Jeff Jarvis points out that ‘values’ were the driver for Bush in the exit polling.
: The NBC exit poll includes some fascinating and surprising data. Among the issues that mattered most to voters, the top issue was not terrorism or Iraq.
The top issue (21%) was “moral values”; 78% of those who cared about that went for Bush, 19% for Kerry. That’s a huge difference. Read this one as you will (MSNBC commentators see it as code for Vietnam and the Swifties).
I disagree a bit on what it’s about.
I’m off to some work meetings early today (will try and comment more later) but want to shamelessly recycle an old post from Armed Liberal on exactly this subject to kick off some discussion.
“Screw Them” Kos, over at the Guardian, demonstrates why he has no clue as to what happened:
So how did Bush even get this far? By demonising an entire group of people — gays and lesbians. By cynical appeals to religion. By slandering a true war hero. And, most importantly, by scaring people. You see, terrorists would detonate a nuclear bomb in a major city if Kerry were elected. Only Bush can protect us.
And those efforts, as I have written before, were all aided and abetted by a well-oiled message machine the likes of which the American left is still unable to match.
No, Kos, you ignorant tool. The problem isn’t the message machine; it’s that the core activists in the Democratic Party have managed to walk away from the values that most people in this country hold, and persist in looking at the electorate as if it’s the one with the problems. The majority of people in this country don’t want gays put in camps, they don’t want a theocracy, they don’t believe in ‘shoot first, talk later’. And as long as you believe they do, you’ll lose, and you’ll take my party with you.
And, by the way, Bush took Clark County by about 1,600 votes.
THE RED AND THE BLUE, part 1
(originally posted Dec 1, 2002)
I’ve been thinking about the whole “coast” “heartland” thing, as noted by Yglesias and others, and had a hard time finding a way into the issue until last night.
We were driving home from the movies, Tenacious G, Middle Guy and I (we saw 8 Mile again, because the two of them wanted to), and I was punching the buttons on the stereo in the Mighty Odyssey Minivan when a discussion broke out.
The top 3 buttons on the stereo are taken up by the three major stations that TG and MG listen to (I tend to listen to the CD’s in the changer because I hate commercials).
KCRW, the local NPR station; KZLA, the local corporate-owned country station; and KROQ, the local corporate-owned alternative rock station.
The voting politics are complex. I’m totally fickle. I’ll mostly turn things off; KCRW when it gets too sanctimonious or the World Music interludes become intolerable; KROQ when the grindcore songs come on; KZLA when really bad country-pop gets played. TG likes KCRW and KZLA. MG hates KZLA.
So when we got into the car, some awful Incubus song came on, and I punched KZLA, which was playing a current country hit called “The Good Stuff”. In case you don’t listen, here’s a typical lyric:
Not a soul around but the old bar keep,
Down at the end an’ looking half asleep.
An he walked up, an’ said : “What’ll it be?”
I said: “The good stuff.”He didn’t reach around for the whiskey;
He didn’t pour me a beer.
His blue eyes kinda went misty,He said: “You can’t find that here.
“‘Cos it’s the first long kiss on a second date.
“Momma’s all worried when you get home late.
“And droppin’ the ring in the spaghetti plate,
“‘Cos your hands are shakin’ so much.
“An’ it’s the way that she looks with the rice in her hair.
“Eatin’ burnt suppers the whole first year
“An’ askin’ for seconds to keep her from tearin’ up.“Yeah, man, that’s the good stuff.”
And Middle Guy looked disgusted and asked me “Why the hell do you listen to that stuff, anyway? How can you like the Vines and this?” That answer’s another issue…
But what I told him was that I liked the sound of good country music, and then started talking about the changes in country since I’d started listening to it, and that today it was almost the last music about love, fidelity, loss and hope, and that I liked that.
And that one thing that I missed from rock was the hope and yearning that used to be a part of it back when I was Middle Guy’s age.
And, as these kind of talks tend to do, they got me thinking.
