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As Plano goes ... so goes the nation? Commentators around the country have been debating that for months. If only they understood what the booming Dallas suburb is really like.

Article Excerpt
Last December, as pundits turned Brokeback Mountain into the culture wars' latest ammunition depot (It's an attack on marriage! It's a landmark event! It's just a movie!), New York Times columnist Frank Rich momentarily called a cease-fire. Brokeback Mountain was a heartland hit, he told anxious liberals. It represented "a rebuke and antidote" to President George W. Bush's support for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. The movie, which he acknowledged has "no overt politics," was "not leading a revolution but ratifying one." After all, it was even doing well in Plano, Texas. Nonsense, replied Los Angeles-based blogger Mickey Kaus. of Slate. Plano is no indicator. It's not the land of pickups and gun racks; it's just a bunch of yuppies. Kaus, an iconoclastic Democrat, quoted a reader who wrote, "Plano, TX is NOT the heartland. It's a ritzy, upscale, SUV-choked, conspicuous-consumption-driven Dallas exurb populated by more east-coast 'expatriates' than native Texans." In other words, this suburb isn't Middle America. It's an affluent island of educated blue in a sea of ignorant red. It's a bunch of people who think more or less like Kaus and Rich. This summer, Kaus revived his argument again to puncture claims that Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth was winning converts in Republican territory. One supposed indicator was the movie's success at the Angelika Film Center in Plano. Again, Kaus quoted a reader: "Plano is no more conservative than Sunnyvale or Palo Alto; it's a typical American metropolitan suburban mongrel (10% Asian, 10% Hispanic) that comprises newcomers from a wide variety of backgrounds and income groups."

"What is Plano really like?" suddenly became a hotly debated question in the political blogosphere. The answer matters not because online pundits are considering relocating but because Plano has come to symbolize the fast-growing territories of Red America. As Plano goes, perhaps, so goes the nation. It's the quintessential "boomburg" and the new Peoria: the touchstone Middle American town, a bellwether for retailers and culture watchers alike.

Regarding the movies, Kaus came to the right...

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