obvious charm, failed to exploit his personal gifts in winning support up North. He lost Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York and Connecticut because he failed to crack the all-important suburban vote.
There were two reasons for this failure: the perception that he is not articulate or smart enough to be president and the perception that he is surrounded by right-wing Republicans who will dominate his selection of Supreme Court justices.
Bush could have won up North, especially in Michigan and Pennsylvania, both of which he lost 51 to 46 percent, had he picked either John McCain or Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge as his running mate. Given a chance to bridge the gap between North and South, he failed to take it, relying instead on the safe choice of Dick Cheney, another Texas oil man.
Gore also blew his chance to be a national unifier. He could have run a campaign that exploited the economic progress of the last eight years. He chose instead to run a campaign of anger at the country's ongoing economic injustices. He could have run to the political center, continuing the New Democratic movement of President Clinton. Instead, he tilted leftward, playing to the old Democratic pressure groups, not the moderate voter who wanted nothing more than to continue the successful fiscal and trade policies Clinton had begun.
The result is a country whose coasts voted one way and whose great heartland voted the other, a country whose future will now be dictated by the troubling vote count in Florida, the one state whose polyglot, oddly integrated population puts it in neither of the great geographic factions that now wrestle each other for power.
(Chris Matthews, chief of the San Francisco Examiner's Washington Bureau, is host of "Hardball" on CNBC and MSNBC cable channels. The 1999 edition of "Hardball" was published by Touchstone Books.)
Copyright 2000, Newspaper Enterprise Assn.
