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.
Proud to be an angry hillbilly.
The author should speak for himself. Isn't much of Australia's population "Scots-Irish"?
His pro-abortion, anti-gun (no one's fooled by the goose hunt) positions haven't gone unnoticed, either.
An old thread dispelling the myth about who does most of or dying and fighting in wars.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2003-01-20-army-usat_x.htm
LOL! ...ever met many Australians? Australians, hillbillies--same thing. Rednecks, unite!
Another to add to my list ...thanks.
At that point, I thought he was describing flyover country. The folks who love country and family, work hard, and try to live good and decent lives. A lot of immigrant groups fall into that category. Mine included. And not one word of it is a bad thing.
You'll enjoy this one. Fraser is the same guy who wrote the Flashman books (and my personal favorites, the MacAuslan books). He can write.
Another reminder that Australia was first settled by British criminals and lunatics.
Why do the Irish fight amongst themselves?
Because there is no other worthier opponent!
Island mentality is bred into their genes... There is nobody else to fight...
I'm 1/16 Irish, English, Scottish, 1/16 German-Jew, 1/8 Chinese, and 3/4 Samoan.
If you read it carefully, you'll note that the author is not expressing his "perception" in those positive statements about the fighting Scot-Irish of America. He is quoting the thoughts of James Webb and Walter Russell Mead, then cramming their fine sentiments into his "dumb Americans" packaging.
He is trying to paint noble and brave men who fight and die for this country as moronic cannon fodder no smarter or more understanding of the reasons for the war than the horses that die beside them.
And the güber is hocking that old crusty ipsos pole. What a maroon!
C13: 100% Unrefined Tennessee Hillbilly
I'm not quite sure if the author sees this as an attribute, but I certainly do. The author is also neglectful in mentioning the German immigrants in this group. The Scotch, Irish and Germans all immigrated to the same areas of Pennsylvania, Virginia, Ohio and the Carolinas and soon started marrying amongst themselves. I am of that stock, having German, Irish and Scottish on both the paternal and maternal sides.
Hillbilly Bump!
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