Posted on 10/28/2004 7:14:04 AM PDT by dead
One particularly overlooked group will keep the White House Republican next week, writes Peter Hartcher.
On the face of it, it seems ridiculous that George Bush should have any chance of re-election next week. He is the first president to oversee a net loss of jobs in the US economy since the Great Depression. He has led his country into the most controversial war since Vietnam.
Yet he has an excellent chance of winning four more years. The polls are confused, signalling a close contest. At one extreme, Bush has a 7 percentage point lead, according to the Fox News poll; at the other John Kerry has a 3 percentage point advantage, according to the Associated Press-Ipsos survey.
How does one of Washington's leading professional political analysts interpret the data? "I have no idea who is going to win this election," Charlie Cook, publisher of The Cook Political Report, confessed forlornly to his clients this week. "I really don't."
The betting shops are more emphatic. The punters on the Iowa Electronic Market, an accurate predictor of the outcome since its inception, covering the last four presidential elections, are pricing Bush as the favourite with odds of 60:40. What is Bush's secret? With such a poor record, how can he still be in the race, much less the favourite?
The first point to make is that while John Kerry has sought to fight much of the election campaign on the economy, it is not the dominant issue. There is something else preoccupying the American mind: "Nobody asked Abraham Lincoln what the unemployment rate was in 1864, as the Union forces marched to victory in the Civil War," quips Walter Russell Mead, one of America's foremost analysts of foreign policy.
The dominant theme of this presidential election, the first since September 11, 2001, is national security. The No. 1 issue of importance to voters is the Iraq war, according to Gallup, and the No. 2 issue is the threat of terrorism. So the two top issues in the minds of the American voter are both national security matters, and here we begin to unravel the mystery of Bush's political resilience.
When the US is at war, there is a powerful group of Americans, overlooked in American politics most of the time, whose feelings are stirred, whose resolve is stiffened, and whose intensity forces itself to the centre of national political life.
It's a group that constitutes the hardy core of the American folk, and it was introduced by the novelist and ex-Marine James Webb in these terms: "This people gave our country great things, including its most definitive culture. It is imbued with a unique and unforgiving code of personal honour less ritualised but every bit as powerful as the samurai code."
"This people", wrote Webb to his fellow Americans, "are all around you, even though you probably don't know it". They are the Scots-Irish. They arrived in America in the 18th century in small boats to find existing English settlements, and so pushed on inland to occupy the harsh mountain wilderness along the Appalachians. They fought the Indians, then they fought the British. From the beginning, they formed the core of the American fighting forces.
In his new book, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America, Webb explains that the heavily Scots-Irish people of West Virginia, who make up only 0.6 per cent of the national population, ranked first, second or third in military casualty rates in every US war of the 20th century.
They reshaped American politics by taking hegemony from the aristocratic English-Americans and starting the populist movement.
And, surveying an ancestral Virginia graveyard, Webb, a former senior official in the Reagan Pentagon, writes that they are his people: "The slurs stick to me, standing on these graves. Rednecks. Trailer-park trash. Racists. Cannon fodder. My ancestors. My people. Me."
The first president to emerge from the backwoods ferment of America's Scots-Irish was Andrew Jackson, 1829-37, the hero of the Battle of New Orleans and the man who brutally purged the native tribes of America from their east coast homes and forced them westward.
His contemporaries described him as fighting mad. His people, he said, were the "farmers, mechanics and labourers". And it's in his honour that Walter Russell Mead of the Council on Foreign Relations has named the strong populist strand in American attitudes to war Jacksonianism.
Mead describes Jacksonian America as a "community of political feeling" and "in many ways the most important in American politics". Understanding these people, whom he estimates to be 30 to 40 per cent of the US electorate, is central to understanding how America behaves in times of war or crisis.
While the academic debates about US foreign policy are conducted on a rarified understanding of the distinctions between realism and idealism, Mead says Jacksonians are concerned with a code of honour, unacknowledged but real. Its elements are self-reliance, equality, individualism, a certain recklessness with credit he calls financial esprit, and the crowning quality, courage.
They are the gun lovers of contemporary America, and the founders of the Bible belt.
From this code of honour come the rules for the American political conduct of warfare. Once Jacksonian honour is engaged, America will fight ferociously, tirelessly and without restraint. "For the first Jacksonian rule of war is that wars must be fought with all available force," writes Mead. "The use of limited force is deeply repugnant. Jacksonians see war as a switch that is either 'on' or 'off'.
