We Have Met the Enemy and He is Us.......
Journey to the heart of Bushlandia
The wide open spaces of Idaho have little room for anti-war sentiment
Oliver Burkemann in Boise, Idaho
Saturday June 3, 2006
Guardian
The governor of Idaho, an affable rancher named Jim Risch, stretched back in his chair and outlined his alternative history of the last few years in America. "Hurricane Katrina - they heaped that on George Bush!" said Mr Risch, in his shirt-sleeves in the blasting dry heat of an afternoon in Boise, the state capital.
"Here in Idaho, we couldn't understand how people could sit around on the kerbs waiting for the federal government to come and do something. We had a dam break in 1976, but we didn't whine about it. We got out our backhoes and we rebuilt the roads and replanted the fields and got on with our lives. That's the culture here. Not waiting for the federal government to bring you drinking water. In Idaho there would have been entrepreneurs selling the drinking water."
This, of course, is not how most Americans view last year's disaster in New Orleans. But then Idaho, to borrow a term gaining popularity on leftwing blogs, is part of "Bushlandia": the three remaining states, clustered in the mountainous west, where the president still enjoys approval ratings of 50% or more. According to the latest polls, Idaho tops the league at 52%, with neighbours Utah and Wyoming on 51% and 50%, making Mr Risch the de facto leader of this nation-within-a-nation. "President Bush is one of our greatest presidents, and he's one of our bravest presidents," the governor said. "People know what's in his heart."
To liberals on both coasts, Idaho is redneck country, famous only for its potato industry and its white supremacists (the now-defunct Aryan Nations group was based in the isolated north of the state until 2001). "Sexual relations with livestock are still commonplace," a columnist for the Nation magazine claimed recently. Idahoans would prefer to focus on their spirit of rugged independence, but the redneck label is fine with them, too. "Many people would say if it stops people coming here and ruining our tranquillity, they're welcome to go on thinking like that," said Bryan Fischer, a former pastor who now runs the staunchly rightwing Idaho Values Alliance.
If you oppose gay marriage, though, or especially if you support the war in Iraq, you will find many friends in Idaho. "A guy called me the other day and said he wanted to join our alliance. He made it clear he was new to the state," Mr Fischer said. "I asked where he was coming from, and he said California. I asked what prompted him to move to Idaho, and he said: "California."
Up to 35% of Idahoans identify themselves as affiliated to neither political party, and the state has elected Democratic officials before. But it has not supported a Democratic candidate for president since Lyndon Johnson. "It wasn't so long ago," a car-rental employee said, half-jokingly, "that if you voted Democrat round here, you'd get shot."
The divide between Bushlandia and the rest of America - or, more generally, between the president's core supporters and everyone else - is not a question of mere policy arguments. It is a clash of two incompatible versions of reality, where the same facts take on completely different meanings. For Idaho Republicans, escalating violence in Iraq illustrates precisely the scale of the challenge there, and the consequent need to stay loyal. Mr Bush's errors, meanwhile, are not an argument for his removal so much as a sign of his human fallibility. "You go into something like Iraq, nobody can know how it's going to turn," Governor Risch said. "People say Saddam was terrible because he tortured his people, now Bush is awful because he invaded. Well, which do you want?"
Core supporters
In the hills outside Boise, on a road where every telegraph pole sports a yellow ribbon in support of the troops, the owner of the Rumor Mill bakery explains the problem in one sentence. The media, Tona Henderson says, is biased to the left, and so the good news from Iraq never gets reported.
In an effort to send a different message, she has decorated nearly every available inch of her cafe - which counts local National Guardsmen and women among its clientele - with photographs of combat veterans. There is also a Bible verse, a shot of Iraqi children grinning in front of a US tank, and a poster in the window that drives home the point. "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of all who threaten it," it reads.
"Of all the people I know that went to Iraq, I've not talked to one who said they think they went there for a bad reason," said Ms Henderson, who has her doubts about Mr Bush on some issues, but not the war. "They said: 'We went over there for a good reason, and we did something good there. And if it came down to it, they'd go back.'"