I’d been thinking a lot about the Great Cultural Divide…the whole red/blue thing, and I had a brief moment of clarity.
It’s all about country music.
Or, rather, it’s all about the worldview that country music encapsulates.
Here’s a counterpoint. My subscription to Harper’s hasn’t run out yet, although I won’t be renewing it in spite of the flood of imploring letters and postcards I’ve received from their subscription service, and in this month’s is a classic explanation of why (not available on the web):
‘Comfort Cult’
On the honest unlovliness of William Trevor’s world
By Francine Prose…
If part of what we seek from art is solace and consolation, an interlude of distraction, a brief escape from our daily cares, even a glimpse of happiness – and who, in these disturbing times does not, or should not want all of that and more? – it is simple enough to understand why the products of what we might call Comfort Culture should dramatically outperform a writer like William Trevor in the marketplace of analgesic entertainment. The Lovely Bones is narrated from heaven by a fourteen-year-old girl who has been raped and brutally murdered by a neighbor (think Our Town with dismemberment) and who receives as compensation for her earthly travails, an afterlife that includes a nice apartment, plenty of teen-girl magazines, a paradisical version of high school, and a front-row seat from which to observe the folks back home coping with their grief and puzzling over her killer’s identity. No such comforts are provided the unfortunate young women dispatched by Hilditch, the creepy serial killer in Trevor’s Felicia’s Journey; indeed it is characteristic of Trevor’s bravery as a writer, and of his passionate sympathy for even the most loathsome outsiders and misfits, that a good part of the book is written from the point of view of the demented and delusional Hilditch himself.
…(emphasis added)
First, I can’t help myself, but the idea of a literary critic with the name ‘Prose’ does give me the giggles…
…but to get back to culture; while I can see a sensitive reading of Felicity’s Journey and a sympathetic nod to the loathsome outsider as a steady part of the programming on KCRW, and a speed-metal version on KROQ (in fact the song probably already exists), there is no way that sympathy would be found on KZLA. No contemporary country song would celebrate that kind of brutality and despair. We’re talking about a fundamental difference of worldview and taste, and this issue ought to serve as a pathway into understanding the gap between the worlds.
It seems to me that America has just ‘disarmed’ those ‘activist liberal judges’ who tend to dismiss state law and the majority of Americans.
Say goodbye to the 60’s and 70’s.
America has spoken…we want conservative values and the blessings from God that come with them. Soon, liberals may no longer skirt responsibility by murdering their young. Time to pay as you play folks.
And next time, pick somebody that is not a communist sympathizer. Pick somebody that has not been ‘less than honorably discharged’ from the service. Pick somebody that will run with a positive message and a firm platform. Pick somebody that actually believes in SOMETHING…ANYTHING…besides against what America holds morally dear to their/our hearts.
God Bless America!
Thank God for George W. Bush!
bq. _”And Middle Guy looked disgusted and asked me “Why the hell do you listen to that stuff, anyway? How can you like the Vines and this?” That answer’s another issue…”_
Sounds like your music tastes are as broad as mine every thing from Acid Rock to Top Ten, Classical to Country, Heavy Metal to Bluegrass, Jazz to Rock-A-Billy but for some reason I just can’t get into Opera.
At any rate I think you’ve hit on something that I do find interesting. I don’t believe it’s as much of a values transference or dialog as I much as I believe the music tells stories people can relate to in some form, fashion or other. I mean let’s face it gone are the days of Harry Chappin and Jim Croce who both offered very promising careers. In today’s society I see no one to fill their shoes. From a country perspective Tom T Hall, The Statler Brothers, and Red Sovine no longer put their stories to music. Country music has however placed others in the lime light that carry on the tradition such as Nanci Griffith and even Emmy Lou Harris is still belting them out. I may be totally off base here but to me it certainly makes a difference when you can decipher the words and sing along. I mean even artists like Guns ‘N Roses, Bon Jovi, Melissa Etheridge seemed to have picked up on it. And yes that includes “The Boss” as well. I may not like his politics but I still like his music.
