November 16, 2005
It's the Values, Voters
By Maggie
Gallagher
Just a year ago, Democrats were pulling out their hair. As the Pew poll reported
in its most recent "political typology" analysis, "Coming out of the 2004 elections,
the American political landscape decidedly favored the Republican Party."
Now President Bush's tanking poll numbers are stimulating a new sense of possibility:
Politics seems up for grabs in a new way. For the first time in recent memory,
a strong economy does not seem to be lifting an incumbent president's political
fortunes.
What does the future hold? The key election may be the Dover, Pa., school board
election, in which all eight school board members who had voted to include a
brief mention of "intelligent design" lost.
I doubt this political rejection was fundamentally ideological. Overwhelming
majorities of Americans say they support teaching creationism alongside of evolution
in public schools. (In the Pew poll, even a narrow majority of liberals favored
teaching creationism alongside of evolution in public schools). It's a typically
American live-and-let-live response that drives scientists, The New York
Times, the courts, certain Democratic elites and George Will stark raving
mad.
The Dover election loss reveals the limits of symbolic politics. Say the words
"intelligent design" in public school, and hordes of New York Times reporters
and ACLU lawyers will descend, stimulating angry confrontations between erstwhile
friendly neighbors. As a values issue, most Pennsylvanians are likely content
with a small nod to intelligent design in their public schools. But as a practical
matter, a small symbol like that is not worth upsetting the principal aim of
schools: educating the kids.
"I think the people of Dover are tired of the attention over such a minuscule
thing, and they want a change," one former board member, Lonny Langione, told
the Times. "A lot of the people I talked to were upset because the school
board came to using taxpayer money to advance their own agenda."
The GOP faces a political crisis for a variety of reasons, but one looming problem
is that so many of its coalition voters are in fact "values voters" drawn to
the GOP for largely symbolic reasons. In the Pew poll, social conservatives
(including the less affluent "pro-government conservatives") outnumber the pro-business,
low-tax "Enterprisers" in the GOP base by a margin of 2-to-1.
Yet so far, few GOP political or intellectual leaders have even tried to translate
values concerns into an agenda that also serves voters' interests, the usual
basis of a stable governing majority. Tax cuts used to serve this unifying purpose,
but Republicans got so good at cutting the taxes of the middle class that the
issue no longer packs the same widespread punch.
In the Weekly Standard essay "The Party of Sam's Club: Isn't It Time
the Republicans Did Something for Their Voters?" Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam
make a serious attempt at translating values into interests.
A "pro-family" economic agenda would begin with the recognition of a frequent
left-wing talking point -- that over the past few decades, returns to capital
have escalated while returns to labor have declined, and that the result has
been increasing economic insecurity for members of the working and middle classes,
they write.
Douthat and Salam suggest two practical solutions: new financial supports for
parents (a la increasing the child tax credit) plus the equivalent of a "veteran's
benefit" providing scholarship money for moms home with their kids. They also
urge the GOP to address widespread health insecurity. Among all the political
typologies in the Pew poll, only the "Enterprisers" (10 percent of registered
voters) oppose government-guaranteed health insurance.
Easier said than done, of course. But it's an important insight: Values pack
a punch at the polls (ask John Kerry). Over time, merely symbolic values alone
won't substitute for an agenda that makes a difference in voters' lives.
Copyright 2005 Maggie Gallagher
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/Commentary/com-11_16_05_MG.html