Even as most of the mainstream media demeans the results of election exit polls showing that John Kerry received more votes than Bush did, they unabashedly trumpet the accuracy of those same polls insofar as they show that "values" was allegedly the deciding factor for many voters.
What the mainstream media is conveniently ignoring is that the evidence reliably shows that it wasn't "values" which swung the election Bush's way, but rather disinformation, distortion and mud-slinging on a scale rarely seen in a Presidential election. Of course, the mainstream media's reluctance to discuss this isn't really so surprising when one considers the extent to which said media was complicit in Bush's use of those tactics to mold opinion and control the flow of information to the American people.
The following three articles make this point exceedingly well, and we should all do what we can to make sure this fact gets out into the mainstream discourse.
First, a piece by Greg Sargent in The American Prospect entitled "Blaming The Victim" points out that elements of the mainstream media are falling hook line and sinker for the Bush re-writing of history and that Bush's re-election campaign was defined not by values, but by distortions, sleaze and deceit:
Exhibit A is Elisabeth Bumiller's lengthy front-page dissection of John Kerry's loss in Thursday's New York Times. Bumiller tells us that George W. Bush's advisers saw Kerry as a "dream opponent ... whose nuanced opinions on Iraq gave them an opening, day after day, to attack him as a flip-flopper." She also describes Kerry's infamous line about his votes on the $87 billion supplemental as a gift to Bush. She catalogues a host of other Kerry failings, from his tendency toward caution to his inability to run a tight ship. And she quotes Karl Rove as saying that a key reason Bush won was that voters "had deep doubts about the other guy."
Yet amazingly, the piece never once mentions the extensive and nefarious tactics the Bush campaign used to create those doubts -- and those tactics are central to the story of this race. The role of the Bush campaign in winning is invariably described in approving terms: Bumiller's piece describes Bush as charismatic and full of clarity and conviction, and she takes note of the tactical effectiveness of the ground game and the anti-gay ballot initiatives. There is no mention anywhere of the Bush campaign's relentless efforts to paint Kerry as weak and vacillating by lying about his record and mischaracterizing his remarks on the stump -- distortions that, inarguably, did far more violence to the truth than any similar ones coming from Kerry's side. This take asks us to believe that doubts about Kerry are the fault of nobody but himself; the Bush campaign was merely a passive beneficiary. Worse, it refuses to see campaigns in moral terms: It allows for no moral comparison between boosting evangelical turnout with crude anti-gay appeals and boosting turnout among African Americans by telling them that the right to vote is precious and mustn't be squandered.
. . . and . . .
But let's remember what actually happened here. The real story of this race is that on many levels, the Republicans ran a campaign that was sleazier, more ruthless, and more dishonest than anything in memory -- by far. The key Bush attacks on Kerry were, first, that he would allow the United States' own security decisions to be vetoed by other nations; and that he would hike taxes on the middle class and small businesses. Those contentions weren't mere rhetorical distortions; they were lies. The grotesque misrepresentation of Kerry's war record, courtesy of the Swift Boat veterans, was likewise based on lies. And the more general effort to paint Kerry as weak and vacillating relied on very deliberate efforts by the president and vice president to lie about Kerry's words on the stump. What all these assertions have in common is that they were not just false, but demonstrably false. Yet they either passed unchallenged by the media, or they were challenged too late -- after they'd succeeded in their objective of creating, as Rove innocently put it, "doubts about the other guy." And the GOP got away with it, because they knew that they could count on political reporters to write about the campaign with the moral urgency of a sportswriter covering a baseball game in June. And that's exactly what happened.
Then there's the op-ed by Bob Herbert in the New York Times, entitled Voting Without The Facts, which discusses the ignorance of many Bush supporters concerning many of the central issues in this campaign - something which clearly reflects on the Bush Administration's long term disinformation campaign on these issues and the mainstream media's glaring failure to counter said disinformation (and even aid in spreading it):
I think a case could be made that ignorance played at least as big a role in the election's outcome as values. A recent survey by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland found that nearly 70 percent of President Bush's supporters believe the U.S. has come up with "clear evidence" that Saddam Hussein was working closely with Al Qaeda. A third of the president's supporters believe weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq. And more than a third believe that a substantial majority of world opinion supported the U.S.-led invasion.
