Louisville Letter: If you want to know where the US is going, Louisville is not a bad place to start looking, writes Deaglán de Bréadún.
Like Ireland, Kentucky has a dual personality: the people combine a strong religious faith with a love of horse-racing and whiskey. There are 120 counties in the state but in the one called Bourbon, drink sales are banned, whereas Christian County is "wet".
Louisville is generally a stronghold of the Democratic Party whereas the rest of Kentucky votes mainly Republican these days, with the exception of a few traditional coal-mining areas.
It wasn't always that way. There was a time when the Democrats could depend on automatic support from Kentucky and the rest of the south. Those were the days of the Dixie Democrats.
But every second Democrat you meet these days, in Kentucky and elsewhere, will tell you the story of Lyndon Baines Johnson who, as president of the United States, signed the Civil Rights Act into law in 1964. At the time he told his press secretary Bill Moyers, "I think we've just delivered the south to the Republican Party for the rest of my life, and yours." Still, most people would agree that LBJ did the right thing. The apartheid-style segregation of blacks and whites in the southern states was a blot on the reputation of the country and a repudiation of the whole idea of the United States of America.
In the south, blue-collar, working-class white men, by and large, didn't like it. They felt threatened and disadvantaged. Measures like affirmative action, giving African-Americans a leg up in the search for jobs, and court-ordered busing of white children to schools in black areas caused further grave upset.
Republicans began to clean up in the south and the only way the Democrats could stem the tide, even temporarily, was to run a southern candidate like Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton, so that southern whites could feel they were voting for one of their own.
John Kerry didn't fit the description and John Edwards, his running-mate from South Carolina, wasn't well enough known. George Bush virtually swept the board in Kentucky and all over the south. But it wasn't all a legacy of Lyndon Johnson's signature back in the 1960s. There were a series of "hot-button" issues which gave extraordinary momentum to the Bush campaign. In addition to the presidential vote, Kentucky and 10 other states had proposals on the ballot-paper to ban same-sex marriage.
Republicans assume blank and innocent looks when you ask them if this was done deliberately to add rocket-fuel to the Bush campaign. The very least that can be said is that, from their point of view, it was a happy coincidence.
At a time when the US economy is not doing so well and the country is at war in Iraq, Democrats despair that voters in places like Kentucky are more concerned with "moral issues" like gay marriage and abortion. They despair even more that their party has been associated in the public mind with a doctrinaire stance on these issues.
There aren't too many liberals in Kentucky but they make up in forthrightness and conviction for what they lack in numbers. One of the best-known, David Hawpe, columnist with the Louisville Courier-Journal, says the Democrats need to take their distance from issues like gay marriage and abortion. He is worried about the divisions in the country: "I don't remember as tense a civic atmosphere in my lifetime since 1968."
Ironically, an increasing number of African-American voters are backing the Republicans. There is now a sizeable black middle-class and voting Republican often goes with this increase in social stature. But Jack Conway, who ran tke Kerry campaign in Kentucky and whose ancestors came from Mayo, says the post-election despair is being overdone. "The Democrats were awfully close." But even he admits it won't be easy to turn his party around. He quotes the humorist Will Rogers, who said: "I don't belong to any organised political party, I'm a Democrat."