We are at a split in this nation, one group has a world view based upon blind faith and control, the othe bases upon intellect and liberty. Sadly once again blind faith and the control freaks have won. Welcome to Germany 1933.
vandervecken, you’re a shining example of what I was talking about…if you want your high-flown valuews to get accepted, get off the damn pedestal.
A.L.
Bush rode to victory in a large part on the coattails of state amendment campaigns to deny gays, and others such as unmarried couples, their rights. That is a fact. His major voting block was born again Christians whose strongest motivation for voting was what they called, “morals.” We were electing a CEO not a pope. Yes those people scare the hell out of me, I have read history. When religion and politics merge, people burn. It has happened to my ancestors in more than one country. I fear the coming theocracy, sorry if that offends you. I also fear a man who ignores our nations major enemy, who in fact is close friends with that enemy, Saudi Arabia, while invading a nation that had nothing to do with the attacks on American instead. I fear a man who labeled major military usage against the Muslim world a, “Crusade.” This is guaranteed to mobilize that world against us even more. I fear his incompetence, I fear his intentions. I fear for my country. Seems Rove has done his work, another American living in fear. I just wish it was the Islamofascists I feared as much as I know fear my government.
I’ve got two words on the kind of country music values we’re going to need for the foreseeable future:
*Johnny Cash*
Right. Because we all know Rove is the anti-christ and Bush is his ventriloquist dummy.
“I just wish it was the Islamofascists I feared as much as I know fear my government.”
There’s this magazine, the Nation, you should read. They too fear John Aschcroft more than Osama Bin Laden.
According to the NBC exit polls, roughly half (47.78%) of Republicans believe that homosexuals should be allowed to marry or form civil unions.
Two negative trends appear to be emerging. Social conservatives like Bennet want to claim the election for their own. And sourpusses like V. want to console themselves that they put up the good fight against fascist theocrats that are on a crusade to kill gays. Someone should have told the 23% of homosexuals that voted for Bush.
Moral values is a big box and there are lots of reasons to check it (leadership, integrity, charity, compassion). That goes for Kerry supporters and Bush supporters.
More stats to ponder:
55% of voters believed that the war in iraq is part of the war on terror.
15% of voters felt that Iraq was the single most important issue
19% of voters felt that terrorism was the single most important issue
Therefore, 34% of voters felt that war was the single most important issue, eclipsing moral values (22%) and the economy (20%)
The difference appears to be that if you voted Kerry you described the issue as “Iraq” and if you voted Bush you described the issue as “terrorism.”
Also, Kerry supporters appear to see an inverse relationship between Iraq and terrorism, strongly believing that the war in Iraq has not improved the long-term security of the country.
Its the war. We just don’t share the same terminology.
Harper’s book review vs. pop-country?
What a fucked up attempt at cultural juxtaposition, man.
RE: the red and the blue again..
Just for kicks, next time you’re in an area with pickups and country music, waltz on over to the supermarket and check out the romance novels. Read a couple until you get the general synopsis and then tell me you don’t see some wierd shit going on.. stuff those fluffy songs on KZLA probably don’t bring up much.
I found your theory very accurate and it’s one that I recognized about 3 years ago. I’ve always been a rock/pop/rap person (I’m 40 and white… I was into rap back “in the day” when my white friends would look at me like I had four heads and from another planet when they heard me listening to rap.) But about 3 years ago, I had this epiphany. Suddenly, the music I was listening to on the pop stations didn’t even come CLOSE to representing my values. I can take cursing, no big deal. I can take a sexual innuendo here and there, no big deal. I like hearing Britney sing about love and about being sexy. But it’s just gotten way TOO over the top and graphic. There’s really nothing tantalizing about pop music anymore.