"To engage in a limited war is one of the costliest political decisions an American president can make. Neither Truman [Korean War] nor Johnson [Vietnam] survived it."
Jacksonians voted Democrat until Nixon, then moved to become solidly Republican. This is the group that is keeping Bush competitive in the election, despite the 1100 American war dead in Iraq and the $US150 billion in costs. This is the group that Kerry courts when, despite a lifetime as an advocate of gun control, he goes shooting for the cameras during the election campaign. And this is the group that Kerry tries to appease when he tries to out-macho Bush with his tough talk about killing terrorists and waging war.
And this is the group that explains the phenomenon that the Lowy Institute's Michael Fullilove captured in the title of a new paper on the US election: Bush is from Mars, Kerry is from Mars too.
The fighting-mad Jackson, says Mead, is alive and well in American political life in this time of war.
Such is the horrors of democracy, when the frothing masses don't heed their betters.
You'll not find a more cluelessly condescending article on this fine day.
Bush is from Mars, Kerry is from Uranus.
What, like that's a bad thing?
:)
Not to disparage Australia, but DESPITE their questionable ancestry, they managed to put the right guy into office this last time. What a dork writer!
'Scuse me while I go spruce up the old trailor now...ya'll never know when the travelin preacher might show up for some haggus and a slop of collards...
West Virginia hillbilly bump
Worse yet, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we are at a net plus of over 3.7 million more Americans working than in 2000, when Bush took office. We lost "payroll jobs" and made it up with a strong growth in small business, which is a relief, because small and medium business growth is indicative of a large economic potential for more growth.
The recovering big business payroll numbers indicates that the big businesses are just catching on. Big business is fast to fire, slow to hire. Small business is more flexible, firing and hiring based on market opportunities that big business tends to ignore until a definite trend has emerged.
Just my views, and why we can't trust any leftist journalist to get the facts straight.
Hee Haw Baby!
Leftist's idea of a "bad record": any President who doesn't drive our nation full speed towards a socialist worker's paradise.
Bush is from Mars, Kerry is from France -- oh, wait, you wrote essentially the same thing....
"On the face of it, it seems ridiculous that George Bush should have any chance of re-election next week. He is the first president to oversee a net loss of jobs in the US economy since the Great Depression. He has led his country into the most controversial war since Vietnam."
Any "net loss of jobs" in the U.S. has been due to factors beyond Bush's control. Bush was the first President in modern times to face a major attack on the American homeland. Hawaii wasn't even a state in 1940, and the target was a purely military one. The closest analogy to 9-1-1 was the burning of Washington in the War of 1812.
And no, this ISN'T the most "controversial war" in American history, and Viet Nam was only yesterday and the same characters who helped make that a "controversial war" like John F*** Kerry, are responsible for making the Iraqi battle controversial.
The most recent controversial war in American history was Ronald Reagan's battle against the Evil Empire. And the same traitors and subversives who opposed that successful conflict are involved in attempting to subvert this one.
And guess what? It won't work.
Its a good thing most Aussies don't think like this pandering anti-American leftist.
"Bush is from Mars, Kerry is from Uranus."
Very Good! LOL
Wrong...
Bush may be FROM Mars but Kerry IS an anus.
(Can I say that here?)
I'll take "hillbillies" over intelligentsia anytime. Who'll stop and help your wife or sister change their tire? Who still says "Yes ma'am" and "No ma'am?" Who enlists for the combat arms? Not effete pacifist intellectuals, that's fer sure.
They are simply a better class of people than Volvo-driving, white wine sipping, whinging, cringing, over-educated morons.
The funny thing is that the intellectuals were so intellectual as to become shills for communism and socialism. Still are I guess.
Actually while he is dead wrong about Bush.
His perception of this particular demographic (my own happily) has some truth....the good parts..lol
Being from a hillbilly(Scotch-Irish)background I really have to defend my ancestors in that I don't believe they are all inbred, dumb,etc. I am proud of their culture and what these rough and tough ancestors of mine contributed to this country in making it the great nation that it is today. Yee Haw!!!!
What "academia" fails to realize is that we Scots-Irish are really the Illuminati...
Amen girl
We are all that keeps this nation from slipping into a greased walled abyss.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.