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ATLANTIC HIGHLANDS HERALD |
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THE VALUES CHASE (Part II) (Second of two articles) Last week I reviewed some comments I heard after the election about values. I went on to assess how both candidates measured up on three key values that I believe are important to many voters. These were: Belief in America, Defense of the Nation, and The Normal Culture .(1) This article continues my analysis of two more values that I believe played a key role in the 2004 election – i.e., Understanding Ordinary People and Religious Faith. I’ll examine how the candidates lined up with them (or not), and how voters perceived that alignment. Understanding Ordinary People. I am not the first to note that a kind of polar-flip of the two major political parties has occurred over the last 25 years. For many years Republicans were called the party of rich people and big business, while Democrats were the party of the ordinary guy. Democrats used this not fully accurate perception advantageously to retain majority status for decades – holding the Presidency for twenty years (1933-’53) and both houses of Congress for all but a handful of years, 1933-’95. Many people – notably the media and the Civil Service – got used to the idea that Democratic Party rule was the natural order of things. This began to change in the early 1970s when Richard Nixon saw that Democrats’ preoccupation with minorities’ concerns left them vulnerable in their traditional base of white southerners. This led to his “southern strategy” by which he smashed George McGovern in 1972. Mr. Nixon wrecked his own Presidency before he could mature the strategy, but Ronald Reagan did so – carrying Republican control of the Senate along with his own election in 1980. The strategy took another giant leap forward when Republicans won control of both houses of Congress in 1994. In the Reagan era Republicans began converting middle-class voters who once were a primary Democratic constituency. They also broke out of the political straightjacket they had been locked in for decades, wherein Democrats handed out goodies and got reelected, while Republicans collected taxes, paid the bills, and played ogre. Ronald Reagan cancelled that perverse deal, cut taxes, spent big on defense, set up the Soviet Union’s collapse, and proclaimed Republicanism as the new wave of the future. Republicans also cultivated both ordinary workers and small business owners as a new “investor class” – thus permanently changing the political landscape. For their part, Democrats dug a deep political hole for themselves by ignoring the ordinary guy’s concerns and identifying ever more strongly with racial and gender activism. This started with benign-sounding affirmative action, but eventually led to reverse-discriminatory preferences in employment and college admissions. Racial and gender politics gained dominant places at the Democratic Table. Militant homosexuality soon joined them. The Party was radicalized. Radicals gleefully crowed that heterosexual white men were now powerless, but they forgot that these former Democrats could go elsewhere. Republicans were only too glad to have them. The trickle became a flood, and wives, mothers, sisters and girlfriends – alarmed by what Democrats’ policies were doing to their men and their children – soon began moving to the Republicans, too. Democrats also pursued Hollywood stars and super-rich radicals like George Soros. Thus, the party of FDR and JFK, who whipped the Nazis and stared down the Russkies, left the political mainstream. Democrats became the party of unilateral disarmament, peace at any price, reverse discrimination, abortion, cohabitation, deviant sexuality, single parenting, radical feminism, and militant homosexuality – with a thin diamond crust on top. There was no room, any more, for the Normal Culture or its adherents. In 2004, political re-polarization is essentially complete. George W. Bush is the first Republican president since Dwight Eisenhower to have a Republican Congress. The recent election clarified, as never before, that the Republican Party – now solidly in the mainstream – stands for Normal Culture, religious faith, lower taxes, work, investment, building private wealth, and the ordinary man and woman. Ordinary voters see very little in common with Democrats today. In the old Democratic Party, a mega-rich wife – especially a radical, outspoken one – would have been seen as a serious disadvantage for any Democratic candidate. Yet this seemed perfectly natural for the new Democratic Party of celebrities and movie stars. No one even thought to question the wisdom of selecting such a candidate until deep into the campaign when it became obvious how detrimental Mrs. Kerry was to her husband’s candidacy. No reporters asked Mr. Kerry if he drove his own car, carried cash, bought groceries, or wrote his own checks – as they once asked Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. But they didn’t have to. Anyone could see how little commonality the Kerrys had with ordinary people’s lives and concerns. Short of taking a vow of poverty, there was no possible way for the Senator to bridge that gap. More than any other aspect of the campaign, Understanding Ordinary People was truly Mission Impossible for Senator Kerry. He lost the contest on it before the campaign even began. Religious Faith. Over the years, candidates have so often tried to contrive this value by carrying Bibles, being photographed going to church, and talking about being “born again”, that one wondered if the real article would be recognized if it actually appeared. Indeed, candidates who are genuine Christians are often reluctant