Then I started listening to country and I couldn’t believe they were usually talking about MY LIFE, or the memories of my life in the past. They just sandwiched it into nifty lyrics, most times sappy… and it MADE ME FEEL GOOD, listening to it. Not like I had to take a shower afterwards or turn it down because my daughter was in the car listening.
You are absolutely right. There’s a reason country music has grown so big… our nation has grown with it and our values have evolved at the same time. My parents were “thriving” in the 60’s, doing the things that people back then did. I, on the other hand, am totally disgusted by the thought of that era in our history and the lack or morals it demonstrated. (Even when I was a teenager, I felt this way.)
I can finally see that the morals of this country have a chance of making a turn around and that turn around started on the eve of Bush’s inauguration in 2000 and grows to this day.
“No, Kos, you ignorant tool.”
Man, that’s right up there with “Jane, you ignorant slut”. Heh.
So lets look at another part of this.
The baby killer advocates somehow seperate murder from morality, then the leftist media pundit cant connect how this moral realtivism that killing a baby at nine months -1 day, that could survive after only 17 weeks of growth, is the same mentality that allowed the left to murder 174 million people, after all it was the “right” people they killed right ?
There is something as basic as principle, and once violated the morality it anchored is set adrift, and drifts right on past Peter Singers current position, an evil man who teaches his students as Princtons Bio-ethisist, that killing a month after birth should be OK. These students are to become doctors and this death ethic where humans are disposable untill they can talk will be carried out of his classrooms into makers of policy, after all, morality now has no anchor, and so has no set definition, its windborne. And these fresh indoctrinares of the post modern decontructionaist marxist utiltarian ethic will be the ones deciding if you live or die, if you are unfortunate enough to land under their care.
This ethic is already on full display in Canada, if your too old, too feeble, and seen as a “useless feeder” of scarce health resource, (assuming you survived the your 18 month wait in line) you will be deemed unworthy of care with exception of a toxic injection of pain drugs to “humainly” hasten your demise.
Princeton’s Peter Singer, the professor of bioethics at Princeton University who advocates, among other things, killing disabled children up to 28 days after birth, has been honored with the World Technology Award for Ethics by the World Technology Network. “I am delighted to have been selected by my peers as a winner of the 2003 World Technology Award in the ethics category,” Singer said in a statement issued by the university. Singer is a leading opponent of what he calls “speciesism,” insisting that animals should be accorded the same value as humans.
“Singer replayed a few of his old tunes…. On killing disabled infants: “If you have a being that is not sentient, that is not even aware, then the killing of that being is not something that is wrong in and of itself. … I think that a chimpanzee certainly has greater self-awareness than a newborn baby. There are some circumstances…when killing the newborn baby is not at all wrong…not like killing the chimpanzee would be. Maybe it’s not wrong at all.”
Singer does not, however, offer any argument for potentiality. After all, calves, pigs and chickens have the capacity to develop into, well, calves, pigs and chickens. Unborn children have the capacity to develop into, well, utilitarian academicians, who can expound on the properties of personhood at the nation’s higher institutions of learning.
On sex with animals: “Your dog can show you when he or she wants to go for a walk and equally for nonviolent sexual contact, your dog or whatever else it is can show you whether he or she wants to engage in a certain kind of contact…mutually satisfying, consensual.”
This is the same Singer, heralded in the interview with the New Yorker as the “greatest living philosopher”.
I am shocked, SHOCKED to report that Singer declared, “I am an atheist.”
“Adultery, incest, sex with children, sex with animals –
– arguing against any such sexual behavior becomes
much more difficult once we decide that the notion of
self-restraint is incoherent.” –Alan Keyes
The basis for German euthanasia that was the intellectual genesis that led directly to the killing of disabled infants and disabled adults had little to do with racial theories. Rather, it came from a book, Permission to Destroy Life Unworthy of Life, published in 1920, long before Hitler took power.
