Posted on 11/10/2004 8:48:04 AM PST by NYer
WASHINGTON – "Call me back on November 3rd," Willis Anthony had said. I had sincerely not intended to do so. But then I did. Because he had been right.
He and his wife had both been right, when in that living room in St. Peters, Minnesota, buried between the grain silos that stood like towers in the vast emptiness of the northern lands, in that little house as polished as a mirror and that atmosphere of neat simplicity, they explained their beliefs, with a bit of embarrassment.
They had been right when, in response to my incredulity in the face of their lukewarm interest in international issues – the war in Iraq, terrorism, security – they replied that theirs was a "social conservatism," similar to but also different from the "compassionate" conservatism of George W. Bush. But they would vote for him, they shyly admitted one week before the elections.
Like the family of Willis Anthony, a farmer to the core, though also a professor of agrarian economics at the University of Minnesota, millions of Americans of the Deep South, the Bible Belt, the Corn Belt, of many different Christian churches and synagogues, cast their votes for Bush.
Another of them comes to mind: Rinaldo Macero, whom I met in Miami, in Little Havana, the main center for Cuban-Americans. He also voted for Bush, and he also did so in the name of a neglected land, an America scarcely represented by the mainstream communications media, but, as has been seen, the majority.
"The yankees," he said, "will never get my vote. Because then they waste it, they tear it to shreds. The yankees have no morality." The "yankees," for Macero and for tens of millions of Americans, are the Anglo-Saxons of the East coast, where Kerry harvested votes, but not hearts; he garnered a consensus, but perhaps did not sow values.
And it is precisely on values that Bush, or we might say his extraordinary electoral strategist Karl Rove, fixed his aim. Not on the war, not on Osama Bin Laden, or not only on them, but on the defense of something profoundly American, as difficult for us Europeans to comprehend as it is easy to denigrate: that "God, country, and family" that has inspired hundreds of derisory commonplaces about the America of the vulgar West and the great open plains, as opposed to the America found on the two coasts, which dines in sushi bars, reads French books, dresses Italian, and obviously votes Democrat.
An example of all of this, Ohio, the state in which a record number of unemployed people voted for Bush, betraying Kerry, and where even the Amish (the religious community well depicted in a famous film starring Harrison Ford[, 'Witness']) brought their buggies all the way to the ballot box – these people who live without electric lights, without telephones, without televisions, without real contact with society. While I drove across the endless plains of the Midwest, I sometimes stopped in the small rural centers. Even here, a typically European stereotype collapsed pathetically.
The “redneck” (the man with his neck sunburned from field work), the “cracker” (the poor white man depicted by Steinbeck in "The Grapes of Wrath"), the “hobo” (the vagabond who travels by freight train in the ballads of Woodie Guthrie); these figures once emblematic of extra-urban American society, no longer exist. In their place there is a generation of young people who have substituted for the Kennedy myth of the new frontier an ethical dimension of such crystalline simplicity that it could almost be mistaken for a domestic moral code. It is domestic, but it is above all shared.
Some define them hastily as "born-again Christians," others as neocons, still others as theocons, but none of these definitions is really appropriate, because the reality is much more complex. Certainly, within this great electoral mass there is room for the "moral majority," as there is for the anti-evolution movement and the county-by-county struggle for the reintroduction of school prayer. But one senses just as surely a transcendent motivation that crosses confessional differences, from Protestantism to Catholicism, passing through Judaism: we could call it a renewed sense of moral urgency, so implicit that if you ask them they have a hard time explaining it to you.
"I had never thought about the problem of abortion, cloning, the environment, stem cells, euthanasia, until I realized that someone wanted to force open the door from behind. Then I thought about it. Bush guaranteed for me that the door would remain closed." This young woman from Altona, Virginia may not say it, but she's thinking it: the Democrats, the pro-European aristocrats of the East, were breaking down this door behind her back.