This is scary. How do you make a rational political pitch to people who have put that part of their brain on hold? No wonder Bush won.
The survey, and an accompanying report, showed that there's a fair amount of cluelessness in the ranks of the values crowd. The report said, "It is clear that supporters of the president are more likely to have misperceptions than those who oppose him."
I haven't heard any of the postelection commentators talk about ignorance and its effect on the outcome. It's all values, all the time. Traumatized Democrats are wringing their hands and trying to figure out how to appeal to voters who have arrogantly claimed the moral high ground and can't stop babbling about their self-proclaimed superiority. Potential candidates are boning up on new prayers and purchasing time-shares in front-row-center pews.
A more practical approach might be for Democrats to add teach-ins to their outreach efforts. Anything that shrinks the ranks of the clueless would be helpful.
Mr. Herbert than goes on to highlight some startling statements by members of the Religious Right Wing claiming a mandate to push their extremist agenda due to the fact that "values" were allegedly the determining factor in this election.
Finally, "A Popular Fiction" by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson in The New Republic, throughly puts the "mandate myth" to rest and goes on to point out that it wasn't the popularity of Bush's positions that put him over the top - rather it was the extent to which Bush blatantly distorted John Kerry's positions and assassinated his character:
There is a more fundamental objection to Republicans' claim of a clear mandate for an ambitious domestic agenda: It is, put simply, a bait and switch. If one can bear to recall events of only a week ago, the Republican campaign was based on two main pillars: fear and mud. Overwhelmingly, the "positive" case for Bush's reelection rested on the relentless drumbeat of the war on terror. Cheney's remarks typically focused not on domestic issues but on veiled or explicit references to the lurking threat of nuclear incineration. Meanwhile the second pillar of the Bush campaign was to destroy Kerry's image as a credible alternative through any means necessary. Gross distortions of his record and proposals, shameless efforts to rip his words out of context, and the lowest forms of surrogate-based character assassination were central to the campaign. The GOP may well have waged the most negative campaign by an incumbent president in modern political history. As The Washington Post reported back in May: "Scholars and political strategists say the ferocious Bush assault on Kerry this spring has been extraordinary, both for the volume of attacks and for the liberties the president and his campaign have taken with the facts. Though stretching the truth is hardly new in a political campaign, they say the volume of negative charges is unprecedented--both in speeches and in advertising."
Karl Rove would not have needed to campaign that way if he believed he had a popular domestic agenda. He knew that he did not. Indeed, in the one setting--the three presidential debates--where popular attention was focused on the major issues of the day and the differences between the candidates, the popular verdict was clear: Kerry defeated Bush decisively.
In fact, everything we know about American opinion suggests that Bush is out of step with the public on all the issues he is now putting at the top of his "to do" list. During the election campaign, polls found that most Americans continue to be highly skeptical of the Republican tax-cut agenda and convinced that they have not benefited from it. In the final debate, Bush had to resort to the fudge of pointing out that the majority of his tax cuts went to "low- and middle-income Americans"--and while they did, the majority of benefits from his tax cuts did not.
On Social Security, administration officials have had four years to develop specific proposals. They have held back precisely because once an actual proposal is outlined it becomes clear what a dreadful deal it will be for most Americans. Indeed, when surveys mention the potential downsides of private individual accounts, public opinion has remained rock solid against privatization--and there is no evidence of a strong shift in favor of Bush's stance. A year ago, for example, the Los Angeles Times found that only a quarter of Americans supported private investment accounts in Social Security if it meant a reduction in guaranteed benefits--a feature of all leading privatization plans. The same basic story holds for other domestic policy issues. The point isn't that the majority of Americans aren't conservative on some topics--they are. The point is that their views have not changed fundamentally, and they remain overwhelmingly hostile to the top domestic priorities on which the administration is now claiming a mandate.