Bush Was Faith, Kerry Was Reason?

Paul Gray, in the Melbourne heralde Sun (Nov. 8, 2004):

TO George W. Bush's critics, the US election contest was the battle of faith and reason.

Bush was faith, and Kerry was reason.

With record numbers of Americans voting -- 120 million -- the result decisively favoured Bush.

Can almost 60 million Americans really be irrational? A more thoughtful explanation for Bush's victory is that it's a win for smart politics.

Bush did two things right, essentially. One was that he appealed directly to the "Jacksonian" streak in the American people by sounding tougher on terrorism.

The Jacksonians (named after 19th century US president Andrew Jackson) are the traditional Scots-Irish core of the US population who, unlike many wet media liberals, perfectly understand the nature of violent conflict.

They are peaceful people essentially, but once engaged in war, they fight to the death. War, of course, is the major development of recent times.

America was attacked on September 11, and President Bush reacted as a true Scots-Irish American: he fought back.

Iraq may have been a tactical mistake but, to many Americans, that hard-
ly matters. During the presidential campaign it was revealed by the respected British medical journal The Lancet that up to 100,000 deaths were created by America's invasion of Iraq.

Many citizens around the planet cannot understand how 100,000 deaths can be overlooked.

But Jacksonian America intrinsically understands the enormous cost of war.

"Once wars begin," explains historian Walter Russell Mead, "a significant element of American public opinion supports waging them at the highest possible level of intensity."

That also explains why, despite filmmaker Mike Moore's best efforts to "raise the consciousness" of America's poorer classes over Iraq, the US states that provided most of the soldiers who've died since March 2003 all voted for Bush.

The key to this psychology is the concept of "honour". Derided by modern liberals as a fabrication by Hollywood, honour lies deep in the psychology of the American population.

Non-Americans, particularly Europeans, usually misunderstand this aspect of American thinking.

"Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus," says writer Robert Kagan -- and the interplanetary difference is basically about history.

The second big thing Bush did right was to mobilise grass-roots support.

It was hilarious listening to ABC radio commentators last Wednesday repeatedly advising that the high voter turnout could be expected to favour the challenger, John Kerry.

A case of wishful thinking, if ever there was one....