Just when you think you've got America all figured out, someone comes along and messes with the map. Forget about the wealth of the suburbs, all the soccer moms and SUVs and solid Republican support. The suburbs have grown up.
Ditch those notions of the seperately suffering inner city, too. Economic woes, racial segregation, crumbling sidewalks and desolate streets are bleeding into the suburbs so much that the line between the two appears to be missing. The new suburb is a complicated configuration of wealth and poverty, high-end schools and crowded classrooms.
The difficult part now for pols and the polity is dismantling deeply entrenched misnderstandings of what suburbia was, and what it is.
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Minnesota State Senator Myron Orfield - author of American Metropolitics: The New Suburban Reality
Michael Goldman, Democratic political consultant, and President of Goldman Associates in Boston
Whit Ayres, GOP pollster, and President of Ayres, McHenry & Associates.
