IT was no cosmic coincidence that country music ruled in the “red states” that went for George W. Bush in the 2004 election.
Statistics show that there were 1,580 country music radio stations in those 31 states that favoured the current US president. The other 20 “blue states” that John Kerry won in had a mere one-third of such radio stations.
How is this a barometer of Americans’ voting pattern?
According to David J. Firestein, an American career diplomat who has taught political campaigns and communication, country music is mostly about family, religious devotion and patriotism.
“It’s an identity that talks about old-fashioned values, things that ‘my dad taught me’,” he said.
Bush, he said, knew this very well and so his use of symbols like cowboy boots and a Texas swagger partly helped him “ride all the way to a second term”.
He noted that Bush picked a rousing country tune, Only in America by Brooks and Dunn, as the official campaign theme in 2004.
“Only in America/Where we dream in red, white and blue/Where we dream as big as we want to...”
Firestein, who gave a talk titled “Mid-term Election: What Factors May Sway Voters?” at the New York Foreign Press Centre recently, said political campaigns were mostly about identity and not issues.
“What kind of a country is America? Will this person represent the values that I stand for? It’s all about identity,” he said, giving examples of the sort of questions that weighed in on the mind of voters.
He said that about 50 million Americans tune in to country music for about three hours daily, listening to songs that dealt with religion, the Bible, angels and so forth.
“The average country music fan is white, female and probably in her 40s, married with kids.”
And it is the kind of songs that they do not mind their kids hearing over the radio.
Firestein found that about 20% of the top 50 country hits each year touched on the traditional family bond.
Such music may indulge Americans’ yearning for the good days, but it is clear that it is no longer a simple life now.
Questions of morals and ethics confront a number of election candidates as scandals emerged, scarring the name of their good office in recent weeks.
Jeanine Pirro, the Republican candidate who is eyeing the post of New York state attorney general, is under investigation for allegedly planning to plant a bug inside the boat of her cheating husband.
She defended herself, saying that she did not secretly tape her husband’s conversations although she had thought about doing it. (Wiretapping a spouse is unacceptable in court as it is a violation of ethics. But the law does not cover photos or videos, so cameras are okay to trap the errant spouse, apparently.)
Her husband has been bad news for her political career. He reportedly had affairs, besides fathering a child with another woman, which he denied until a paternity test proved it in 1998.
In 2000, he was convicted of tax evasion and spent 11 months in jail.
“Albert J. Pirro Jr (Jeanine’s husband) makes Bill Clinton look like a saint,” a reader of The New York Post said.
On his part, Albert described himself as a lonely political husband who wasn’t getting enough attention at home.
Another scandal confronting the Republican Party is the resignation of Mark Foley, who quit the Congress last month after news broke that he indulged in sexually-explicit online chat with teenage boys.
A probe is now going on to find out whether appropriate action had been taken to stop Foley earlier, since several lawmakers and top Republican aides had apparently known of his bad behaviour before it became public knowledge.
New York state comptroller Alan Hevesi of the Democratic Party is in the soup, too. He had made use of a state employee to serve as a personal chauffeur for his ailing wife for three years.
Such stories must surely lead to fans of country music singing the blues now.
(Sunday October 29, 2006)