Written by a famous law professor, Karl Binding, in collaboration with a noted physician, Alfred Hoche, and called “the crucial work” by Holocaust historian, Robert Jay Lifton, Permission to Destroy Life Unworthy of Life advocated ideas that are strikingly similar to Singer’s.
Singer expanded on that murderous theme, announcing that Americans have a “moral obligation” to kill the aged and infirm because they consume far too many of our medical resources.
This ethic has been embraced in Canada and in over half of Europe, well unless your rich, then of course you jump a jet or bus to the USA.
” In Paris, people don’t talk about the Jews as yet. Their babies were handed over to female officials responsible for strangling Jewish infants and experts in the art of execution by putting pressure on the carotid arteries. They smiled and said it was painless.” — Marguerite Duras
“It is the supreme duty of the state to grant life only to the healthy and hereditarily sound portion of the population…. The life of the individual has meaning only in light of that ultimate aim.” -Nazi medical authority, Dr. Arthur Guett
Well. not even the NAZIs had poultry in the bordellos, but Peter Singer latest contribution to a book comes right after the section about sex with chickens.
Some of us, (how “old fashioned of us, how “backward” eh ?) are not even close to the “teachings” that students of professor Singer leave school and go into society with.
Germany was not the world leader in abortion ethic, even as it WAS the locus of Margeret Sanger and her ilk, the founder of planed parenthood and leader in the US Eugenics movement with the main aim as a tool to reduce the population of blacks.
You should look to the what was then the leader, the Lefts beloved Utopia, the Sovet Union.
“We live not sensing the country beneath us,
What we say can’t be heard ten paces away,
and where there’s a chance to half open our mouths
The Kremlin crag-dweller stands in the way.
His thick fingers are like fat worms.
He laughs through his bushy cockroach moustache,
And the polish on his boots shines.
All around him are the riff-raff of thick-skinned party leaders.
He plays the half-humans with favours.
Forging edict after edict like so many horseshoes
Shooting some in the forehead, others in the chest, the eye, the groin.
Every day there is an execution –
To our broadchested Georgian,
It’s like picking raspberries. — Mandelstam
“In the years of the terror, there was not a home in the country where people did not sit trembling at night, their ears straining to catch the murmur of passing cars or the sound of the elevator.”
“only the dead smiled, Glad to be at rest:
And Leningrad city swayed like A needless appendix to its prisons.
It was then that the railway-yards Were asylums of the mad;
Short were the locomotives? Farewell songs.
Stars of death stood Above us, and innocent Russia
Writhed under bloodstained boots,
and Under the tires of Black Marias.” — Anna Akhmatova
The Soviets soon dispensed with Abortion however, and would simply kill any pregnant mother, especially because since they murdered by quota, murdering a Woman with child counted as two.
That usually brought along worried extended familly members and husbands who quickly followed the Woman and childs fate.
I see murder for convience as little different than the ethics of Singer, the nazis the soviets or any other flavor of the left.
I might want to ask you to ponder, why do so called “Womens Rights” (to murder the innocent) seem to be a natural fit in the party where half of the members are those particualry known for their idology that created the singular example of the horrific mountain of murdered innocents.
And why are the individual rights people, the faithfull, and those that hold that innocent human life be protected, be it 20 years old or 20 weeks old. all, without much exception, reside in the other party ?
I find the puzzelment of the press, how “Values” was a surprising ingredient in stated voting choices in the largest number of those poled, and that they almost all went to Bush.
But even then they are clueless, they are measuring the affects of principle on person, and clueless that principle gives rise to all the things they are measuring, without understanding that all those traits dont come as seperate items, but are symtoms rather, after effect, of something far more profound basic, and closer to the soul.
Something as a basic as an understanding of the objective truth of right and wrong. and it expresses a set of natural conclusions, morals, and a repect for your fellow, the more helpless, the greater the need to defend his rights, and babies are simply the most helpless of us all.
And for all of this, they call us authoritarian Nazis or other ill fitting names by those, if examined, actually closely fit the idiology of the smear they throw at us.