I know that there have been a lot of anecdotal diaries posted lately, but, sometimes, I think anecdotes can tell the truth better than stats and studies (just ask any mom whose doctor has told her that teething doesn't make babies get runny noses). So here's one of mine.
I've belonged to an internet "birth club" since my first child was born in 2001. It's comprised of about 50 moms, all of whom had babies in the same month of 2000. It's really a mix of all walks of life, from moms who are executives for Fortune 500 companies to moms who live in trailer parks in the rural south. For the past 4 years, we've been through a lot together, births, death, divorce, you name it. Seemed that nothing could break the strong bond we all had. Nothing, that is, until the 2004 election. We split pretty predictably right down the Mason/Dixon line, red vs. blue. only recently have we been able to start patching up all the hurt feelings. I spoke the other day with "Melanie," a mother of 4 member of the club who lives the rural south--and voted for Bush.
I had made a comment on the club site that I had lost respect for those who voted for Bush. She took offense, and we started talking about the reasons WHY she voted for Bush. She's a baptist--and, as a suspected, one of the "moral values" crowd.
I told her that a Johns Hopkins study estimated that we had killed 100,000 civilians in Iraq. She was SHOCKED at that number. She didn't believe me--I had to find the report online and direct her to it. Then she said that she felt horrible about that, but we had no choice--Iraq had weapons off mass destruction and we had to get them before they got us. I told her that there were no WMD's in Iraq. She actually laughed. Told me I was crazy. I directed her to MSM stories regarding the Duelfer report. She told me that she would investigate more later, but she was pretty sure that I was wrong.
Once we started talking about the "moral values" issue, it became clear pretty fast that she was actually under the impression that the PRESIDENT gets to decide if abortion is illegal or whether gays can marry. She voted for Bush fully expecting him to outlaw gay marriage and abortion. Case closed.
When I explained to her the finer points of the Constitution, amending the Constitution, and Executive Power, she was not only shocked, but upset. At first she insisted that I was wrong, that I didn't understand politics. After I assued her that I had spent 4 years in law school studying the Constitution and I was pretty sure I was right, she was quiet for a long time. I basically asked her whether it was worth it to have a President in office who pushes tax cuts to send American jobs overseas just because he is against gay marriage--any issue he really can't do anything about? She said no, and that if she'd known that, she might not have voted for him. She wanted to know if her pastor knew that, and, if so, why did he tell them to vote for Bush, when so many people in her church had lost jobs to off-shoring? She was pretty suprised to learn that a big part of Bush's tax cuts were aimed at large corporations that sent American jobs overseas. She asked me why Congress voted for those kinds of tax cuts. I told her to ask the people that she voted for.
I asked her about the gutting of the Clean Air and Water Acts, about the leadership at the EPA who lied to people living around Ground Zero about the air quality, about drilling in ANWAR, about Global Warming. She said that those were issues that the President couldn't control--that the Congress was in charge of the EPA.
Let me just clarify that Melanie is not an uneducated person. She's an elementary school teacher and her husband is a former Marine. She's not someone who dropped out of school at 16. She's an exhausted working mom who is too tired and frazzled to read the paper or watch the news when she gets home, so she relies mainly on her pastor to give her "the big picture" on Sunday mornings. In short, she has no bullshit alarm.
I could go on and on about the conversation here, and I think we all know that educating voters to the issues is a major component to taking back the Senate and White House. But, I would argue that one of the things that needs to be done is to educate voters about the workings of the government--so that when someone like Tom Coburn says that he is anti-abortion, they know that he is just one of a very large number of people who would get to make that decision, and won't let that issue be the defining factor in casting their votes. Granted, I know that there is a faction of people for whom religious issues will ALWAYS be the main issues, but I can't help but believe that there are a lot of people out there like Melanie, who are reachable, swayable.
For example, the economy is a huge issue for Melanie. Her town has been hit hard by off-shoring jobs, and is plagued by mysterious health problems most likely caused by the emissions from manufacuting plants close by in an adjoining state. She worried about off-shoring and air pollution. However, we never got our message to her that while gay marriage is something that George Bush really CAN'T do anything about, that it's up to each individual state and that a Constitutional Amendment would probably never pass, the economy and the air quality in her area is something that he is much more responsible for. That while she may share certain religous and social IDEALS with Republicans, they are not doing anything to improve her quality of life. That while they drag out abortion and gay marriage every four years to sway people like her, in reality, they know that they don't have anywhere NEAR the votes to do anything about either issues at a national level. So, in the end, they go back to starting wars and stuffing the pockets of large corporations.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that we need to somehow find a way to communicate to people like Melanie the difference between social ideals and the political reality. They need to know how the government works so that their bullshit alarms go off when some religious zealot tells them that God put George Bush in office to outlaw abortion or gay marriage.
I think the thought that really resonated with Melanie was when I told her that the Republicans were pacifying her community with talk about abortion and gay marriage on one hand, while sending their jobs overseas with the other. She said to me "so I guess the question is, how long do I keep beating my head against the wall?"
She emailed me this morning to tell me that she had been on MoveOn's website--and that she agreed with their positions much more than she thought she would.