So You’re Telling Me 1 In 3 Vets Favor #OccupyResoluteDesk?

Posted on | May 28, 2012 | 19 Comments

by Smitty

The Blaze relates a Gallup poll showing 58% of veterans favor Romney to 34% for BHO. Gallup theorizes:

Men who serve in the military may become socialized into a more conservative orientation to politics as a result of their service.

We had this one guy on USS Two Ships Ago, whose last name I’ll truncate to ‘M’ for reasons of good taste.

The rotation pattern for junior officers at the time was every 18 months or so, the idea being to reduce the stress of being a division officer. You could go to a ship, get through the learning curve of being in the fleet, and then transfer somewhere else to start fresh, with a clean slate.

Except FUM.

Effed-Up M______ was such a heinous piece of work that his nickname, FUM, followed him to his second division officer tour. Had him covered like a jimmie hat, did the sobriquet. You could have a conversation with him, and he seemed so normal, so natural, so pleasant. Yet time and again he would come into possession of a critical piece of information and sit on it, to the detriment of others. After a while, it came to seem deliberate passive aggression. FUM was secretly hated, but had a prominent position in the wardroom, so you had to navigate around his carcass with care.

FUM and #OccupyResoluteDesk, seem two birds from the same henhouse, as far as I can tell. Nobody whose experienced an organization capable of real-world accomplishment (and I don’t mean electoral campaigns) is going to follow either one except out of idle curiosity.

In November 2008 I was talking to a Lefty friend of mine. She was a psychiatric nurse in the Navy in the Vietnam era. I suppose she’s in the 1/3 category. Asked what I thought of the result, I allowed that it depended upon whether the campaign moderate Obama or the radical leftist Obama showed up in January to be sworn in. We all see that we may as well have had Hugo Chavez or my old buddy FUM as BHO for the last three years. Barack couldn’t lead two nuns in one minute of silent prayer, any more than he could avoid jacking up a toast to the Queen of England.

Perhaps support for BHO among veterans can be attributed to head injuries.

Update: more at The Lonely Conservative, including the latest Romney campaign video.

Category: Barack Obama

Comments

19 Responses to “So You’re Telling Me 1 In 3 Vets Favor #OccupyResoluteDesk?”

Bob Belvedere
May 28th, 2012 @ 7:38 pm

That last line is the best punch line I’ve read or heard in along time.

BTW: This may interest you: Wonder whatever happened to the Resolute Desk created for the movie JFK?
http://spectator.org/blog/2012/05/25/ever-wondered-what-happened-to
ombdz
May 28th, 2012 @ 7:48 pm

Great post. There’s a good reason that Vets are turning away from The One. Which are pretty much the same reasons that other groups are doing the same thing. And if Mitt’s campaign stops last week are any indication, he knows who the swing groups are and he’s going after them, hard … http://bit.ly/qVdDUt
Adjoran
May 28th, 2012 @ 7:50 pm

A 24-point spread is none too shabby. We have to allow for the head injuries, the older Yellow Dogs, and the black vets who can’t escape the Democratic plantation (and maybe don’t want to as long as there’s a black patriarch in the big house).

And the women, of course. With all due respect, without female votes, there would be precious few Democrats elected to any office.
Mike G.
May 28th, 2012 @ 8:04 pm

You beat me to the racial and feminist aspect of the equation. It would be interesting to see a racial/gender breakdown in this poll to see how the numbers skew.
Veterans Prefer Romney Over Obama By Wide Margin | The Lonely Conservative
May 28th, 2012 @ 8:06 pm

[…] is the Memorial Day video released by his campaign titled, simply, “Thank You.”Update: Smitty wonders about his fellow veterans who support BO: “Perhaps support for BHO among veterans can be attributed to head […]
KenPrescott
May 28th, 2012 @ 8:08 pm

”
Men who serve in the military may become socialized into a more conservative orientation to politics as a result of their service.”

