Famous Liberal Writer Votes for Pres Bush
'The liberal elite hasn't got a clue'
As a member of the Manhattan intelligentsia, novelist Tom Wolfe seems a lonely defender of George Bush's values. But he's bewildered by a sex-mad society and tired of being lectured to at dinner parties. So he's voting for President Bush tomorrow.
November 1, 2004
Tom Wolfe casts his gaze across America at this election time. For the most part, this softly-spoken, gentleman journalist from the South can write with such voracity about the grime and sediment which inhabits American society and the human soul.
As he notes, the America which votes tomorrow is a country at odds over morality like never before. "I suppose we are talking here about what you might call the religious right and the immoral left. I do have sympathy with them, yes, though I am not religious. The sexual revolution has become a carnival."
No writer has chronicled the full American curve over four decades quite like Wolfe. He is "proud", he says, "that I do not think any political motivation can be detected in my long books."
"Here is an example of the situation in America," he says: "Tina Brown wrote in her column that she was at a dinner where a group of media heavyweights were discussing, during dessert, what they could do to stop Bush. Then a waiter announces that he is from the suburbs, and will vote for Bush. And ... Tina's reaction is: 'How can we persuade these people not to vote for Bush?' I draw the opposite lesson: that Tina and her circle in the media do not have a clue about the rest of the United States. You are considered twisted and retarded if you support Bush in this election. Reagan was sniggered it, but this is personal, real hatred.
"Indeed, I was at a similar dinner, listening to the same conversation, and said: 'If all else fails, you can vote for Bush.' People looked at me as if I had just said: 'Oh, I forgot to tell you, I am a child molester.' I would vote for Bush if for no other reason than to be at the airport waving off all the people who say they are going to London if he wins again. Someone has got to stay behind."
"I think support for Bush is about not wanting to be led by East-coast pretensions. It is about not wanting to be led by people who are forever trying to force their twisted sense of morality onto us, which is a non-morality. That is constantly done, and there is real resentment. Support for Bush is about resentment in the so-called 'red states' which means, literally, middle America.
And John Kerry? "He is a man who has no beliefs at all. He is poll-driven, and it is therefore impossible to know where or for what he stands."
And there has been a complete climate change in the nation which elected Bill Clinton twice, to that which may confer the same honour on George Bush tomorrow. This, says Wolfe, began not with the election of Bush, but on the morning of September 11 2001.
"That day told us that here was a different kind of enemy. I honestly think that America and the Bush administration felt that something had to be done. But I do not think that the Americans have become a warlike people."
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