Two nights ago, I was elbow to elbow with a sea of young people who were spending the night in the Ronald Reagan Building, the Republicans' general headquarters in Washington, awaiting the electoral results. I asked myself how someone could be Republican at twenty; I looked at the beautiful girls waving the pennants of the Grand Old Party, those boys in their excessively serious suits who ended up abandoning themselves to the gyrations of the rock and roll with that absence of malice that is profoundly, terribly American, an attitude that we Europeans strain to comprehend.
I think I did understand, after the fact. They were not lauding Bush's final surge, or not that alone. They were exulting in front of a map of the United States that was being colored in red, the color of the Republicans. And even here, it was not a competitive sort of exultation, "us" against "them," but an exultation in belonging.
That red that colored the continental map from Virginia to Nevada, from Florida to Texas, was the boundary of their enclosure, where one can feel at home again, the enclosure that the young woman of Altona – who is 19, not 80 – did not want to be opened.
Look closely at the electoral map: there is an America within America; one cannot overlook it. It is an America that placed Iraq only in third place among national priorities, in spite of the fact that young Americans continue to die in the Middle East, young people like those White House interns who wept as they sang "Amazing Grace," the most beautiful religious hymn Americans know. It is a hymn that perhaps in Boston, New York, or Los Angeles, in the Democratic strongholds, they would have sung with much less conviction – or they would not have even put it on the agenda.
But on the agenda of the young Republicans, as on that of their parents, of their friends, in the schools scattered throughout America in the countryside and the small cities, the first priority was the defense of a system of values. To avoid deforming that which – over the course of more than two hundred years – American society has laboriously shaped.
"We need a 'macho' leader who can stand up to Castro," said the cigar shop lady, a bit simplistically, whom I interviewed ten days ago in Florida. Millions of voters must have unconsciously said something similar to themselves: we need a strong leader who can defend our values. And that leader was not, and could not be, the gloomy, lukewarm John F. Kerry.
__________
The website of the Holy See's newspaper:
> “L’Osservatore Romano”
And of the Italian bishops' conference:
> “Avvenire”
__________
Notes and links on the November 2nd vote, Vatican-U.S. relations, and Bush's religious beliefs
In "The Wall Street Journal Europe," November 5-7, there appeared two maps that were particularly instructive on the distribution of the vote on November 2nd in the United States.
The two maps highlight the differences in total votes between Bush and Kerry, not state by state, but county by county.
The counties Bush won are colored in red; those of Kerry in blue. County by county, the dimensions of the victory are represented vertically, with a red or blue bar that is shorter or taller depending on the disparity in the vote.
The map of the United States showing the counties won by Bush is extremely red. Bush won also in many of the counties of the states on the Pacific coast that went overall to his rival. The only areas where the red shows continuous gaps is in southern Florida, along the Mississippi, in Massachusetts and other states of the extreme northeast, and west of the Great Lakes, in Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin. The outstanding victories are rare. The county Bush won with the greatest margin (155,010 votes) is Orange County in California, which adjoins Los Angeles, where his rival won handily.
But the map with the counties won by Kerry is only sporadically colored in blue: in the few areas mentioned above, and a few others here and there. So where did he draw deeply? Only in a few counties of the big cities, above which in fact there stand out blue bars as tall as they are isolated. The record is in Cook County, in Chicago, with a margin of 805,857 votes. Los Angeles is next, with 715,577 more votes, then Philadelphia and Manhattan.
The Bush rally in Lancaster
"For decades, the roughly 40,000 Amish of Pennsylvania have rarely voted.
When they did, they were overwhelmingly Republicans. Members of a reserved, deeply Christian subculture - still speaking the German dialect of their ancestors who settled in Pennsylvania in the early 1700s - they strive to stay apart from modern society."
Why the Amish are wheeling out the vote
Catholic Ping - please freepmail me if you want on/off this list
Think you'll enjoy this one!
The author gets it.
BTTT
Argh!! I live in a Blue State and I think this is crap. Bush won because Kerry is a fraud. Kerry is a wimp. Kerry is a flip flopper. Kerry is a stinking socialist.
