Timothy Kalyegira
7 November 2004
opinion
Kampala — The staggering impact of George W. Bush's re-election victory on Tuesday is just starting to become clear.
A truly groundbreaking and historic event has taken place in the United States of America, the wealthiest, most militarily powerful, and culturally influential nation the world has ever seen.
This was the scale of Tuesday's victory: President Bush received more than 58 million votes across the nation, 3 million more than those got by Democratic challenger John Kerry and most significantly, a stunning 4 million votes more than the enormously popular President Ronald Reagan received in his 1984 landslide victory over Democrat Walter Mondale.
The 1984 Reagan landslide remains the largest winning margin by any candidate in U.S history. And yet George Bush easily eclipsed that 54 million-vote total of Reagan last week.
It was significant that even the charismatic and very popular former President Bill Clinton and dozens of Rock and Hip-Hop stars (Dixie Chicks, Puff Daddy, Bruce Springsteen, Carole King), campaigning on behalf of the Democrats and helping to bring out the vote, were unable to bring their mass appeal to Kerry's advantage.
Most of all, the seething anger within Democratic circles at what they deem a rigged Florida vote in 2000, the unpopularity of the March 2003 Iraq war, and the sheer contempt that most educated people feel for Bush, all failed to impact on the election.
What was the reason for this massive win? If not voting on Bush's record, what possible reason could the 58 million people have been voting for?
What irrationality led voters to ignore the evidence of their eyes, the mess in Iraq?
Most curiously in the battleground state of Ohio - which alone has suffered 25 percent of all jobs lost in the last four years under Bush - for unemployed factory workers to come out and vote the man they well knew was responsible for their job losses?
How could a man so consummately unpopular, so thoroughly despised by America's middle and upper middle-classes, so hopelessly unable to express himself in intelligent English in a country so sensitive to media image - sweep the election under so irrational and incomprehensible of circumstances?
When I returned to Uganda from my first visit to America last December, I wrote in The Monitor arguing that just from spending six days in New York City, I had noticed that America, far from being a multi-cultural, secular country, is actually a conservative White-dominated, Christian nation.
I was severely criticised by many people who read the articles, especially Africans living in the US and offended by my tendency to ignore their significance in American society and my tendency to see everything in terms of race.
But now in November 2004, we are suddenly and shockingly reminded of how uncannily correct I might have been, because, according to the CNN television network, the force that swung the election to Bush was the White, Christian Protestants whose large turnout broke every record in the book of conventional wisdom.
None of what happened on Tuesday surprised me.
But exactly what is the nature of the America that most political commentators and news editors did not foresee?
This much we can now deduce from the United States.
First, it is a vast nation which, although a spin-off from western European Anglo-Saxon Christian civilisation, is a country all of its own peculiarity.
It is the only major country in the world, for instance, to have failed utterly to embrace soccer, the world's most popular sport. Two other of the world's most popular spectator sports - cricket and rugby - are virtually without trace in the United States.
These social oddities alone should indicate to us how totally familiar and yet totally peculiar America is. Secondly, none of the powerful and mainly left-leaning, liberal news media of America was prepared to recognise the key role that Christianity still plays in the United States.
America is the only industrialised and advanced country in the world that is steadily becoming much more, not less, religious as the years go by.
Whereas an open display of Christian devotion and religious feelings is viewed with discomfort and a little scorn across much of an increasingly secular western Europe, in the United States the right-wing, conservative and evangelical sects and denominations known in Uganda as the "born again" Christians are rapidly becoming the most powerful social force.
Together with Islam, evangelical Christianity has become one of the world's fastest spreading religious movements.
As we witnessed just after Brazil's 2002 World Cup final victory over Germany (when the Brazilian players unashamedly displayed vests reading "I Belong To Jesus"), even in traditionally Roman Catholic South America, the evangelical churches have established an amazing foothold.
According to the Vatican itself, an average of 4,200 Roman Catholics in South America convert to the "born again" faith every day.
Also none of the national opinion polls we relied on to guide us on the trends in the Bush-Kerry battle asked an important question concerning one of the most traumatic revelations of the past two years - the sexual abuse by Roman Catholic priests in Boston, Massachusetts of their young teenagers and primary school children.
The effect that this shocking scandal had in stiffening the resolve of the American public to invest their votes in any politician who seemed to uphold moral values went largely unnoticed and unaccounted for.
Yet the Roman Catholics are the largest single Christian denomination in the United States.
So while John Kerry and George Bush, political observers and party activists, and the news media were focusing on the issues that they assumed interest the "average American", they were unaware of the deep religious current underway in the rural and mainly conservative Christian heartland of American known as the "Bible Belt" - the agricultural and industrial states that listen overwhelmingly to Country and Gospel music, attend church services regularly, wear blue jeans, and don't know where Britain or China are on any world map you show them.
In many ways, the re-election of George Bush and the domination of American politics by the Republicans started in 1994 when a man named Newt Gingrich led the Republicans to a stunning mid-term election triumph termed the "Contract With America".
This Republican-dominated Congress was so hostile to the then President Bill Clinton that in December 1995 it forced the federal government to shut down because of disagreements over the budget process.
This same Republican Guard was instrumental in persecuting Clinton and effecting his impeachment in August 1999.
Finally in November 2000, came Florida.
Because the latest Republican triumph is borne of the bitter power struggles between the Democrats and Republicans over the last 10 years, it is likely that the Republicans will seek to use their control of all three branches of the United States' political system - the White House, Supreme Court, Congress --- to impose their contract with America in ways that will take the rest of the 21st century to undo.
This is the full extent of the Bush victory.
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