Journey to the heart of Bushlandia

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,1789613,00.html

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.

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?"

And I don't like any more when it is applied to states thousands of miles from me.

There are smart enlightened people in every state.

To bash states is counter-productive in my opinion. We want to win over voters in all of them, don't we?

I guess I should read articles before I comment on them. But I just don't have the time in the middle of the night. :)

Pardon me for my tinfoil ideas, but my state Alabama became solidly Republican right around the same time that we went to electronic voting.

I know Reagan's popularity had a lot to do with it, but I can't dismiss the machines. It just seems too much of a coincedence. Yeah, Alabama is a conservative state, sadly. But the pole reversal in state partisan politics happened at the same time that electronic voting was introduced. Fact.

I would be interested in seeing the data from other southern and western states.

Thanks for the article.

These people need to get with the majority and be like everyone else.

They need to realize that the overwhelming majority of Americans oppose them. Therefore, they are wrong.

Your reasoning is insipid.

you see all the time on freeper sites. Freeper's don't have any business being that cocky and neither do we.

bush hates and fears the 'rightwing' american, the staunch republican't who skips over the facts to worship the fantastic notions that were never true to begin with ...bush invaded iraq precisely to enlist these dupes to his cause instead of having them hearing about the 2k election and the irrefutable questions about 911 which might have made the nightly news had not bush invaded iraq. Bush knows that as long as this rightwing bloodclot minority support him, the pigmedia can pump up the volume and prevent the true american majority from taking over (and punishing the lying thieves etc)...the problem with this stategy is that it is a 'ponzi' scheme with each outrage silencing the earlier one-and one day bush is gonna get caught performing fellatio on a little kid, or something. when the wheels come off the con, it's gonna be breathtaking

jeans are popular out there ´cause the sound of a zipper going down tends to stampede the livestock.

What a fine American attitude :sarcasm:

"People say Saddam was terrible because he tortured his people, now Bush is awful because he invaded. Well, which do you want?"

What I want is for murder and torture NOT to be done in my name.

These folks are a trip.

For those of you who were nauseated with the "reasoning" of the hicks in that article, here's another on the same topic, this one from the NY Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/04/washington/04believers.html?ei=5094&en=fef6401af47a9777&hp=&ex=1149393600&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print

As President's Poll Numbers Fall, Many in Utah Stand by the Man
By TIMOTHY EGAN

PROVO, Utah — Here in what may be the reddest city in the reddest of states, where Democrats sometimes gather like lost souls at the one Starbucks, most people are standing by President Bush.

When he gives a speech that angers voters or brings ridicule from other parts of the country, people here pick up different messages. They might break with Mr. Bush on the war in Iraq or on illegal immigration, but not with the man himself.

"When I watch him, I see a man with his heart in the right place," said Delia Randall, a 22-year-old mother from Provo, the hub of a county that gave Senator John Kerry just 11 percent of the presidential vote in 2004. "I like George Bush because he is God fearing, and that's how a lot of people in this area feel."

These voters are among the committed Bush supporters who are standing proudly by him as he tries to reverse the poll numbers that are sliding even in Utah, hang on to Republican control of Congress, revive his agenda and stabilize Iraq.




Cher