Posted on 10/13/2004 7:52:53 AM PDT by dead
October 14, 2004
He might be 65 but John Howard understands how younger people are thinking.
To the folks in Gnashville, John Howard's fourth and most decisive election victory is not only devastating, it is inexplicable. "I cannot understand how the Coalition was returned to power," a "stunned" Petrina Frost of Woollahra wrote to The Daily Telegraph. "I only know one person who voted Liberal. I attended the polling booth with three people. We all voted Labor. I discussed the results with my workmates this morning - they all voted Labor. Everyone I talk to voted Labor. So, tell me, how is it that Labor did not win?"
Poor Petrina should get out more. The same goes for the big wheels of the Labor Party, not to mention a good portion of the media who, as the joke goes in Liberal circles, suffered a "major failure of intelligence" in not predicting the election result and misjudging Mark Latham's appeal.
It will probably take more time than usual for the burghers of Gnashville to regroup and rationalise an explanation for the result that can fit with their world view. So far all they've managed is The-Big-Lie-On-Interest-Rates-Is-The-New-Tampa. But as they pull and stretch the facts to fit, they ought to consider the omen from Paris which came just as the polls opened on Saturday: Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstructionism, died in Paris of pancreatic cancer, bringing to a symbolic end a destructive era of postmodern truth-twisting.
The story of Howard's historic landslide is the evolution of conservative support since he won government in 1996. The strong-minded, grey-haired stalwarts of the Liberal Party have made way for a new generation of conservative under-30s who admire the Howard reviled by the baby boomer nostalgics of Gnashville. Howard has presided over a "youthquake" of conservatism not dissimilar to Ronald Reagan's in the United States in the 1980s.
If you observed each of Howard's four victory parties at the Wentworth Hotel, that evolution was evident. Each year the crowd has been getting younger, rowdier and more patriotic as the food improved, from sparse plates of triangle sandwiches in 1996 to the tempura prawns and Peking duck wraps abounding this year.
In 2001 most of the under-30s were T-shirt-clad volunteers bussed in from Parramatta by (probably former) MP Ross Cameron, 39. This time the under-30s were not just political volunteers but Howard fans such as Ben Williams, 25, the popular winner of the first Big Brother reality TV series, who now runs his own production company. The result was "fantastic, mind-boggling", he said on Saturday night. "John Howard is a great Australian and a great man."
This time, handsome young men in dark suits surrounded by willowy beauties in dazzling frocks seemed to outnumber their elders and kept the party going well after 2am. They spurred Howard and his family to sing the national anthem and yelled "you beauty" so enthusiastically he struggled to keep a straight face during his victory speech.
The more ambitious, who found their way into the private party next door to the grand ballroom, orbited closely around Howard's sons, Tim, 26, an internet entrepreneur dubbed "the spam king" and "hot" by one female journalist, and Richard, 24, who had flown in from Washington where he has been working on the Bush-Cheney campaign.
Howard recently said the greatest measure of his success was that he got on so well with his adult children. He has tapped into the mindset of their generation which has seen the fallout of the baby boomers' beloved social revolution: child abuse, broken families, the destructiveness of unchecked pornography and promiscuity, youth suicide, social breakdown, farcical political correctness on university campuses. The children of divorce and hippiedom are looking for social stability and resent attempts at indoctrination by leftist teachers.
The Coalition may have become the natural party of government because Howard and his campaigners have understood the conservative evolution from the start. Labor, on the other hand, has an identity crisis. "We've got to decide who we are," Labor frontbencher Lindsay Tanner, said on Tuesday night on ABC TV's Lateline. "I think that's our core problem. Are we a party that supports loggers or environmentalists?" Good question, because you can't be both. And with the soul-searching Labor will be doing over the next three years, and after the catastrophe of Latham's late embrace of the Greens in Tasmania, you can be fairly sure the party won't decide to shift itself left.
There is no such indecision from the NSW Liberal state director, Scott Morrison, 36. On Saturday night he said Labor lost the campaign in the first week. "It allowed us to set the agenda which surprised us." What didn't surprise him was Louise Markus winning Greenway, in the western mortgage belt. Those western Sydney seats, which surround Latham's seat of Werriwa, have gone from safe Labor to marginal Liberal to safe Liberal under Howard.
The plan to snare Greenway began 18 months ago. Morrison is a member of the Pentecostal Hillsong church in Alan Cadman's safe seat of Mitchell in north-west Sydney. He mentioned to Cadman that he had heard Labor's MP in Greenway was retiring. Cadman suggested fellow Hillsong member Markus, who began doing the grassroots work that won her the seat.
This wasn't a marketing ploy by strategists to find a candidate to sell but an authentic empathy with a socially conservative, family-oriented electorate.
Sociologist Katharine Betts, analysing the 2001 election, found the views of Coalition voters and candidates on social and economic issues to be much more closely aligned than for Labor voters and their candidates. Labor candidates expressed views far to the left of Labor voters. People are no longer defined by class or job but by values.
Suburbanisation and terrorism have also promoted the rise of conservative values says a new book, The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America, by The Economist writers John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge. In the culture wars, "the right is not necessarily winning on every front, but it is making the political weather now in the way that the left did in the 1960s".
Even Derrida changed in the past 15 years, says an obituary in the Chronicle of Higher Education. He came to believe there was such a thing as the "undeconstructible" and thought he might not be an atheist after all.
Australian women tend to be attractive. Some of these conservative women need to come over here!
Paging Ms. Kael, Ms. Pauline Kael, please pick up the yellow courtesy phone...
Here's hoping John Howard doesn't screw up like Nixon did, however (I'm sure he won't).
Source?
And little lambsie divey.
Sorry about that! Don’t know what I did wrong. Here it is:
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/10/13/1097607297531.html
LOL! The exact same thing popped into my mind. Pauline Kael indeed! Hahahahahahahahahaha!!!!!!!!!! So true.
So when do they get their guns back?
All I care about is that they're on board in the global war on terror.
"The-New-Tampa" ? ? ?
Would some who speaks 'Strine' be so kind as to explain what "New Tampa" means in this article? Last time I saw the term it was the name of a large high end development north of Tampa, Florida?
Aussie generation X bump.
Also worth noting is that Generation X was the first generation that could be legally killed by their mothers.
Tampa refers to an incident involving a boat load of refugees, before the previous election, the boat was called Tampa i believe.
Ping list for the discussion of the politics and social aspects that directly effects Gen-Reagan/Generation-X (Those born from 1965-1981) including all the spending previous generations (i.e. The Baby Boomers) are doing that Gen-X and Y will end up paying for.
Freep mail me to be added or dropped. See my home page for details and previous articles.
I have often worried that the Zers would end up as chips of the old block, however things seem to indicate that they are much further right than their parents. This is most remarkable in the many cases of those who grew up in broken homes and, typically being in maternal custody, witnessed their hippie moms shacking up. The miracle of the many, small, good things in life.
God Bless John Howard and Australia Fair!
I happen to think it is. Our way of "rebelling", LOL! And beleive me, to this day my mother thinks of it that way as she's still tokin' it up and we're establishing decent lives. She thinks I'm just horrible for having *gasp* moral values!!
I hope so too. I also hope that these college students saying "everyone on campus today is a liberal" is more of the typical MSM lies and distortions.
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