Monday,
November 15 2004
HAVE YOU BOUGHT THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM?: There
are three groups that really want you to believe that the
religious right and "moral values" were the driving
forces in this election: 1) the religious right 2) liberals
and 3) the media. All three have a vested interest in cementing
the conventional wisdom that this was the election of the
"values voter."
Group
1 obviously wants to overstate its role in the election
to increase its power and influence on the political process.
Groups 2 and 3 cling to the "values voter" theme
to help rationalize what happened on election day and to
paint the Republican party as captive to a fundamentalist
(which in the liberal mind is synonymous with "intolerant")
Christian base.
But
as
Charles Krauthammer explained last Friday in typical,
brilliant fashion, the role of the "values voter"
in this year's election is mythical:
The urban myth grew around the fact
that "moral values" ranked highest in the answer
to Question J: "Which ONE issue mattered most in
deciding how you voted for President?"
It is a thin reed upon which to base
a general theory of the '04 election. The way the question
was set up, moral values was sure to be ranked disproportionately
high. Why? Because it was a multiple-choice question and
moral values cover a group of issues, while all the other
choices were individual issues. Chop up the alternatives
finely enough, and moral values is sure to get a bare
plurality over the others.....
If you pit group against group, moral
values comes in dead last: war issues at 34%, economic
issues at 33% and moral values at 22%.
And we know that this is the real
ranking. After all, the exit poll is just a single poll.
We had dozens of polls in the runup to the election that
showed that the chief concerns were the war on terror,
the war in Iraq and the economy.
Ah, yes. But the fallback is then
to attribute Bush's victory to the gay marriage referendums
that pushed Bush over the top, particularly in Ohio. This
is more nonsense. Bush increased his vote in 2004 over
2000 by an average of 3.1% nationwide. In Ohio, the increase
was 1% - less than a third of the national average. In
the 11 states in which the gay marriage referendums were
held, Bush increased his vote by less than he did in the
39 states that did not have the referendum. The great
anti-gay surge was pure fiction.
We
see more proof of Krauthammer's thesis in an
AP/Ipsos poll conducted from November 3-5 among 844 registered
voters:
I’m
going to read you a list of issues and I’m going
to read the list twice. Please tell me which one issue
should be the highest priority for President Bush in his
second term:
The situation in Iraq.......................27
Terrorism..........................................23
The economy ..................................18
Health care.....................................14
Unemployment ................................7
Education ........................................7
Taxes ................................................2
(NOT READ) Other .......................2
Not sure ......................................... -
Granted,
"moral values" were not part of the AP/Ipsos list,
but no one in their right mind would argue that voters were
suggesting that a Constitutional amendment banning gay marriage
or repealing Roe vs. Wade be higher on the list of the President's
priorities than Iraq, terrorism and the economy.
That
doesn't mean "values" issues weren't part of the
mix in this election, but they were an undercurrent at best
and simply do not account for President
Bush's country-wide demographic and geographic gains.
If
I had to characterize this election in a single phrase,
I'd say it was an election about maturity, not morality.
It was a referendum on serious issues and ultimately George
Bush won because he was more serious about them than his
opponent.
You've
probably heard the reference before that the Democratic
Party is the "mommy party" and the GOP is the
"daddy party." The bottom line is that since 9/11
the country has been in no mood to listen to mommy.
Think
about it. Democrats got their clocks cleaned in 2002 and
again this year. They've suffered two history-defying losses
in the last two cycles. As much as Democrats would like
to boil these losses down to the bigotry of the South and/or
the fear-mongering of Republicans, they simply can't seem
come to grips with the primary reason for their failure:
an inability to pass the national security test with the
American people.
It's
not that Democrats can't pass the test, but that they deliberately
refuse to by shunning hawkish members of their party (like
Joe Lieberman and Dick Gephardt) and by embracing antiwar
leftists (like Michael Moore and Howard Dean). It's a schism
that makes it extremely difficult for Democrats to be competitive
nationally or in the South, and no one better represented
the schism, both in symbol and in substance, than John Kerry.
His campaign this year was the ultimate effort to dress
mommy up like daddy, and voters could tell the difference.
-
T. Bevan 7:00 am Link
| Email |
Send
to a Friend