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JAMES Q. WILSON: Why Did Kerry Lose? (Answer: It Wasn't 'Values.')
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Mon, 08 Nov 2004 18:48:42 -0500
Begin forwarded message: From: "John F. McMullen" <observer () westnet com> Date: November 8, 2004 4:41:59 PM EST To: johnmac's living room <johnmacsgroup () yahoogroups com>Subject: [johnmacsgroup] JAMES Q. WILSON: Why Did Kerry Lose? (Answer: It Wasn't 'Values.')
Reply-To: johnmacsgroup () yahoogroups com From the Wall Street Journal --http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB109987690402167230,00.html? mod=opinion%5Fmain%5Fcommentaries
COMMENTARY Why Did Kerry Lose? (Answer: It Wasn't 'Values.') By JAMES Q. WILSONIt is easy to explain the election. Too easy. Depending on your instincts and how much time you are given to think, you can say that the electorate
has moved to the right or that John Kerry flip-flopped or that the Democrats were unable to appeal to the moral values of people. ThomasFriedman wrote in the New York Times that President Bush was re-elected by
people who disagree with him on what America should be. His evidence is that "Christian fundamentalists" have used their "religious energy to promote divisions and intolerance at home and abroad." Garry Wills has said much the same thing. These explanations are wide of the mark. The nation did not undergo a rightward shift in 2004 any more than it had when it elected Reagan in 1980 and re-elected him in 1984. The policy preferences of Americans are remarkably stable, a fact that has been confirmed by virtually every scholar who has looked at the matter. There is no doubt that John Kerry showed great skill at embracing deeply contradictory positions, but that does not make him unusual; all politicians have mastered the art of self-contradiction. What was remarkable in this election is that one candidate, President Bush, never changed: He said what he meant and meant what he said.If the Democrats could not appeal to the moral values of people, that fact must have been lost on the 48% of the voters who supported Sen. Kerry. It is true that moral values were important to some: based on exit polls, to
about one-fifth of all voters. And of these, the overwhelming majority supported President Bush. But almost exactly the same fraction said that jobs and the economy were the most important issues, and of these the overwhelming majority supported Sen. Kerry. And if you add together terrorism and the war in Iraq, 34% found these to be the most important issues (Mr. Bush carried those worried about terrorism, Sen. Kerry those critical of the Iraq war). Given these facts, why does a Times reporter write that moral values were the "defining issue"? I have read her essay three times and cannot discover an answer. I am just as mystified by Mr. Friedman's lament that "Christian fundamentalists" are ruining his America by fostering "divisions and intolerance." It would make as much sense to say that liberals arefostering division and intolerance by favoring abortion and gay marriages.
In fact, abortion was not an issue in the election and Messrs. Bush and Kerry both opposed gay marriage. A ban on gay marriage was approved in Oregon, a state won by Sen. Kerry. In truth, American politics has frequently been gripped by moral issues. It is one of the aspects of our history and culture that makes us different from most European democracies. We have become morally engaged by the struggle against slavery and against liquor and for civil rights. David L. Chappell, in his splendid history of the civil rights movement, reminds us that this was not simply or even mostly a political struggleabout well-understood rights but rather a religious effort to define those rights and to motivate people to recognize them. It is easy to forget that
there were religious leaders on both sides of that struggle. Those who defended segregation urged followers to confine preaching to the word of God and not to meddle with cultural matters; those who attackedsegregation said that the word of God required them to prevail by changing
the culture. It is true that President Bush improved his voting support among people who attend church frequently and who describe themselves as Catholics,Protestants and Jews, but Sen. Kerry won nearly half of all Catholic votes
and over three-fourths of all Jewish ones. The ritualistic condemnation of Christian fundamentalists neglects twothings. The first: Secularists are just as likely to provoke moral outrage
as are religious believers, yet we rarely read stories about the Secular Left. The second: Research shows that organizations of Christian fundamentalists are hardly made up of fire-breathers but rather are organizations whose members practice consensual politics and rely on appeals to widely shared constitutional principles.One can make a good case that the economy or the war in Iraq were just as
important as morality. Of the people who thought tax cuts were good forthe economy, 93% supported President Bush; of those who thought they were
bad for the economy, 92% supported Sen. Kerry. About half the people thought the Iraq war had made this nation more secure; 89% of themsupported President Bush. For the half that thought the war had made this
country less secure, 80% voted for Sen. Kerry. People vote for the president for a host of reasons that pollsters have difficulty in grasping. All we seem to know very clearly is where they live. The Red (Bush) counties are found not only in the South and the Midwest but in the interior of California, Oregon and Washington, and in upstate New York and eastern Pennsylvania. The Blue (Kerry) counties are largely the site of big cities. Texas may be Bush country, but its southern counties went for Kerry. To explain the vote requires us toexplain the variety of factors that characterize the voting preferences of the great heterogeneous mass of people one finds on farms or in cities. No
political scientist has done this and I doubt that many journalists willdo it either. I have attended lots of scholarly meetings where professors
try to predict election outcomes with, at best, moderate success. Oneproblem is that they have only some very gross measures on which to work,
such as the state of the economy and standings in the polls. The pollsters do no provide much information because they usually gather too few responses to permit observers to cross-tabulate data into all of the relevant categories. What is the vote likely to be in Ohio among gun-owning union members who attend church but who have just lost theirjobs and think the U.S. should spend less time fighting wars? Or how will
business people vote if they have received a tax cut, think our invasion of Iraq is not going well, and oppose abortion?I draw lessons from the election, but not very deep ones. One is that the profound liberal bias among many big-city newspapers and most TV stations did not determine the outcome. Evan Thomas was wrong when he said that the left media would add 15 points to the Democrats' total, but may have been
right when he later scaled down his projection to five points. * * * What is most impressive about this election has been the extraordinary success both parties have had in registering new voters and getting themto the polls. Suppose the Democrats had done this better than the GOP. The result might well have been a Bush loss in Florida and Ohio, and thus the
loss of the election. Our press would now be running columns about the liberal shift in public opinion, the defeat of fundamentalists, and the importance of antiwar sentiments. But in fact the Democrats did not do a better job than the Republicans. Perhaps the columnists should now just say that Karl Rove out-organized his opponents. Mr. Wilson is the author, inter alia, of "The Moral Sense" (Free Press, 1997). Copyright 2004 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.*** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material whose use
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- JAMES Q. WILSON: Why Did Kerry Lose? (Answer: It Wasn't 'Values.') David Farber (Nov 08)