For God, and George

That is America as non-America sees it; it is not America as America cherishes it. George W. Bush’s re-election on November 2 was not just a mandate, it was Middle America stamping its sense of national identity.

In the end, America appeared a divided country. True, Bush won 51 per cent of the vote to John F. Kerry’s 48 per cent. Almost the same, you’d say, give or take a few million. Yes, but 51 per cent in a democracy isn’t a narrow escape. An enlightened interpretation would see it as a landslide.

After all Bush has won more votes, in absolute numbers, than any American president ever. His party controls both houses of Congress, his agenda has triumphed. If America is divided, it’s between heartland and coast, core and fringe.

A quarter century ago, the Southern Baptists were Jimmy Carter’s champions. Today, they’re part of Bush’s burgeoning Christian Coalition. They don’t speak the same language as Kerry’s Boston Brahmins. The Democratic elite has lost the Republic’s people.

THIS new American wasn’t born in a day. He was always there, having his say, making his point, pushing his country gradually to the right. The Reagan revolution moved the economic goalposts. After 1980, nobody talked of big government and mega-welfare schemes. Even Bill Clinton, Democratic president in the 1990s, was a fiscally-conservative Reagan legatee.

The Bush proto-revolution is the cultural analogue of Reaganomics. Read it in the exit poll numbers. Fifty-three per cent of those above 60 voted Republican on November 2, as opposed to 44 per cent of those between 18-29. The generation that won the Cold War, made its money and set up its businesses in the Reagan years, now wants to define its society.

For 22 per cent of the voters, ‘‘moral values’’ were the number one issue of this election; 79 per cent of this segment went with Bush. Another 20 per cent saw the economy and jobs as the critical issue; 80 per cent of this segment preferred Kerry.

Nevertheless Kerry’s strongest campaign pitch was cancelled out by the third most important factor in this election — terrorism. For 19 per cent of Americans, it was the decisive issue; and 86 per cent of this group felt safer under Bush.

THE blue collar worker in that rust belt town may be very worried about his job, about cheap steel from China and South Korea, about outsourcing to India. Yet he is also the most gung-ho patriot in the American family, almost unrealistically passionate about God and Country. In a ‘‘normal’’ election, he may have swung to Kerry’s ‘‘the economy’s in a mess’’ corner, bought his apprehensions about world trade; in the time of the War on Terror, America came first.

Irrespective of where he stands, the American voter is informed by a remarkable certitude. A full 78 per cent of the electorate had decided which way it was voting more than a month before the election. The faux argument over who won the three presidential debates was quite purposeless. When America is set on a course it believes is right, it cannot be stopped.

That’s the crucible George W. comes from.