Our next Scots-Irish president

Salena Zito:

What do Hillary Clinton, Mike Huckabee, John McCain and Barack Obama have in common, besides wanting to be the next commander in chief?

They are all of Scots-Irish descent, an ethnic and cultural lineage that has produced more presidents and military leaders than any other.

“Fascinating, but not surprising,” says U.S. Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va. The former naval secretary and decorated Marine should know: He catalogued the migration and cultural influence of the Scots-Irish in America in his book Born Fighting.

They have “always had the tradition of being in leadership positions, whether it is the military or in politics,” Webb says. In fact, 17 of America’s 43 presidents are confirmed Scots-Irish.

They also comprise the largest swing-voting bloc in the country; you cannot win a presidential election without them. In a 2004 newspaper column, Webb suggested that by ignoring Scots-Irish voters in places such as West Virginia and Tennessee, Al Gore probably lost the 2000 presidential election.

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Perhaps because political academics and pollsters parse the Scottish half off with the WASP vote and define the Irish-Catholic half as blue-collar Democrats. They are neither.

So, who are these mystery leaders and influential voters?

Dr. Joyce Alexander, secretary of the national Scotch-Irish Society in Philadelphia, traces their roots to a mass migration from northern Ireland in the 1700s.

The “Ulster Scots,” who had been tossed to Ireland two centuries earlier, grew tired of fighting England’s battle against Irish Catholics, so they left. A group of their clans settled in New Hampshire, then spread to Maine and Vermont.

“Eventually, most of them settled south of New England,” Alexander explains, “from the center and bottom of Pennsylvania down to the tips of Alabama and Georgia,” a region better known as Appalachia.

In time, they became the dominant culture for most of the Midwest and the South.

Much of our democracy’s values emanates from the Scottish Kirk, a philosophy that embraced a bottom-up populist form of governing made up of councils of peer groups.

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Most miss the fact that they are originally from Scotland. They left Scotland before the English culture lifted that area from poverty. It wasn't until they got to the US that they were able to lift themselves from poverty by adapting the American culture. Webb's book on the Scots-Irish is excellent. Thomas Sowell also gives an interesting account of how the culture of the Scots-Irish evolved. My mother's father was Scots-Irish. His name was McCaig.

It is interesting that we have heard much about Obama's Kenyan ancestors, but this is the first I have seen of his ties to the Scots-Irish.