The governor of Idaho, an affable rancher named Jim Risch, stretched back in his chair and outlined his alternative history of the past few years in the United States. ”Hurricane Katrina — they heaped that on George Bush!” said Risch in the dry heat of an afternoon in Boise, the state capital.
”Here in Idaho, we couldn’t understand how people could sit around on the kerbs waiting for the federal government to do something. We had a dam break in 1976, but we didn’t whine about it. We got out our backhoes and we rebuilt the roads and replanted the fields. That’s the culture here.”
This, of course, is not how most Americans view last year’s disaster in New Orleans. But then Idaho 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 Utah and Wyoming on 51% and 50%, making 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,” he said. ”People know what’s in his heart.”
Idaho is redneck country, famous only for its potato industry and its white supremacists. ”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, who runs the right-wing Idaho Values Alliance.
If you oppose gay marriage, though, or if you support the war in Iraq, you will find many friends in Idaho. ”A guy called me the other day and said he wanted to join our alliance. He made it clear he was new to the state,” Fischer said. ”I asked where he was coming from, and he said California. I asked what prompted him to move to Idaho, and he said: ‘California.”’
Up to 35% of Idahoans identify themselves as affiliated to neither political party. 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 the US is not a question of mere policy arguments. It is a clash of two incompatible versions of reality, where the same facts take on different meanings. For Idaho Republicans, escalating violence in Iraq illustrates the scale of the challenge there, and the need to stay loyal. Bush’s errors 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,” Risch said. ”People say Saddam was terrible because he tortured his people, now Bush is awful because he invaded. Well, which do you want?”
In the hills outside Boise, on a road where every telegraph pole sports a yellow ribbon in support of the troops, the owner of the Rumor Mill bakery explains the problem in one sentence. The media, Tona Henderson says, are biased to the left, and so the good news from Iraq never gets reported.
In an effort to send a different message, she has decorated every inch of her café with photos of combat veterans. There is also a Bible verse, a shot of Iraqi children grinning in front of a US tank, and a poster in the window that drives home the point. ”Life, liberty, and the pursuit of all who threaten it,” it reads.
Being a Democrat in this setting can be a lonely existence. ”We do still find ourselves whispering in the supermarket about it,” said Maria Weeg of the Idaho Democratic Party. ”There’s such an overwhelming psychological thing … The Republicans have done a pretty good job of making Democrats here into the enemy.”
But she declines to mock her opponents. ”These are people who have deep, core values and it behoves us to try to understand those values. Bush has this rugged, everyday, average guy sort of persona that speaks to Idahoans, and there’s a strong feeling that we’ve just got to stick by our president because he’s our president.”
At a national level, Democrats disagree over what to do about places such as Idaho. Some would give them up as a lost cause, targeting resources on marginal states instead. Weeg supports the alternative ”50-state strategy”. The Republicans, this theory holds, won Idaho as part of a long-term, bottom-up, nationwide strategy to change the focus of politics from economics to morality. Only a similarly broad Democratic initiative has any hope of turning things around.
This is not to say that the Republicans might not one day lose Bushlandia, whose population holds lukewarm views about the party’s two most likely nominees for 2008, John McCain and Rudy Giuliani. Even the president’s 52% approval represents a steep fall from prior levels of support. But a core of affection for Bush, Risch insisted, would always remain.
”I’ll give you the best example I can think of,” the governor said. ”We had a fellow by the name of Bill Clinton. He was the president of the United States. He sexually harrassed an employee in his office. The women’s groups around the US should have been ready to crucify him … But what did they do? They came to his support in spades. Why? Because they knew his heart.” — Â