Noted Blogger to do weekly column for British newspaper
Now this is interesting...
Roger L. Simon is reporting:
bq. Britain's
Guardian has asked
Glenn Reynolds to do a weekly column in the run-up to the election. Is this an inoculation against blog attacks? Given what's recently happened to CBS, you couldn't blame them. And maybe there's a little of that in this case. Cooptation, after all, is one of the oldest and most successful strategies. Still, it's great to see Glenn giving a
lesson in Jacksonianism to the smart set in Chelsea. They need it. I'll be watching these columns as they go along. And the reaction to them, particularly across The Pond. Maybe our frequent commenter PeterUK can keep us apprised.
This is a very good thing to happen. Reynolds' Blog is Instapundit - one of the top ones. His first article at the Guardian is great -- he starts by talking about the South and their current antipathy to any Democrat who is not from the South:
bq. In my lifetime, only one Democrat who was not from the American south has won the presidency. And the Democrat who did so, John F Kennedy, accomplished this feat when I was two months old.
bq. Since then, many have concluded that it's impossible for a Democrat to win the south unless - like Bill Clinton or Jimmy Carter - he has southern roots. (Al Gore, who hails from Carthage, Tennessee but who spent much of his childhood in a posh Washington hotel, apparently wasn't southern enough.)
He continues:
bq. So what is it about the south? I think it's defence. Some time between the election of John F Kennedy, and the ignominious defeat of 1972 Democratic nominee George McGovern, the Democrats lost credibility on national defence. From Kennedy's stirring "bear any burden, pay any price" language, to the "peace at any price" slogans of the anti-war left in 1972, the Democrats lost their traditional stature as the internationalist and interventionist war party. Instead, they became identified with the welfare-state liberalism of the north-east and west coast, and with the anti-military sentiments of the anti-Vietnam war movement.
bq. Southern candidates offer a presumption of manliness that offsets these problems, at least somewhat. (Having worked for Al Gore in 1988, and a bit for Clinton in 1992, I remember a phone call in which I told Clinton strategist Bruce Reed that they needed to push Clinton's masculinity in that campaign. Show him lifting weights, or something. Don't worry, responded Reed, a shortage of testosterone isn't his problem. Truer than I realised, at the time.)
And then introduces:
bq. To understand the American south's role on defence, it's helpful to look at what political scientist Walter Russell Mead calls the "Jacksonian tradition" in foreign affairs. Because when Zell Miller - a Democrat from Georgia who is deeply unhappy with his party on matters of national defence - delivered the keynote address at the Republican national convention, he spoke in the purest tones of Jacksonian America.
bq. Jacksonians (as Mead explains in this interview) aren't very interested in foreign affairs, but respond vigorously to threats:
bq.
"[The idea is]: Don't bother with people abroad, unless they bother you. But if they attack you, then do everything you can ... When somebody attacks the hive, you come swarming out of the hive and you sting them to death. And Jacksonians, when it comes to war, don't believe in limited wars. They don't believe, particularly, in the laws of war. War is about fighting, killing, and winning with as few casualties as possible on your side. But you don't worry about casualties on the other side. That's their problem. They shouldn't have started the war if they didn't want casualties."
The whole article is a really good read. It will be interesting to see if more Bloggers get invited to write columns in mainstream media -- they must be seeing the writing on the wall by now.
Posted by DaveH at September 30, 2004 1:32 PM