One would think that in a column titled "The Day the Enlightenment Went Out" [Garry] Wills might try out an argument or two. Nope. In the place of anything even remotely resembling reasoned argumentation is bald bigotry aimed at his own religious heritage.
George Neumayr, American Spectator . Now, it seems, the conservative rural red-neck Calvinist vote has captured America. A plurality of voters, emerging from poll booths, said that the most important issue in the campaign had been ‘moral values.’â€
The Economist
Let me say from the get-go, trying to offer a fair, even-handed, and accurate representation of what the "moral values" debate isabout presents a formidable challenge. The term, like a storm-tossed ship, has taken on so much water there is a real chance it will drown in hyperbole, non-sequitors, and mean-spiritedness.
And conscious distortion aside, it is also by no means something that can easily be nailed down. Trying to tease out howresistance to abortion figures in it is even more complicated. But if you stay with me to the end, I promise it will be worth your while.
Without running through the entirety of yesterday's TNV, we know that when the question is asked specifically, we candefinitively measure how important pro-life single-issue voters were to the President. We know that President Bush's pro-life position provided him with a crucial--and probably decisive--edge among those voters who cast their ballot based on Mr. Bush's pro-life position or Sen. Kerry's pro-abortion stance. That net advantage for the President was a hugely important 4%.
How the term "moral values" relates to our concerns is trickier. Moral values refers to the answer 22% gave Election Day to an exit poll question that asked what was the one issue that mattered most when deciding which Presidential candidate an individual voted for.
No other issue by itself ranked as high. Nearly 80% of those people voted for President Bush! A post-election survey conducted by the Pew Research Center found that an even higher figure--27%--chose moral values as the issue that mattered most in deciding their vote.
Many critics went ballistic. They are still seething. It wasn’t enough to agree that the term “moral values†was not spelled out norexplored in the November 2 exit poll question. Nor was it enough to concur that if other separate questions were combined into one category (such as joining the war in Iraq and terrorism), that total would be larger than the 22% (or 27%) who cited moral values.
Indeed, it wasn't enough to readily admit that if people were given the opportunity to offer their own response (as opposed tochoosing from a list of issues), moral values was no longer number one. None of this tamps down the anger.
It would be impossible to cite on a family-friendly blog what was said on some Internet blogs; the language was pretty vile. Butsome of the profanity-free criticism will give you the flavor.
Often the critique did not distinguish between those weak-kneed conventional wisdom-grasping media outlets who, we were told, mindlessly printed the figure, on the one hand, and those individuals who offered it as a reason (members of a “bureaucratized evangelical movement†whose “closest analogy†is the Palestinian terrorist movement Hamas, “which draws in poverty-strickenPalestinians through its own miniature welfare state,†to quote Barbara Ehrenreich), on the other.
It’s no exaggeration to conclude that for the Barbara Ehrenreichs, moral value issues voters are the thin edge of an incipient totalitarian wedge. And, of course, President Bush was excoriated for various positions he had taken--his supposed use of “wedge issues,†such as abortion, for example--to "whip" his supporters into a "frenzy."
If you step back, what seems to be at the heart of the rage that poisoned so much post-election commentary is the insistence that“moral values†is either (a) so amorphous as to be meaningless, (b) merely a prod used to drive mindless voters into the voting booths, like so many cattle, or (c) has precious little to do with such “cultural issues†as abortion. Any truth to this?
First, let's backtrack for one second. Whatever ranking moral values had, it was seldom mentioned by Kerry voters. By contrast,moral values was “the most frequently cited issue for Bush voters,†according to Pew. Looking to the future, this is valuable information.
Second, when Pew gave people an open-ended question it’s true that moral values was no longer the issue volunteered most asthe decisive issue. But it WAS the second most cited. However, that leads to further complications.
Judging by their responses to Pew, when they cited moral values, people were thinking of a constellation of both issues, often abortion, and personality characteristics, such as honesty and integrity. [Others answered in terms of traditional values such as “right and wrong,†while others “explicitly mentioned religion, Christianity, God, or the Bible.â€]
I hope this gives you a flavor of what the discussion is about and why it so unhinges critics who hate Bush and despise many of the people who gave him a second term. But there is one last more directly abortion-related analysis which is very important.
Kerry’s pollster, Stanley Greenberg, produced a document dated November 9 titled, “Solving the Paradox of 2004.†Among themost significant findings for us is that in “battleground states and among swing voters,†only labor unions made more contacts than did pro-life groups.
But, according to Greenberg, Kerry lost because he could not win over enough of the Bush “waverers†(people who considerednot voting for him but did in the end). "The single biggest response [doubt] is Kerry as 'flip-flopper' (36 percent), but when grouped the responses were dominated by worries about cultural issues."
In other words, people were “skeptical that Kerry has firm principles and worry that he is out of touch with them on the cultural issues.â€
Most important, while people who decided very late pretty much split their votes evenly, "that was swamped by the shift ofdownscale voters in the final week and a half, as values trumped the undeveloped economic concerns," Greenberg writes. "In that period [which coincides precisely with the time period in which NRL PAC was most active], the vote broke for Bush by 55 to 44 percent.â€
That produced a "cultural surge at the end, an intensified polarization that took down many Democrats in the rural states and the South, that diminished their blue collar support generally and that allowed George Bush to get a national majority from red America."
Let's conclude with one more lengthy but important Greenberg observation.
“The debate about whether ‘moral values’ was really the top issue concern of voters, in some senses, misses how powerful a factor were the cultural issues in this election. When asked what was the most important issue in your vote, 19 percent say ‘moral values,’ equal to the number who say the war in Iraq, terrorism and national security, and the economy and jobs.
“For the certain Bush voters [as opposed to “waverersâ€], terrorism and national security are the dominate voting issue, followed closely by moral values. But for the Bush waverers, who were the key swing group in the election, moral values is as important as terrorism and national security, and ,critically, are followed by concerns with the economy and jobs which are also quite important.â€
For all these reasons, and more that we’ll examine in the next day or two, abortion was pivotal in re-electing President George W.Bush.
One would think that in a column titled "The Day the Enlightenment Went Out" [Garry] Wills might try out an argument or two. Nope. In the place of anything even remotely resembling reasoned argumentation is bald bigotry aimed at his own religious heritage.