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US voters got the man they wanted
By McGreevy
American liberals must feel like their Irish counterparts did after the 1986 divorce referendum.
As Jean Tansey, the leader of the Divorce Action Campaign, famously said when that referendum was rejected: “The Irish people have disgraced themselves again.”
Liberals can only conclude that the American people too have disgraced themselves again. They chose gung-ho unilateralism over multilateralism, oil before the environment, gay-bashing instead of gay marriage, lower taxes instead of better public services, intolerance ahead of tolerance.
It must be painful for liberals in America to be living in a country which appears to despise their values and whose values they despise in turn, much like socially progressive people felt in Ireland during the 1980s.
This election has given the lie to one of the cherished shibboleths of the Enlightenment, that as people become more prosperous and better educated, they become more secular, a situation that prevails in Europe today, but not in America anymore.
Never has the chasm between the US and Europe seemed so wide and the response of anti-Bush commentators here to his emphatic victory has been all too predictable. It’s the electorate, stupid.
Before the election, a reporter from The Irish Times, a card-carrying liberal from America’s West Coast, said that if Bush won, it would be because the majority of people in the US were ignorant, ill-informed, conservative and frightened.
Bush won with the largest popular vote ever won by a US presidential candidate, but The Mirror could only sneer: “How can 59,054,087 people be so dumb?”
It’s not stupidity, explained Gene Kerrigan in The Sunday Independent: “a huge proportion of Bush’s supporters are ignorant. Not stupid. Ignorant.”
The trouble with the aforementioned analysis is that 59,054,087 people cannot all be dumb, ignorant or both.
Like most people this side of the Atlantic, I wanted John Kerry to win. I felt that he would be no less resolute in prosecuting the war on terror, but he could have restored a sense of common purpose throughout the world.
I’m queasy, too, about the mixture of God and politics that Bush seems to represent. We have had enough of that in Ireland.
Kerry didn’t win, but it doesn’t mean that we should disrespect the American people for their choice.
There were sound reasons why they voted for Bush. Again and again throughout the campaign, he reminded them that they knew what kind of man he was and where he stood.
He also appears, like Ronald Reagan, to be a man at ease with himself. Amazingly too, for such a paragon of privilege, he comes across as a regular guy.
Those in the chattering classes make the classic error of mistaking inarticulateness for stupidity. It doesn’t follow. Stupid is as stupid does and though Bush may be inarticulate, his campaign was far from stupid.
He has been a forthright leader in the war on terror. The invasion of Afghanistan was a moral imperative given the nature of the Taliban regime.
The violence in Iraq gave us all pause for thought, but again the American people have seen the evidence and concluded that it was on balance the right thing to do.
Bush based his campaign on what he called the “three Fs” — faith, flag and family.
These are the bedrock values of any country, yet, somehow they have become a debased currency. The Republicans won because they didn’t
patronize the views of ordinary people.
You don’t have to be a bigot to see why hard-working, church-going, small-town supporters of Bush would see gay marriage as an affront to their values.
President Clinton’s great strength was to appeal to both conservative and liberal voters in the US, a skill which the Democrats will have to rediscover if they are ever going to take back the White House.
He urged Kerry not to back gay marriage, but support a compromise that would allow for civil unions. This would have been tolerant and fair to gay couples, while respectful of the institution of marriage. Kerry rejected the advice. It was a costly mistake.
Despite that, Kerry fought a redoubtable campaign which would have won him every Presidential election except this one, but maybe it was never to be.
The American people examined the evidence. They knew about the stolen election, Bush’s lack of intellectual curiosity and the chaos of post-war Iraq and concluded that, despite everything, his robust style of leadership was what they needed in these fraught times.
They elected a man just like themselves. For better or worse, they now have the President they wanted.
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