SAN FRANCISCO, Oct 23 (IPS) – “What are they thinking?” is a question my mother screams at the television every election season. A union nurse in overwhelmingly liberal, Democratic San Francisco, she cannot believe that the presidential election is even close.

“What is wrong with these people?” she asks, amazed that about half the country will vote Republican this year.

Who are these people who will vote Republican even after the Grand Old Party started a war based on lies, ruined the economy, fouled the environment while enriching the oil companies, and created a situation where tens of millions of citizens lack even basic health insurance?

“Who are these people?” indeed. Inside the comfortable political bubble of San Francisco, it is possible to go through daily life without meeting a real live Republican. Like other big U.S. cities on the East and West Coast, many San Franciscans feel under siege — their future held hostage by a strange species of conservatives they in many cases have never met.

Many wish they could reach out and convince these conservatives that the right doesn’t have the answers they’re seeking, but they don’t know where to start.

Enter Rose Aguilar, a journalist and political blogger who grew up in Sonoma County, about 40 miles north of San Francisco and now hosts a daily talk show on KALW, an affiliate of National Public Radio. After George W. Bush’s re-election in 2004, Aguilar rented a van and hit the road with her boyfriend. Their goal: to meet and speak with as many Republicans as possible on their own turf.

The result of their travels is the book, “Red Highways: A Liberal’s Journey into the Heartland”, which records the dialogues Aguilar had with conservatives in four traditionally Republican states: Texas, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Montana…Read More

Red Highways: A Liberal’s Journey Into the Heartland
Rose Aguilar
Polipoint Press

The stark blue and red contrast of the electoral map is misleading: In reality, not just states but groups and even individuals are varying hues of purple. But even with the election over, how shall we make sense of the vast, overwhelming diversity of our political landscape? Two new books offer contrasting models of how to do so, with some tantalizing similarities: Both seek to complicate the easy red-blue snapshot offered on television…Read More

When Rose Aguilar, host of Your Call on San Francisco public radio and more recently on KUSP, first decided to write her book Red Highways: A Liberal’s Journey Into the Heartland after the soul-crushing 2004 election, she probably didn’t imagine that, come book-tour time, she’d be face-to-face with the kind of sound-bite journalism that pissed her off enough to write it in the first place. “Nobody reads the book,” she says. “And the differences between the men and the women interviewers–the men always have to have the upper hand.”…Read More

Rose Aguilar has a solution for anyone forced to work twenty-hour days at a job that requires huge reserves of brain power: The raw food diet. Spinach smoothies; nothing processed or packaged; no meat, eggs, or dairy products. That’s how she subsisted while writing her new book Red Highways: A Liberal’s Journey into the Heartland — about a six-month investigative journey through America’s so-called “red states” — and hosting the daily KALW radio show Your Call. It’s also the reason that 35-year-old Aguilar can stay out until 3 a.m. celebrating Obama’s victory in her Mission District neighborhood, then stay up another hour reading the newspaper headlines online, and still look bright-eyed for an interview the following day. Showing no signs of sleep deprivation, Aguilar sat by the front window of San Francisco’s Ritual Café on that now-historical Wednesday. She was eating yellow vegan cake — a rare splurge — and perused that day’s San Francisco Chronicle. Aguilar is, by all appearances, an iconic San Francisco tree-hugger: She wears fleece jackets, has an illustrious public radio career, and uses progressive blogs like CommonDreams.org as her primary source of information. How she withstood six months in the Bible Belt and came away with renewed faith in humanity is anybody’s guess…Read More

If you’re one of the 200,000 San Franciscans who voted for Barack Obama, maybe you’re staring at that map of red and blue states wondering, “How could 56 million people vote for John McCain? Why is there still this incredible swath of crimson belting our country?”

Similar questions have been burning in the minds of liberals since the 2000 election. In 2005, San Francisco resident Rose Aguilar turned them into a quest: “One night, after spending several hours online, sending articles to friends who were probably sick of me barraging them with e-mails and practically falling over political books and magazines I had yet to open, I realized it was time to leave my comfort zone. I needed to turn off my computer and get out into the streets to find out why people vote the way they do and find out if we’re as divided as we’re led to believe.”

Red Highways: A Liberal’s Journey into the Heartland (PoliPoint Press, 221 pages, $15.95) is the result of Aguilar’s six-month road trip through reliably red states to ask people why they identify with one party over another, or vote for certain candidates, or don’t vote at all…Read More