Why Bush Will Win in November

I dread the thought, it keeps me awake at nights, but I do think that Bush will win in November. Spengler gives some good reasons in an Asia times piece, Why Americans love George W Bush

George W Bush almost certainly will win another term as president of the United States, as I have predicted all along. That surprises outside observers of US politics, who can see that the Democrats are cleverer, better dressed and better looking. It is just the sort of Americans who know they are neither clever nor good-looking who will vote for Bush.

Bush supporters are the sort of American one never meets. Through the media as well as through personal contact, Asians and Europeans meet the United States in the person of its coastal elite: academics, journalists, clerics, entertainers, and the technological avant garde. The sort of American traveler one meets in Hong Kong, Singapore or Bangkok probably will vote for John Kerry in November. Fewer than one in six Americans owns a passport, and those are found disproportionately on the US coasts, colored Democratic blue on the electoral maps. The elite enjoys the frisson of cultural difference and will travel thousands of miles to patronize quaint foreign cultures. By contrast, provincials from the inland states (colored Republican red on the electoral maps) take their holidays in Las Vegas or Disney World. For them the gambling-casino replicas of the Eiffel Tower or the Venetian canals are just like the real thing but without the inconvenience of strange tongues and customs.

Bush voters really do look worse (obesity is an inland disease in the US), dress worse, and are less likely to have attended a university than Kerry voters. But Bush voters are the sort of people who believe in their heart of hearts that America was founded to protect the likes of them - unlikely the clever and attractive people who can fend quite well for themselves. That is the source of their patriotism.

I live in Oregon. It almost always shows up as a blue state on the map but it's not, it's a red state with some blue spots in the Willamette Valley. Those blue spots are where most of the people live so the state looks blue. The people in those blue spots fit Spengler's description of the west coast educated and passport owning west coasters, the residents of the rest of the state fit Spengler's description of the red staters.

The red state citizens get their news from FOX, not because they want the truth but because FOX tells them what they want to hear. They like the idea of the United States being an imperial power taking the resources of others for their benefit. At a time when they are afraid of terrorism they don't want to hear that the President is an incompetent idiot. They truly fear that gays will upset their comfortable flat world. They feel comfortable in the black and white, good and evil world presented in the Abramhic Bible. They don't like gray, they don't like nuance. The simplistic world vision that George W. Bush preaches is comfortable.