California and New Jersey are suburban states that used to be reliably Republican. But they are also coastal states whose voters don t like the ties between the GOP and the Religious Right. Clinton made it safe for tax-sensitive suburbanites to vote Democratic. He also got economic liberals such as Bill Bradley and Ralph Nader to denounce Clintonism as a sellout. At the same time, Clinton reduced the Democrats appeal in culturally conservative areas of the country, such as Tennessee and Arkansas and West Virginia, states Gore should have won.
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A few years ago, a colleague told me about San Francisco General Hospital. The only patients without a ward dedicated to them were white male heterosexuals. They had to make do with the random unoccupied bed. The psychiatrists who ran the pro-grams apparently believed that psychological readjustment was not possible without an understanding of one s place in the continuing drama of the dominant and the disenfranchised. Millions of lives have been saved, improved, and extended by the public health efforts of these three periods.