Or the pool of persons willing to serve in the military tend to be significantly more conservative than the population at large.
richard mcenroe
May 28th, 2012 @ 8:10 pm

Is there any breakdown by service, rank and occupational specialty?
M. Thompson
May 28th, 2012 @ 8:16 pm

Gee, looks like something was forgotten there. . .
Pathfinder's wife
May 28th, 2012 @ 9:04 pm

A lot of the talk I hear is that nobody’s truly gung ho supportive of Barry (except a few — and the military isn’t political ideology inclusive anyway) but a bit of nervousness over Romney (the military may slant conservative, but this is not the same as slants Republican). Of course, some are gung ho Mitt too, as the military isn’t inclusive of one party or the other. The majority I talk to aren’t thrilled either way and consider this the same old, same old.
Those interventionist foreign policy statements seem to have spooked a few (understandable, the troops have been fighting for a long time now; they are tired).
Plus some I’ve heard from don’t think he’s really conservative.

It is what it is.
CAPT Pete in GA
May 28th, 2012 @ 9:28 pm

Smitty, great analogy – we had a FUM in our Wardroom – he was the one who went to the nude beach with a couple of his enlisted MMs – got sunburned in a tender place. We were always told that was a violation of UCMJ.
jwallin
May 28th, 2012 @ 9:30 pm

Well, keep in mind that that was a survey of veterans and not current service.

figure 33% of that 32% are black veterans and then about 5% were dyed in the wool democrats back in the Roosevelt era and won’t think anything bad of a Democrat and they’re too lost in the past these days to pay attention to the scandals and such. The label Democrat is all they need to hear.

Then there’s about 33% are current Government employees and likely belong to a union and they wouldn’t answer the survey truthfully if they were conservatives.

So that leaves about 19% of that 32% which is probably about correct considering that those are older but not senile veterans from the 80’s and 90’s when the dems weren’t quite so vicious publicly.

BTW I’m not talking percentages of a percentage. I’m taking the 32 and divvying it up cause I’m too lazy to convert it.
Proof
May 28th, 2012 @ 10:12 pm

Smitty: Don’t discount disgruntled Paul voters.
Pathfinder's wife
May 28th, 2012 @ 10:20 pm

Well, it’s worth remembering that a person’s military service is not the be all end all of their life — sooner or later they get out and become civilians…and that can mean a very different sort of life than what they may have had while in, with different priorities, which means a very different outlook for some.

Generalities (such as polls and percentages for groups) are good for making general predictions, but they are terrible for determining how each individual is going to behave.
Bob Belvedere
May 29th, 2012 @ 7:40 am

Adj, Mike: I think I laid out the case brilliantly [if I do say so myself] for repealing the 19th Amendment here:
http://thecampofthesaints.org/2011/05/03/offend-a-feminist-the-case-for-repealing-the-19th-amendment/
ThePaganTemple
May 29th, 2012 @ 9:26 am

Would somebody explain to me what the fuck is a “non-military veteran”? Whatever the hell it is, Obama is leading with them by about four percent, according to Fox.
Quartermaster
May 29th, 2012 @ 12:43 pm

The nude beach wasn’t, but the sunburn was if it rendered him unfit for duty.
Quartermaster
May 29th, 2012 @ 12:45 pm

Non-military vets are people that served in their minds or dreams.
K-Bob
May 30th, 2012 @ 4:21 am

“Barack couldn’t lead two nuns in one minute of silent prayer, any more than he could avoid jacking up a toast to the Queen of England.”

Careful!, or he’ll send you to a Polish Death Camp.
The Spot-On Quote Of The Day… « The Camp Of The Saints
May 30th, 2012 @ 10:43 am

[…] awarded to Smitty, Admiral Of The Afghan Seas and Chief Squid on the USS O’Dough, who offers the best explanation as to why a recent pool shows that thirty-four percent of veterans support El Presidente General […]