Supporting the troops but opposing the war is not a popular option. "It's ludicrous!" Bryan Fischer said. "It's like you're saying you think our soldiers are over there doing something immoral, but you support them doing that? That makes absolutely no rational sense."
Being a Democrat in this setting can be a lonely existence. "We do still find ourselves whispering in the supermarket about it," said Maria Weeg, executive director of the Idaho Democratic party. "There's such an overwhelming psychological thing. No one wants to be part of 'the other', and the Republicans have done a pretty good job of making Democrats here into the enemy."
But she declines to mock her opponents. "These are people who have deep, core values and it behoves us to try to understand those values," Ms Weeg said. "Bush has this rugged, everyday average guy sort of persona that speaks to Idahoans, and there's a strong feeling that we've just got to stick by our president because he's our president.
Bumper stickers
"It takes a lot of discretionary time and energy to find the kind of information that gives you both sides of the story. And if you're working three jobs and feeding four kids, you don't have that time. So the bumper-sticker messages will be the ones that resonate."
At a national level, Democrats disagree over what to do about places such as Idaho. Some would give them up as a lost cause, targetting resources on marginal states instead. Unsurprisingly, Ms Weeg supports the alternative "50-state strategy", championed by the party chairman Howard Dean. The Republicans, this theory holds, won Idaho as part of a long-term, bottom-up, nationwide strategy to change the focus of politics from economics to morality. Only a similarly broad Democratic initiative has any hope of turning things around.
This is not to say that the Republicans might not one day lose Bushlandia, whose population holds decidedly lukewarm views about the party's two most likely nominees for 2008, John McCain and Rudy Giuliani. Even the president's 52% approval represents a steep fall from prior levels of support. But a core of affection for Mr Bush, Jim Risch insisted, would always remain.
"I'll give you the best example I can think of," the governor said. "We had a fellow by the name of Bill Clinton. You might remember him - he was the president of the United States. He sexually harrassed an employee in his office. The women's groups around America should have been ready to crucify him ... But what did they do? They came to his support in spades. Why? Because they knew his heart. They knew his heart."
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006
The wide open spaces of Idaho have little room for anti-war sentiment
Oliver Burkemann in Boise, Idaho
Saturday June 3, 2006
Guardian
The governor of Idaho, an affable rancher named Jim Risch, stretched back in his chair and outlined his alternative history of the last few years in America. "Hurricane Katrina - they heaped that on George Bush!" said Mr Risch, in his shirt-sleeves in the blasting dry heat of an afternoon in Boise, the state capital.
"Here in Idaho, we couldn't understand how people could sit around on the kerbs waiting for the federal government to come and do something. We had a dam break in 1976, but we didn't whine about it. We got out our backhoes and we rebuilt the roads and replanted the fields and got on with our lives. That's the culture here. Not waiting for the federal government to bring you drinking water. In Idaho there would have been entrepreneurs selling the drinking water."
This, of course, is not how most Americans view last year's disaster in New Orleans. But then Idaho, to borrow a term gaining popularity on leftwing blogs, is part of "Bushlandia": the three remaining states, clustered in the mountainous west, where the president still enjoys approval ratings of 50% or more. According to the latest polls, Idaho tops the league at 52%, with neighbours Utah and Wyoming on 51% and 50%, making Mr Risch the de facto leader of this nation-within-a-nation. "President Bush is one of our greatest presidents, and he's one of our bravest presidents," the governor said. "People know what's in his heart."
To liberals on both coasts, Idaho is redneck country, famous only for its potato industry and its white supremacists (the now-defunct Aryan Nations group was based in the isolated north of the state until 2001). "Sexual relations with livestock are still commonplace," a columnist for the Nation magazine claimed recently. Idahoans would prefer to focus on their spirit of rugged independence, but the redneck label is fine with them, too. "Many people would say if it stops people coming here and ruining our tranquillity, they're welcome to go on thinking like that," said Bryan Fischer, a former pastor who now runs the staunchly rightwing Idaho Values Alliance.
