Snowmobiles are good. NASCAR is very good. Football metaphors about God are better. “Sam’s Club Republicans” are the salt of the American earth. Hollywood, the media and academics are suspect at best, subversive at worst. Though not as bad as European ideas.
Republicans insist that Barack Obama’s Democrats represent — the very forces that are holding the United States back from becoming the nation it is destined to be.
“It’s not about talking pretty,” former Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge said Thursday night, the final night of the Republican National Convention. He paused, then jabbed his finger forcefully and used an informal contraction. “It’s about talkin’ straight.”
If the Reagan years launched Republicans’ journey back into the hearts of regular America, the McCain-Palin campaign of 2008 brings it home. Everyday Americans, take heed: The Republican Party stands behind you and your way of life, and John McCain and Sarah Palin are your kind of people.
“It’s the small-town, rural, down-to-earth `real Americans’ vs. the urban sophisticates,” says James Broussard, a Republican and a historian at Lebanon Valley College in Annville, Pa.
Cloaked in the civil language of suit-and-tie politics are code words for the Republican vision of what life in America should be and how to get there — one that differs deeply from what the Democrats want to do if Obama wins.
Consider the mosaic of cultural ideals assembled through the following quotes culled from Republican convention speakers this week:
_Rep. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee: “Last night, my NASCAR dad fell in love with Alaska’s hockey mom.”
_Former Washington Redskins coach Joe Gibbs: “God’s our head coach. Would he put us here without a game plan? Absolutely not.”
_Ex-McCain rival No. 1, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee: “(In) my hometown of Hope, Ark., the three sacred heroes were Jesus, Elvis and FDR, not necessarily in that order.”
_Ex-McCain rival No. 2, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani: “We, the people — the citizens of the United States — get to decide our next president. Not the media, not Hollywood celebrities, not anyone else.”
_Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty: “John McCain and Sarah Palin connect with Sam’s Club voters. They get it.”
_And vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, in one of many statements aimed right at this accelerating narrative: “I’m just one of many moms who will say an extra prayer each night for our sons and daughters going into harm’s way.”
Not since the 1980 election between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan have the cultural lines been drawn so distinctly and the divisions cast so sharply.
“It’s the apotheosis of what’s been going on since the Reagan presidency. Populism has shifted from the Democratic to the Republican party — ordinary folks vs. the establishment and the elite,” says Peter Kreeft, a philosophy professor at Boston College.
But if the small towns go red and the big cities blue, the land between is the battleground of 2008, the newest slice of American culture, with evolving needs and political alignments still coming together. “The question,” Broussard says, “is who gets the suburbs?” And there, for now, no one knows which vision of America will prevail.
AP
9/5/8
Magnolia Tribune