Bush sticks to the plan. Bush doesn't pander to the Media and the Elites of Europe. Bush puts capitalism and the economy and the safety of our country first.
I am sure that the morality vote played a key issue with many people but to play this as the only single most important reason why he won is delusional.
Am I wrong?
That Italian guy figured out America.
Isn't it odd that liberals who've lived here their entire lives haven't?
No, you are not wrong. There are many reasons Bush won and morality is just one of those reasons. Most of the fence-sitter I know didn't so much vote for Bush as they did against Hollywood and the liberal "elite". There is a great amount of animosity in the South and Midwest against these liberals who constantly refer to us as ignorant racist hicks.
Of course its not the single most important issue. What you must understand is that it is the single issue MOST FOREIGN to the thinking of the "stone-age media" types, and the the denizens of the "blue counties" (I refuse to use the term "blue states", because there are lots of "red" areas on a state-wide basis in any state). Thus those folks single it out ahead of other factors.
I forgot about the so called "artists". What is amazing is how their true colors showed when they lost. It is incredible.
Nope. I believe the same thing. The multitude of issues foisted on the public are all rooted in socialism.
Those issues are the symptoms of a country that was veering onto a Marxist path.
All true; however, there are many in the US who want to grow the socialist agenda and view the Liberals and Democrats, as their transport vehicle. In their eyes, gays are equal to heterosexuals, abortion is no different than an enema and aborted fetuses should be put to good use - giving their stem cells to research in order to keep the Hollyweird folks looking forever young.
There were many factors that contributed to the Bush Victory but "moral issues" predominated. I am a red person residing in a blue county of a blue state. It is an honor and privilege to cast my vote each year for those candidates, buried near the bottom of the ballot, who represent the values I cherish most.
It's just one of the first things that fell out of their spreadsheets as they try to analyze the election. Few of them have actually studied ethics and fewer understand the field of study.
I agree. I am only saying that the media and the libs are just livid and openly hostile because they think the ONLY reason Bush was re-elected was because of these issues.
However one doesn't need to be very religious to see the "Frankenstein" type of science that I feel is taking place with aborted fetuses. I am beginning to think they are using this to justify abortion instead of actually producing real science that saves lives.
I figured Dubya had done okay and voted to keep him another 4 years so we could have a little continuity in our national goals for a while. His revamping of NASA was a big part of my decision and would have been the main reason except that we are at war and don't need to show weakness at this time. I also have some confidence in the depth of Dubya's philosophical reasoning powers, something that wasn't there at all until he presented his stem cell case.
I must agree trashcanbred. I live in what many would consider a very traditional state (Nebraska). Yet my vote for GWB was not based on religion or morality or values. He received my vote first and foremost because of the war on terror. It is the most important issue of our time and I feel that W has proven his leadership qualities in that arena overwhelmingly. That was the same issue that drove all of my friends to vote for him as well. Some of the other factors that drove me to vote again for W.
1. Tax Reform (we need to get rid of the income tax in
order to truly liberate the economy and the people)
2. Kerry (ex hippie socialist wanna be's will not get my
vote. Ever. He talked the talk but his record did not
walk the walk.)
3. The Economy (despite what the impression that the MSM
tried to give, the economy is getting better all the
time. W's economic policy saved us from falling into a
DEEP recession bordering on depression after 9-11.
That alone was worth my vote)
While values certainly are important, they werent what got my vote. The Dems are blaming their loss on evangelical Christians because they can't accept the fact that voters dont buy their BS. That dog don't hunt now and it won't in 4 years. I just hope they keep it up. It would be nice to see Hitlery lose by a landslide in '08
bump 4 later
There is something missing in europe, perhaps they could find it by visiting red America.
Well he certianly has a chance to fix NASA now. I certainly am behind the new approach. This is one of the least mentioned ains of this election. I still mantain that h=if he vision is realized that it will actually be for this that he is most remembered in history. He will have made us the first truly space-faring nation in history.
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