Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
With Bush's victory, the Lone Star State's right-wing ethos reigns supreme.
Nov 10, 2004 | With the reelection of George W. Bush, the Texanization of American politics is virtually complete. Ever since 1845, when the state was annexed by the United States, the Lone Star State and what it represents have been controversial. At that time, Ralph Waldo Emerson said the push to add Texas to the Union was an event that would "retard or retrograde the civilization."
Retrograde or not, Bush's convincing win over John Kerry means that America's identity has now been subsumed by the Texas worldview. American voters have chosen a government that is militarist, self-absorbed, piously Christian, dominated by big business, generally unconcerned about social inequality, and perfectly happy with regressive taxation. Those characteristics have defined Texas for generations. And now that Bush has regained the White House, the state will accelerate its export of these attitudes to rest of the United States, if not to the rest of the world.
This election had many facets. But a recurring theme -- and criticism -- of Bush was his image as a cowboy. For his critics, Bush the cowboy was a hayseed, a country bumpkin with too much pride and too much power who was always ready to reach for his revolver. For Bush's backers, Bush the cowboy was the modern version of "Gunsmoke" marshal Matt Dillon, a quick-on-the-draw gunslinger who would, as Bush put it, get the bad guys "dead or alive."
Bush's entire campaign strategy was based on that image: Bush, the tough hombre who never makes a mistake, will protect America from those varmint terrorists. The sissy senator from Massachusetts won't. End of speech. Repeat. Then repeat again. And again.
It worked. And thanks to Bush's roots in the Lone Star State, the tough-guy image was, of course, the cowboy. The European press in particular seized on this theme. In April, the Guardian called Bush an "inept cowboy" who can't "keep the herd settled in at night." Yet Bush reveled in the cowboy image. During the Republican Convention, Bush told his faithful: "Some people say that I have a swagger. In Texas, we call it 'walking.'" The crowd roared its approval.
Like Texan Lyndon Johnson, Bush has a rural hacienda that allows him to play the role of gentleman rancher. He wears cowboy boots. When dressed in casual clothes, he often wears a big belt buckle. Like Johnson, Bush wears a cowboy hat while on the ranch. Bush's straw hat is finished in a style known as a "cattleman's crease" -- even though the cattle being run on his Prairie Chapel ranch do not belong to the cowpuncher in chief. (In fact, neither does the ranch itself; it's owned by a Midland, Texas, outfit known as the Lone Star Trust.) Bush has even played the cowboy in Washington by wearing a pearl-gray Stetson on occasion. And of course, Bush adjusts his drawl up or down depending on just how Texan he wants to be.
Texas was an essential part of Bush's path to power. Born in New Haven, Conn., and a product of Andover, Yale and Harvard, Bush acts the Texan in a way that would never have occurred to Johnson. For Johnson, who grew up on a hardscrabble ranch in Blanco County, the Texas attitude, the Texas accent, was inbred. He couldn't turn it on or off in the way that Bush does so skillfully. Johnson was an arrogant but charming, undereducated, overachieving, rough-hewn politico who got his degree from Southwest Texas State Teachers College in San Marcos and never felt comfortable around the fancy-pants intellectuals who went to the power schools in the East.
George W. Bush embraced Texas myths and style in a way that his father never could or would. And Texans see Bush II as one of their own. Last year, Houston oilman George Strake Jr., a veteran of Texas GOP politics for several decades, told me that the elder Bush "had to learn the Texas mentality from a book. But 43 [George W. Bush] has the Texas mentality in his heart. He was raised out there in west Texas."
For historian H.W. Brands, a professor at Texas A&M University whose most recent book is "Lone Star Nation: How a Ragged Army of Volunteers Won the Battle for Texas Independence -- and Changed America," having Texas "in his heart" goes a long way toward explaining Bush's foreign policy. The president is "quite willing to tell the world to 'go to hell -- this is the way we are going to do it,'" says Brands. "The first George Bush was a New Englander and was by nature much more attuned to the sensibilities of other countries."
The tough-guy attitude is as much a part of Texas as the Alamo or the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders. It's an attitude -- and a self-obsession -- that stems from the nine years the state was an independent country. It also comes from the Alamo, the losing battle in San Antonio that went on to become the battle cry for the Texas soldiers fighting the Mexican army. The defeat at the Alamo is a perfect example of Texas' insular attitude. "Texas celebrates a military disaster," says Brands. "I don't know of any other military defeat that is so celebrated." Stir in several billion barrels of light, sweet crude oil; pour in a steady stream of immigrants (mainly from points south) who happily accept cheap wages; and you have the formula for an inward-looking state that continually reinforces its creation myths.
These elements -- along with its music, its movies and several other ingredients -- endow Texas with a swagger, a halo of self-congratulatory pomposity unmatched by any other state. In 2003, the Texas Legislature passed a law requiring schoolchildren to recite the Pledge of Allegiance every morning -- to the Texas flag. Texans have internalized this maniacal self-obsession with their state. It's a concept best summarized by singer-songwriter Ray Wylie Hubbard (a native of Oklahoma), who, in 2003, released the instantaneous classic "Screw You, We're From Texas."
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