America's new "silent majority"
And so tonight-to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans-I ask for your support.
-- Richard Nixon, Nov. 3, 1969.
Will Bunch
We were reading the New York Times on Sunday, which had an interesting article about the political situation in Ohio, where the Democrats have a good chance of wresting control of the statehouse and a Senate and several House seats. But this passage leaped off the page at us:
Mr. Brown is considered one of the more liberal members of the state's Congressional delegation; he supports abortion rights, opposed the constitutional amendment prohibiting same-sex marriage and voted against the war in Iraq.
"Sherrod Brown is out of the mainstream," Mrs. Dole said. "I don't think his kind of liberalism will sell across the state. Drawing the contrast is the key here: it's the choice between the two candidates, despite the environment."
Incredibly, that exchange just stood there, unchallenged. So just how far out of the mainstream is Sherrod Brown?
-- A new poll just out shows that a majority of Americans -- some 57 percent -- now believe that sending troops to Iraq was a mistake, in essence agreeing that Brown's opposition to the war was correct.
-- On an amendment to ban gay marriage, a poll released just this week found that voters rank this at the very bottom of issues that they want Congress to take up, and some 63 percent of Americans are either strongly or somewhat concerned about changing the Constitution over this issue.
-- On abortion rights, the nation is fairly evenly divided. A poll taken in April shows 51 percent opposed to most abortion rights and 46 percent generally in favor -- but a majority opposed a law in South Dakota seeking to ban them.
Based on that, Sherrod Brown may be the most mainstream candidate in America. However, you could almost forgive someone for thinking the opposite, given the media's failings to provide any context. The Democrat's positions are very much in the majority -- a new kind of "silent majority" that leans to center-left as opposed to Nixon's center-right grouping.
They are not the people posting multiple diaries on blogs like Daily Kos, or obsessing over the latest doings inside the Beltway -- as you probably do if you're reading this. They're too busy making a modest living.
They are, instead, the people that we see so often when TV or radio tries some rare "man on the street" reporting -- bashing the war in Iraq or asking the government to stay out of their bedroom, and occasionally getting funny looks from reporters who fail to realize just how "mainstream" these points of view actually are.
They are cab drivers and nurses, waitresses and insurance agents. They don't read blogs but most of them vote -- and so it's why the Democrats got the most ballots for president in 1992, 1996, and 2000, and came within an eyelash of ousting "a war president" in 2004.
The things that this "silent majority" believes may not boil down easily to a single word or a short soundbite, but they are common sense ideals, and truly American. And so they believe in family values and probably in a God as well, but not in the government intruding on their private lives, let along reading their emails. They believe in a strong defense, but not in wars that America starts first. They believe in free-market capitalism, as long as rich people pay their fair share and the environment is protected.
True, in many ways they are a different "silent majority" from the one that elected Richard Nixon in 1968. Times have changed. America is both more diverse and -- Lou Dobbs and his noisy minority of fanatics notwithstanding -- tolerates more diversity.
And so they are all around you, and yet this "silent majority" is able to hide in plain sight, not just from the news media but even from the leaders of the Democratic Party, the partisans who would seem best positioned to represent them in D.C.
And so we watch a Democratic Party that is splitting itself in two, arguing what's the real message and what's the best way to woo over a mass of people who might very well tell you -- if you would just listen -- that "you had me at 'hello.'" And we guess there will always be debates over strategy and tactics -- that's why consultants and even a few bloggers get paid the big bucks.
But at the end of the day, should it really be hard for a Democrat like Sherrod Brown to win in 2006?
Everyone should just stop yelling for a moment...and listen to your silent majority.
Posted on May 10, 2006 10:56 AM |
