GI Bill Bobby
| 🎓 | |
| Era | The Sixties |
|---|---|
| Age | 25-35 |
| Home | Columbus, OH |
| Demographic | suburban, white, young veteran |
| Lean | Swing voter |
| Race | white |
A Korean War veteran in his early thirties, a middle manager in the Columbus suburbs who owes his degree and his mortgage to federal programmes. He is the younger of the cast's two suburban swing voters and the more hawkish.
Who they stand for
About 5.7 million Americans served during the Korean War era. The Veterans' Readjustment Assistance Act of 1952 gave them a version of the GI Bill that veterans of the Second World War had already used, including tuition assistance, a living allowance, and a VA-guaranteed mortgage that helped build the postwar suburbs. Columbus, Ohio, and the suburban rings of other Midwestern cities filled with men like him during the 1950s. They were college-educated on government money, worked in the new white-collar middle management, and voted for Eisenhower. Ohio was a bellwether state. It voted for Nixon in 1960 and for Johnson in 1964, and its suburban vote moved with the national trend.
This bloc's politics centred on continuing the Cold War it had fought, keeping taxes low, and electing a president who appeared competent. It was not an ideological bloc, and it was not a Southern one. Its unease grew through the decade because of the Great Society's new legislation and the campus protests, and by 1968 the same voter supported Nixon again, forming part of what became known as the silent majority.
Playing to them
He responds well to competence, and to a president who presents the country as functioning well. This includes a steady economy, support for the space programme and the armed forces, a war fought to be won or not fought at all, and taxes kept low. He admires the government programmes that built his own life, such as the GI Bill, without wanting them extended to everyone, so a Great Society programme presented as a new entitlement worries him in a way a veterans' benefit or a new highway does not. He does not forgive draft evasion excused by the White House, a war that ends in a stalemate like the one he returned from, rising taxes, or visible disorder in American cities. He is a contemporary of Levittown Larry, but takes a harsher view because he fought in the war that followed the one his neighbour fought and won.
Either party can win his support, which is his value to a campaign. Escalating a war to please him costs the support of Campus David and Faculty Eleanor. Cutting taxes to keep his support uses money that would otherwise fund Great Society programmes Harlem James wants.
Where they live
The five states where GI Bill Bobby makes up the largest share of the electorate in the sixties:
- Vermont
- Utah
- Maine
- New Hampshire
- North Dakota