Pandering To the Mythical Values Voter
Tue Apr 12, 2005 at 10:25:34 AM PDT
Certain Dems, it seems, are determined to prove that they can be
just as screechy and moralistic as the ayatollahs of the right. And why not? Obviously, it worked for Joe Lieberman. I mean, sure, he might not be in the White House, but he is on Fox more than Michelle Malkin these days. That's gotta count for something, right?
Former Lieberman flack Dan Gerstein trumpets his arrival into the consultocracy with a Wall Street Journal Op/Ed column - surprise! - bashing Dems for showing insufficient sanctimoniousness to Middle America. Those of us who don't give a hoot about Spongebob's sexual orientation are sneering coastal "cultural elites," and John Kerry lost because he "openly embraced Hollywood and went on to lose married women voters by a margin of 55% to 44%."
Continued below
Gerstein writes:
Part of this response is clearly motivated by profit margins. But it also flows from a profound aversion to making moral judgments. And that's the nub of the values problem for Democrats today. We don't hesitate to judge people's beliefs, but we blanch at judging their behavior. That leaves us silent on big moral issues at a time of great moral uncertainty, and leaves the impression that we are the party of "anything goes."
At Washington Monthly, Amy Sullivan rightly points out that if you wanna talk about holding businesses responsible for their actions, the Dems are the party of responsibility, while the GOP is the party of "Hot Tub" Tom. But Sullivan buys the Republican talking point that the Dems are out of step with the masses of Middle America:
The real concerns of Americans go much deeper than gay marriage or abortion--even if they have a hard time articulating them. Americans are very anxious about the idea that people will do whatever they can get away with, and their perception is that Democrats are the ones who let people get away with things. But Democrats can gain the advantage if they craft a consistent message. Some people certainly are opposed to abortion on principle; but many are simply offended by the idea that some people might rely on abortion as a means of birth control .... Tie these into a consistent call for responsibility and Democrats have a better chance of claiming some moral ground.
There's an honest-to-Gosh coastal conceit at work here -- one cooked up in rightwing Washington think tanks and eagerly promulgated by the precious, snarky, self-involved and hopelessly bourgie boarding-schools-then-Harvard-or-Yale-then-Columbia-J-School D.C. and New York media class. It says that all those Midwestern and Southern lumpens in their gauche sweatpants, flannels and crucifixes are slow-witted, pious, fragile and afraid. They of the patriarchal sky gods and the cult of the football just want to be assured that somebody's running things and will discipline anyone that gets out of line. The Dems just have to show that they can be stern in order to get right with rightwing voters.
This is just bullshit, as anyone who's ever been to a Harley rally in Milwaukee or a hunting lodge in the U.P. will surely know. Blue-collar Midwestern and Southern culture is as sacrilegious as it is sanctimonious and as libertine, if not much more so, as it is buttoned-down. Those suburban and exurban true believers in the Bush cause? We don't know them. They're friggin' pod people, those God people. But the Washington and New York cognoscenti look out on the hinterlands and see an undifferentiated mass of Passion-viewing, Terry-and-The-Babies-saving Rapture Christians.
As TAPPED and Atrios point out, this is yet another case of "centrist Dems" chasing the right's unattainable market share instead of staking out a niche of their own, much as CNN and MSNBC lavish their awkward unrequited love on Fox's demographics like gawky high school science geeks staring longingly at the captain of the cheerleading team. This is nothing new, of course - Al and Tipper Gore cornered the market on liberal prudery with the PMRC two decades ago.
They won't win over "values voters" by bashing Hollywood, though they may well turn off larger numbers of their own potential audience. The youth vote? Kiss it goodbye if you want to be seen fussing about vulgarity in video games, movies and music. But what about their parents, who vote in much larger numbers? Won't they be touched by Holy Joe or Holy Hill's neo-Victorian prurience? Fat chance. Because loud as the "moral majority" might be, the reality is that they're a tiny minority, and they're deeply invested in the Republican Party.
Most Americans, whatever their degree of religiosity, accept that they're sinners, and like to relish in it on occasion, whether or not they scurry back to church the following morning to repent. We're a nation of furtive Skinimax watchers, porn downloaders and gangsta rap aficionados. We like our food fatty and our sex dirty. We play video games well into our thirties, and our favorite movies tend to involve fantastic chase scenes, explosions and gratuitious gore. On the whole, we seek redress for these indulgences in the pews or the gym - not at the ballot box. We are, in short, as profoundly libertarian in our outlook, shaped by our frontier history, as we are censorious, thanks to the dwindling influence of the Puritans.
So if the Dems wanna steal some of the GOP's market, they might start by revisiting the party's proud libertarian tradition. Remember? The party of JFK? The one that kept business in line but trusted the American people to take care of their personal lives? The party that spent its time trying to figure out how to better invest our tax dollars rather than handing them all to Halliburton and catching the Red Eye to Florida for the latest Passion Play? There's hay to be made here in Middle America - if the "safe and sensible" centrist Dems would only pull their drooling heads out of Jerry Falwell's ass. And the best part is, they don't even have to come up with their own talking points - just borrow the Republicans'. Tell them to get Big Guvmint out of their bedrooms and keep Big Business out of their wallets.
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