If you oppose gay marriage, though, or especially if you support the war in Iraq, you will find many friends in Idaho. "A guy called me the other day and said he wanted to join our alliance. He made it clear he was new to the state," Mr Fischer said. "I asked where he was coming from, and he said California. I asked what prompted him to move to Idaho, and he said: "California."
Up to 35% of Idahoans identify themselves as affiliated to neither political party, and the state has elected Democratic officials before. But it has not supported a Democratic candidate for president since Lyndon Johnson. "It wasn't so long ago," a car-rental employee said, half-jokingly, "that if you voted Democrat round here, you'd get shot."
The divide between Bushlandia and the rest of America - or, more generally, between the president's core supporters and everyone else - is not a question of mere policy arguments. It is a clash of two incompatible versions of reality, where the same facts take on completely different meanings. For Idaho Republicans, escalating violence in Iraq illustrates precisely the scale of the challenge there, and the consequent need to stay loyal. Mr Bush's errors, meanwhile, are not an argument for his removal so much as a sign of his human fallibility. "You go into something like Iraq, nobody can know how it's going to turn," Governor Risch said. "People say Saddam was terrible because he tortured his people, now Bush is awful because he invaded. Well, which do you want?"
Core supporters
In the hills outside Boise, on a road where every telegraph pole sports a yellow ribbon in support of the troops, the owner of the Rumor Mill bakery explains the problem in one sentence. The media, Tona Henderson says, is biased to the left, and so the good news from Iraq never gets reported.
In an effort to send a different message, she has decorated nearly every available inch of her cafe - which counts local National Guardsmen and women among its clientele - with photographs of combat veterans. There is also a Bible verse, a shot of Iraqi children grinning in front of a US tank, and a poster in the window that drives home the point. "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of all who threaten it," it reads.
"Of all the people I know that went to Iraq, I've not talked to one who said they think they went there for a bad reason," said Ms Henderson, who has her doubts about Mr Bush on some issues, but not the war. "They said: 'We went over there for a good reason, and we did something good there. And if it came down to it, they'd go back.'"
Supporting the troops but opposing the war is not a popular option. "It's ludicrous!" Bryan Fischer said. "It's like you're saying you think our soldiers are over there doing something immoral, but you support them doing that? That makes absolutely no rational sense."
Being a Democrat in this setting can be a lonely existence. "We do still find ourselves whispering in the supermarket about it," said Maria Weeg, executive director of the Idaho Democratic party. "There's such an overwhelming psychological thing. No one wants to be part of 'the other', and the Republicans have done a pretty good job of making Democrats here into the enemy."
But she declines to mock her opponents. "These are people who have deep, core values and it behoves us to try to understand those values," Ms Weeg said. "Bush has this rugged, everyday average guy sort of persona that speaks to Idahoans, and there's a strong feeling that we've just got to stick by our president because he's our president.
Bumper stickers
"It takes a lot of discretionary time and energy to find the kind of information that gives you both sides of the story. And if you're working three jobs and feeding four kids, you don't have that time. So the bumper-sticker messages will be the ones that resonate."
At a national level, Democrats disagree over what to do about places such as Idaho. Some would give them up as a lost cause, targetting resources on marginal states instead. Unsurprisingly, Ms Weeg supports the alternative "50-state strategy", championed by the party chairman Howard Dean. The Republicans, this theory holds, won Idaho as part of a long-term, bottom-up, nationwide strategy to change the focus of politics from economics to morality. Only a similarly broad Democratic initiative has any hope of turning things around.
This is not to say that the Republicans might not one day lose Bushlandia, whose population holds decidedly lukewarm views about the party's two most likely nominees for 2008, John McCain and Rudy Giuliani. Even the president's 52% approval represents a steep fall from prior levels of support. But a core of affection for Mr Bush, Jim Risch insisted, would always remain.
"I'll give you the best example I can think of," the governor said. "We had a fellow by the name of Bill Clinton. You might remember him - he was the president of the United States. He sexually harrassed an employee in his office. The women's groups around America should have been ready to crucify him ... But what did they do? They came to his support in spades. Why? Because they knew his heart. They knew his heart."
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006
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