Values, white workers and dead chickens

The Republicans are happily declaring that the election turned on "values."  And the wise souls in PunditWorld who worried about John Kerry's huntin' wear will be solemnly advising the Democrats to pay more attention to these poor, neglected "values" voters.

I must admit, I have more than a little sympathy for the reaction this Kerry volunteer expresses:  Forget the "heartland" by Janet Sullivan, Salon.com 11/04/04.

By the time I had gone to bed, the chorus of pundits had fixed on a single tune, as they always do, and remarkably quickly, too. (Do they watch one another's feeds in the green room?) They had dusted off the old theme that the Democrats need to "reach out" more to the "heartland." Reach out? How, exactly? Forget that these folks blindly ignored all objective reality -- and their own best economic and national-security interests -- and voted for Bush. Look what they did at the Senate level. In Kentucky, they refused to use even basic sanity as a litmus test, and reelected a guy with apparent late-stage dementia; in Oklahoma, they tapped a fellow who wants to execute doctors who perform abortions, who was sued for sterilizing a woman against her will, who pled guilty to Medicaid fraud, and who largely opposes federal subsidies, even for his own state; in Louisiana, they embraced a man who has made back-door deals with David Duke and who was revealed to have had a long-running affair with a prostitute; in South Carolina, they went with a guy who thinks all gay teachers should be fired; and in Alaska, they reelected a woman who was appointed by her father to the job after a spectacularly undistinguished career as an obscure state senator. And compared with the rest of the GOP Class of '04, she's the freaking prom queen. These are the stellar elected officials that the "heartland" has foisted on the rest of us.

"Reach out" to these voters? Yeah. Then boil your hand till it's sterilized.

Now let me say all the obligatory things:  it's an overwrought view, the Dems have to capture some voters they lost in 2004, the party has to try to build majorities, it's better to be effective than to be a purist, yadda yadda, etc., etc.

But with all the qualifications, that writer has a healthy instinct.  Which is not to be buffaloed by the Republican blustering about "values." There's no need for Democrats and liberals to get defensive on this whole area, because defensiveness won't convince anybody either. Nor will a lot of prissy doubletalk about being more "sensitive" about "respecting the deeply-held values" and bladdy-blah.

Obviously, some clear thinking is needed about just how the "values" mantra can be offset.  Ruy Teixeira looks at it from a demographic viewpoint in his Lessons of the 2004 Elections 11/03/14:

The last three elections (2000, 2002, 2004) have all had strong ‘culture war’ components that have severely depressed white working class support for Democrats. Recall that Bill Clinton actually carried the white working class (whites without a four year college degree) by a point in both his election bids. But in 2000, Al Gore lost these voters by 17 points; in 2002, Democratic congressional candidates lost this group by 18 points and this year, the situation appears to have worsened further. That is implied (though not proved) by the finding, cited above, that Democrats lost whites as a whole by 5 points more than 2000 and another exit poll finding that Democrats’ slippage by education group was concentrated entirely among the non-college educated. (Kerry split the college-educated evenly with Bush, just as Gore did in 2000, but, where Gore lost the non-college educated by just 2 (49-47), Kerry lost them by 6 (53-47).)

And he makes a very good point that is likely to get lost in the blather of the Big Pundits:

Democrats’ difficulties with this group surely have a great deal to do with these voters’ sense of cultural alienation from the national Democratic party and its relatively cosmopolitan values around religion, family, guns and other social institutions/practices. Even the war on terror has increasingly become more a cultural issue linked to patriotism than a true foreign policy issue for many of these voters. [my emphasis]

Molly Ivins has a  very useful notion on how to conceptualize this (Mourning in America WorkingforChange.com 11/04/04). I usually avoid analogies like the plague on things like this.  But this one works for me:

Some people think you cannot break a dog that has got in the habit of killin' chickens, but my friend John Henry always claimed you could. He said the way to do it is to take one of the chickens the dog has killed and wire the thing around the dog's neck, good and strong. And leave it there until that dead chicken stinks so bad that no other dog or person will even go near that poor beast. Thing'll smell so bad the dog won't be able to stand himself. You leave it on there until the last little bit of flesh rots and falls off, and that dog won't kill chickens again.

Molly talks about one of many dead chickens that should be hung around the Bush administration's neck.  But the point is:

The Bush administration is going to be wired around the neck of the American people for four more years, long enough for the stench to sicken everybody. It should cure the country of electing Republicans.

And at least Democrats won't have to clean up after him until it is real clear to everyone who made the mess.

In other words, the Democrats don't need to start acting like poor loony Zell Miller and run around apologizing for the existence of the party.  They need to act like an effective opposition party and make sure people understand just what majority Republican Party rule in all three branches of the national government really means.

The Iraq War itself, and the incredible mismanagement that has dogged Bush's merry little Mesopotamian adventure all along, is one big smelly dead chicken around his administration's neck as it is.  Having to actually grapple with that mess for the next four years is not going to be one of the Republican Party's happiest moments.

But the question there is, how many more Americans have to die, how many more Iraqis, how many Iranians and Syrians, to convince more of these Republican "values" voters that they have bigger problems to worry about than gay marriage?