to talk about their faith because they know reporters and opponents will accuse them of trying to game this value for political advantage. My purpose here is not to question the faith of any of the recent presidential candidates. The Bible warns against doing this, and I consider it gauche as well. Only God can know the heart, and He will judge every man’s life at His time of reckoning. But the Bible does say we can tell something about a man’s heart by watching what he does. “By their fruits you will know them,” (2) Jesus said, speaking of “trees” that yield either good fruit or bad fruit – but really talking metaphorically about reading people’s hearts by their actions. One thing that reveals a man’s heart, according to the Bible, is his money. “…where your treasure is, there will your heart be also,” (3) said Jesus. On this score we have some data about the recent candidates. According to officially released figures, President and Mrs. Bush gave 9% of their income ($69,925 of $771,940) to churches and charitable organizations in 2002. Mr. Kerry’s information shows that he gave 13% of his income to charity in 2002 (i.e., $18,600 of $144,091). This looks generous, but Mr. Kerry is a married man whose wife files a separate return. Mrs. Kerry released only two pages of her tax returns, showing an income of $5 million for 2002 but no data about her charitable giving. She also released nothing about the tax-free part of her annual income, estimated at $50 million a year from tax-free bonds. Of course, these financial data are very limited indicators of how the candidates’ personal faith is expressed in giving. How their public conduct is informed by their personal faith is also of interest, and has more immediate meaning to voters. President Bush – who speaks openly of having accepted Jesus Christ as his personal Savior – is a Christian in the Evangelical style. He admits that his youth was misspent in problem drinking and riotous living, but says a personal encounter with Christ changed him. His professions of faith far predate his political career. Mr. Bush will speak of these matters if asked, but even his critics agree that he does not wear his faith on his sleeve. His policy positions align with those advocated by most Evangelicals. In one of the debates he spoke of “feeling” the prayers of people and relying on the strength they furnish. Mr. Kerry is a Catholic. He has not run for national office before, so it is difficult to say how much he has mentioned his personal faith or if it was a large part of his public persona before 2004. He calls it a “very private” matter. In the recent campaign he claimed good standing as a Catholic, but some church officials said he should be denied communion on account of his pro-abortion advocacy. The jury is out on whether Mr. Kerry’s attempt to identify with Christian voters was successful. Mr. Kerry has said he opposes homosexual marriage – an issue which played an unexpectedly large role in the 2004 campaign – but opposes the proposed Constitutional Amendment that would prohibit recognition of homosexual marriages. He wants the matter left up to the states. His position, of course, ignores the “full faith and credit” issue – whereby all states would have to accept homosexual marriages certified by any other state. President Bush also opposes homosexual marriage, but supports the Constitutional Amendment solution. He did not make the issue a major part of his campaign strategy or message, nor did he use it to hammer his opponent. However, both Mr. Kerry and his running mate, Mr. Edwards, used the gay marriage issue as an opportunity to remind voters that Vice President Cheney’s daughter is a practicing lesbian. Mrs. Edwards suggested that Mrs. Cheney was “ashamed” of her daughter. The tactic produced a strong adverse reaction. I believe it was a “serious mistake”. Both candidates presented nuanced positions on how to deal with the homosexual marriage issue. But Mr. Kerry was too obviously waffling. Voters saw that “leaving it to the states” was a way to straddle the issue. His party’s strident advocacy was a much greater problem. Every voter knew that homosexuals are a key Democratic constituency, so however much Mr. Kerry said he opposed gay marriage, voters knew his party was for it. This hurt him in certain states – notably Ohio – perhaps enough to defeat him. Religious Faith was once a given in American politics. All candidates were assumed respectable, church-going people who accepted the Normal Culture and common morality. But that time is past. Today, Democrats are clearly identified with what many people still consider perversion. Despite a pro-gay media blitz – including sympathetically portrayed gay characters in most sitcoms, and pundits’ hard sell of a “new morality” in America – the recent election showed that the sales job has not quite succeeded. I doubt that it will. We might have a deuce of a fight over it, but I believe complete cultural and moral equivalence for the homosexual lifestyle in America is beyond the pale. The effort is already receding from its high water mark. Like a druggie on a 40-year bender, Democrats are whacked out on abortion, homosexuality, and militant secularism. Their Party is trashed. Whether they can recover will depend on their ability to regain the key value of Religious Faith. As I noted earlier, this will mean more than talking and creating photo-ops. When you’ve been down in the gutter this long, it’s a tough road back. ******* (1) “The Values Chase (Part I)”, Atlantic Highlands Herald, 9 December 2004. (http://www.ahherald.com/atlarge/2004/041209_values.htm ) (2) The Bible (KJV), Matthew 7:20. (3) The Bible (KJV), Matthew 6:21.
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