Obama And The Scots-Irish

The Exile writes:

We looked recently at how the Democrats have managed to alienate the Catholic vote in the USA, now let's turn our attention to another group, the Scots-Irish. They normally vote Republican, but might be expected to switch given the state of the economy. Unfortunately, that does not appear to be happening.

If you only read one article about the USA and its culture then the one I urge you to take in is The Appalachian Problem by Peter J. Boyer, from the latest edition of the New Yorker. Boyer looks at the Scots-Irish, who make up the bulk of the white population in Appalachia and concludes that Obama just isn't reaching them. According to Dave Mudflat Saunders, a man who combines Democrat beliefs and Scots-Irish values:

Obama’s “Change” message... is too abstract, too vague, for the region. “Those people . . . were screwed by the English in Scotland and Ireland way before they came over here and started getting screwed,” he said. “They’ve been screwed since the dawn of time. And you know what? You ain’t gonna do anything with them, talkin’ about change. You know why? We’re all changed out. That’s all you ever hear, every election. Somebody’s gonna change some shit. Nothin’ ever changes. We get f**ked.”

What these people need to hear from Obama are concrete proposals that they can believe in, which will ensure that jobs return to their areas. What they are getting is either waffle, or policies that they know will tell against them. Thus when Joe Biden said, "No coal plants here in America," as he did recently in Ohio, that strikes directly at the heart of Appalachia with its coal mining tradition. As far as Obama is concerned he may very well have described the USA as the "Saudi Arabia of coal," but he is also on record as dismissing the whole industry as "dirty energy". What that means is that he flip-flops on policy matters: a waffler who flip-flops - the man is a Republican wet dream.

The problem is that Obama doesn't have those policies, and thus he has nothing to offer the God fearing, gun carrying, anti-abortion voters who are of Scots-Irish descent.

Whether in Northern Ireland and in relation to the English (or the Anglo-Irish) themselves, or in the United States and in relation to the anglophile WASP elite, there is an old Scots-Irish ambivalence (no doubt underlying Ian Paisley's recent cosying up to the SNP) that saw them with the English (and thus with the Anglo-Irish) during the Plantation, against them during the Civil War, with them during the Glorious Revolution (as I do not hesitate to call it, given the Papal Blessing sent to William of Orange when he set out for Ireland), against them during the American Revolution, and half in and half out of the 1798 Rebellion (the Jacobin, and thus anti-Catholic, foundation of Irish Republicanism).

The Scots-Irish in Northern Ireland are for ever "betrayed from London", and the Scots-Irish the American South and West are for ever the victims of "Northern aggression" or "East Coast elitism". But no one fights harder for either Union, British or American.

Obama should have chosen Jim Webb as his running mate, for this and various other raesons. But even now, Obama can and must appeal directly to this remarkable people's economic populism, and at least as much to the fact that they, with the blacks and the Irish Catholics (Joe Biden's lot), make the United States military possible, so that theirs - his wife's, his hearers', and Biden's - are overwhelmingly the families and communities devastated by pointless, unwinnable wars.