Roosevelt attained the status of a saint.
With the Great Depression and the New Deal in the 1930s, Democrats had greater appeal in the rest of rural America, even while remaining strongest in the rural South. In the South, the Democratic Party had been the dominant political identity since before the Civil War. But the motivations behind Lynn's endorsement mattered because they expressed changes underway over a period of years in agricultural America and among middle-class voters who worked for wages and did not have a college degree.įor generations, those voters had been the bedrock of the Democratic Party. Of course no one country singer, no matter how beloved, could confer the presidency on Bush or any other candidate - not in 1988 or in any other year. Lynn later campaigned for the second President Bush, George W. She was telling them Bush would act as their guardian, defending what her fans regarded as America (and certainly doing that better than that year's Democratic nominee, Michael Dukakis, the technocratic governor of Massachusetts).
She was not inventing a false biography for him she was communicating a certain shared faith with her audience. If Loretta Lynn said Bush was country, in a sense, he was. Whether Lynn's description fit him or not, Bush spent much of 1988 doing his best to earn it - getting photographed driving a truck and professing his deep love of deep-fried pork rinds.īut none of that was what really mattered. Bush went from a super-elite private prep school to Yale, and after Navy service and a few years in Midland, Texas, setting up an oil business, he moved to a well-heeled part of Houston and from there back to Washington as a member of Congress, director of the CIA, chairman of the Republican Party and Reagan's vice president.
Bush had been born in New England and raised in Washington, D.C., the son of a senator from Connecticut. That provoked a few smiles and much head scratching at the time. On that occasion, referring to one of her own signature songs ("You're Looking at Country"), Lynn told the crowd and the cameras that looking at Bush was "looking at country." And in case there was any doubt, she leaned into the microphone and proclaimed: "I know George Bush, and he is country." Surprise at Lynn's alignment with Trump was a reprise of the reaction some of her fans had when she appeared on stage in 1988 with the Republican nominee for president, George H.W. (The 2016 Democratic nominee had alienated some country music fans with what seemed a slighting reference to the phrase "Stand By Your Man," the title of Tammy Wynette's ethos-defining song about marriage.) Lynn once told an interviewer she had gone with Trump in part because her audiences would have booed her if she had endorsed Hillary Clinton. Some of Lynn's fans were surprised this week to learn she had supported former President Donald Trump That change made a big difference in American politics when it happened, helping to elect Republican presidents such as Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and both Presidents Bush.Īnd it continues to make a big difference today.
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