Campaign '06: The Paris Primary
The Democrats this year are looking for votes wherever they can find them — even on the Left Bank
By VIVIENNE WALT/PARIS
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 04, 2006
About 4,400 miles separate St. Louis and Paris — Paris, France, that is, not Paris, Tennessee — and that distance was matched by the reality gap over the telephone on Tuesday night. On one end, Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat challenging Republican Senator Jim Talent, was defending her campaign to a crowd of party faithful, who crowded around a speaker phone to quiz seven Democratic candidates running in tight races against Republican incumbents. The Missouri state auditor sighed down the line: "You have to be here to understand what it's like here."
It was hard to argue with that. From a Left Bank living room on a sumptuous Beaux Arts boulevard, you had to shut your eyes hard to picture the Ozarks. About 50 Democrats had squeezed into the Paris apartment for a fund-raising conference call organized by Democrats Abroad, joined by Democrats in Vienna, Strasbourg, London and Cambridge, England, in settings that no doubt were also jarringly different from St. Louis. In this audience, there was an obvious question — a "litmus test," as one Paris Democrat put it — for candidates: How would you have voted on last week's detainee bill, which allows for aggressive interrogation tactics to be used on terror suspects? "I probably would have voted yes," McCaskill said. Then, as the groans and jeers erupted from the European phone lines, she rushed to add: "I'm very uncomfortable about the lack of habeas corpus. But this was better than what the Bush Administration wanted." "Bulls---!" came a blunt retort from Paris.
In years past, candidates might not have bothered to make an international call to stump for money and votes from Americans across the world. Americans living abroad were not even permitted to vote in U.S. elections before the 1980s, and since then their ballots have been viewed by many of those living abroad as marginal to most races. Yet millions of Americans are living overseas these days — an estimated 50,000 in Paris alone — and the numbers are growing. This year some candidates have taken notice....
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Among the writers, retired lawyers, bankers and a handful of younger Americans in the Paris living room, the Democratic Party's prospects looked impossibly bright. That perspective seemed distorted even to the event's host, Constance Borde, the kinetic head of the France chapter of Democrats Abroad. The organization's mailing list of about 2,500 Americans living in France includes hundreds of people who moved to Paris decades ago, fell in love with the city, and never left. "These people are totally ideologically out of touch," she said. "They don't realize how conservative America has become." (George Yates, a displaced San Francisco attorney who runs the France chapter of the Republicans Abroad, estimates his group has only "about 200" supporters, suggesting that the American expatriates here are largely Democrat.)...It took a dose of straight talk from McCaskill — a fourth-generation Missourian who was her high school Pep Club president and Homecoming Queen — to inject a note of reality. Asked if she would win endorsements from the Kansas City Star and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, she laughed. "This isn't about St. Louis and Kansas City," she said. "It's about rural Missouri. The challenge is on gay marriage, abortion. That's what we're up against." With another weary sigh, she added: "The problem we have as Democrats is that so many of the leaders come from the very, very blue states," she says. "They go home to the echo chamber. They never go to places like Missouri." But if you're a voter in Europe, Missouri can now come to you.
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1542712,00.html?cnn=yes 
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