If Obama loses the race, blame it on the ‘born-fighting’ Ulster brigade

Basically, the Scots-Irish — the descendants of the Ulster Protestants who actually make up most of Irish-America — haven’t taken to Barack Obama

IT’S the Irish, stupid. If you’re bored by US politics, apologies: we still aren’t at the halfway mark between the Iowa caucus and the US presidential election. Actually, though, if there is one US election to follow in your lifetime, this is probably it.

Why? Well, for one thing, the old rules don’t apply anymore. Between 2004 and today, politics Stateside has been turned on its head. And, for another thing, it’s the fault of the Irish.

First things first: for years, two armies of roughly the same size — but different levels of religious observance — fought a culture war. The 1990s and early part of this century were the most stable period in US politics since the 1880s with the Republicans consistently scoring 49%-51% and the Democrats 46%-49%.

Few of the 50 states were seriously contested and between the 2000 and 2004 presidential races, for instance, only three switched colour.

Roughly since Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, though, these two armies have abandoned their trenches and votes have begun moving around. George W Bush’s approval ratings plummeted as Americans began seriously to question his competence, if not his ideology per se. The result was the big Democratic win in the 2006 Congressional races.

Does this mean a Democrat will win the White House this year? That remains to be seen. In 2004, the voters identifying themselves as Democrats or Republicans were evenly split — 37% each. Four years later, the proportion of Democrats has grown to 43% while just 31% describe themselves as Republicans. That isn’t as big an advantage for the Democrats as they enjoyed in the mid-’70s, but the fact they are raising three times more money — not least via the internet — should equate to a Democratic victory. The days when the Democrats were the champions of the working man are over.

Another factor in the Democrats’ favour is the turnout in this year’s primaries: 50% higher than when the Republican nomination was still being contested. Furthermore, the Democrats have won three by-elections in Republican seats, in part because they ran better candidates. In this November’s House and Senate races, lots of Republicans are retiring, further handicapping the party of Reagan and Bush.

So why my caution over the White House? Last month, polls were suggesting the Republicans’ John McCain was level pegging with either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. In the last few days, he has slipped a couple of percentage points, but with as many as 15 states in real contention this year, a Democratic win cannot be assured. McCain’s own Lazarus impersonation is symptomatic of the current volatility. His original strategy — running as another George Bush — failed spectacularly.

While he didn’t win the Republican race very convincingly, he does now have solid support among the party faithful. There just aren’t as many of them as there used to be. If the Republican party sees itself, at heart, as being the party of married white people, the Democrats are obsessed by fairness. When they used to be a coalition of northern Catholics and southern Protestants, a candidate needed a two-thirds majority at the convention to win so as to bridge that divide.

Nowadays, consensus is supposed to emerge by handing out convention seats proportionately. It hasn’t worked this year. Instead, tribal warfare has broken out between young and old, between blacks and Latinos and Asians, and between upwardly mobile voters and what Americans call the middle class (the working class to us Europeans).

It’s between the academics and the Appalachians, says the world’s leading authority on American politics, Michael Barone. Basically, the Scots-Irish — the descendants of the Ulster Protestants who actually make up most of Irish-America — haven’t taken to Barack Obama. Among those people a recent book described as “born fighting” — and only marginally less so among other Americans who trace their heritage back to these islands — Hillary Clinton has had a commanding lead. Witness her enormous 41-point advantage in West Virginia last week.

Is racism at work in these states? It seems not: one district in next-door Virginia polled nine-to-one for Hillary, but also voted for an African-American governor. Rather, it is a specific response to specific candidates and never forget that Obama’s background is actually more privileged in some ways than Hillary’s.

With Obamania firing up young voters and black voters and Clinton having the same effect in industrial states and among Latinos and Jews, the bottom line is that neither is maximising the potential Democratic vote. By the time you read this, Kentucky will probably have gone to Clinton and Oregon to Obama, so the pattern continues: the west going to the Illinois senator, the east to the former First Lady. Obama would dearly love to claim victory at this stage, but he needs more superdelegates onside before he can do so and many of them don’t want to say no to either the first serious black candidate or the first woman candidate until Puerto Rico, Montana and North Dakota have had their say. The outcome in November, with so little focus on the issues thus far, is hard to predict. In 1968, many Americans saw the race riots and the campus rebellions and voted for Richard Nixon. Could the US finally be seeing the end of 40 years of conservative domination? If the election were decided on domestic policy, the Democrats should shade it. Voters born after the mid-’60s don’t remember queuing for petrol or the ‘stagflation’ — high unemployment and high inflation — associated with big government.

THAT works to the Democrats’ advantage. Furthermore, most Americans think electing a black president would be “a good thing” — so long as he isn’t in the Jesse Jackson mould. Foreign policy, though, is beginning to run the Republicans’ way again. The ‘surge’ in Iraq — which McCain has supported consistently — is working, as even Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi admits. Obama’s promise to negotiate with Iran without preconditions is damaging him, too.

Ultimately, then, the race for the White House will probably be decided on the question of American exceptionalism: do voters believe the US is different and better than other countries? In short, do they love America? Republicans always say ‘yes’ to this question; Democrats are divided.

And that’s Obama’s weak point. Back in March, he could not disown his inspiration, Rev Jeremiah (“God damn America”) Wright. Now he can. His wife, Michelle, implied she hadn’t been proud of the country that put her through Princeton and Harvard and gave her a $300,000 job until her husband won his first primary.

One of Obama’s funders was in the Weather Underground terrorist group (motto: ‘Kill your parents’). These are all significant negatives. At the same time, Obama’s has been the only political strategy that has worked this year. That not because all the others have stupid advisers — just that America is in a new place politically. And remember, should Barack Obama not make it, blame the Ulster Prods.