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.
See my post #37.
Those who still carry that spirit, will get our backs up when we or our people are violated.
.6% of the American population? Innumeracy has spread to Australia.
I wish we were fighting this "insurgency" in Iraq in a more Jacksonian style instead of a McNamarian style.
8-) We have a winner!
LOL! Can there be two winners?
The day is young, dead.
Killing flies with a sledgehammer.
It's a good thing.
So9
More of a Sherman or Chesty Puller style.
We Hill Billys have 10/22s in our gun safes.
Aussies have buried theirs.
he tried, and failed.......miserably in my opinion.
HILLARIOUS - AND
Bush is from Mars, Kerry speaks from his Anus.
This Aussie seems to understand is that that heart and soul of this nation are in the Scots-Irish traditions (I'm one: last name start with the Irish "Mc" but is pronounced "mac"). We are the nonhyphenated Americans. I have ancestors who fought in the Revolution and on both sides of the Civil War. He does have the Europeans view of us down part. My British boss looks at me after describing my heritage and declared me a red-neck.
I understand he has no respect for us.
But he admits who has always done most of the fighting and dying.
Listen to any Dem and they will have you believe it's minorities....which is the complete opposite of the truth.
I linked an old USA Today article on this above in the thread.
Mr. Hartcher can kiss my Scott-Irish, German, Cherokee grits.
First, not all "English-Americans" (a hyphenated identity at last!) were or are "aristocratic." I'm a typical Bible-Belt redneck, but if I have any Scots-Irish blood at all I'm unaware of it. Of course, the Scots-Irish were mostly lowland Protestant Anglo-Scots (since the Angles were in Scotland before the Gaelic Scots were!), so I suppose it's theoretically possible. But as close as I can figure, I'm as lilly-English as it's possible to be. Not even a dash of Celt to add flavor.
Secondly, I am again reminded of the similarities between the so-called "Bible-thumping white trash" (and before anyone gets mad, I number myself among that population) and their supposedly polar opposites, Black Americans. The food is the same ("soul food" when eaten by Blacks, but "the food of fascism" [I suppose] when eaten by poor whites), the dialect is very similar (both preserving obsolete British Islands dialects [yes, including "ebonics"]), both subscribe to the same Biblical literalism (as do I, only more so), and even the violence of the ghetto culture is a mirror of the code o' hills or the duels of honor between Southern aristocrats. Yet of course these two groups are presumed to have nothing in common, each in need of "protection" from the other by politicians who ridicule in the other group what they praise in their own.
I am at a loss to understand the uncritical embrace of contemporary political leftism (homosexuality, abortion, evolution, G-dless moral/ethical systems) by this large and still largely rural and Fundamentalist community. But for whatever even the most "reactionary" Black preacher or layman seems to feel completely unthreatened by the Left (whose ridicule they have never felt). Will that ridicule ever be turned against them? Will they ever cease to be the "noble savages" of our contemprary rationalist Rousseaus? It's interesting, but it could be that the presence of the large community of unregenerate "hillbillies" is the only thing standing between the Black community and the hatred and enmity of their "friends" on the Left. Does anyone out there really believe that if the Left succeeded in turning every poor white into a rationalist intellectual it would have any further need of its "gentlemen's agreement" with Black Fundamentalism?
Who knows? Maybe the Left would actually invoke the resentment of the old double standard to turn the now leftist "crackers" into their shock troops against the only remaining Biblical Fundamentalists--the new "patter rollers."
That sums it up. LOL.
MacAuslan? Never heard of them, what sort of books are they? Read and enjoyed all the Flashman books tho'.
A sci-fi author whose name escapes me refers to some of the W. Va. heroes of his 1632 series of books as "Hill-billy hard-*sses", much as this writer describes them.
LOL!!!
Hey, I head the Learned Elders of Zion. What say we merge so that we may all the quicker realize the goals of Our Diabolical Conspiracy?
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