The Value of Values
The Campaign Turns Moral
Andrew Sullivan
The old Nixon saw had it that all campaigns had an arc. They tilted to the true believers during the primary season, and then they tacked to the center in the summer and fall. You shored up your political base - and then you made a pitch to the middle. Hyper-liberal or hyper-conservative positions in the winter were finessed by the summer convention, where the candidate has a chance to win over all those undecided voters.
There's one thing, however, this scenario didn't quite take into account: What if there are decreasing numbers of genuine swing voters in the middle? That certainly seems to be the case in this campaign. A recent Pew Forum poll found that the undecideds form about 21 percent of the electorate at this point in the campaign, compared to 32 percent at this stage in 2000. Moreover, finding those swing voters is very hard. It takes prodigious market research to track them down, figure out how to appeal to them, and offer them the one argument in each case that might sway them. Core believers, on the other hand, are relatively easy to find. Find the counties where you did best last time and re-visit them. Or go to organizations that already support you, and that can mobilize the base some more.
So last week, you saw John Kerry addressing the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, one of the oldest civil rights groups in the country. And you had George W. Bush on a bus in the middle of rural upper Wisconsin, visiting places he'd won easily only four years before. In some ways, Bush's base-work was more significant than Kerry's. Kerry's base is already highly mobilized - by loathing for the president. Sure, he has to make some overtures to black and Hispanic groups - and he has plans for a big media buy on black and Latino television channels. But in general, Kerry is now playing to formula: moving to the center, speaking of his "conservative values," taking a position on Iraq almost indistinguishable from Bush's, and so on.
But Bush, once again, is playing a different, riskier game. His political guru, Karl Rove, has been obsessed these past three and a half years that four million evangelical voters didn't show up to the polls in 2000. With them, Bush might have won some critical states and not have had to endure the Florida nightmare. Did the last-minute revelation of a past drunk-driving arrest offend these rural, Christian voters? Or was Bush not attentive enough to their needs all along?
There's no risk of that this time. Bush is playing hard to galvanize his religious base - even at this stage in the campaign. Last week, Bush unveiled a central part of the strategy. A Constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage was introduced into the Senate. It failed miserably and predictably - but that wasn't the point. The point was o use the issue in the coming campaign. Bush pushed hard for it, used it on the trail, and individually lobbied senators to come to his side. Evangelicals held telethons, where they sent a tsunami of telephone calls and emails into the Senate offices to lobby for the measure. The Republican leadership cleared the schedule of other less important matters - like passing a budget - in favor of an emotional debate about values. All of this was not because they believed the amendment would pass - but because they want to find an issue to rev up their base with as much fervor as Kerry's is mobilized against Bush.
The president has used the anti-gay gambit twice before, and it is already becoming a staple of politics in the South. When he was governor of Texas, Bush used his support of the state's anti-sodomy law (struck down last year by the Supreme Court) to portray his opponent, Ann Richards, as soft on moral values. When Bush was in trouble in the 2000 campaign, after Senator John McCain beat him in New Hampshire, Bush's surrogates in South Carolina sent out emails showing McCain meeting with gay Republicans. Kerry, of course, is from Massachusetts, the one state where gay marriage is legal. It all adds up to a perfect subliminal message - and sometimes not at all subliminal - that a vote for Kerry is a vote for gays, drugs, sex, and general moral decline.
Could this turn off moderate voters? Of course. John Kerry tried to exploit this at the NAACP. Here's his riff on values: "Later today, John Edwards and I will embark on a series of front-porch tours -- going to the homes of ordinary citizens across this nation and talking with them about the values that matter most to them -- values you live by everyday: Family. Responsibility. Service. Opportunity. Inclusion. Fairness. Faith. And the most revolutionary value of all - that we are all created equal." But Bush figures his own rawer appeals will work better. And losing gay voters, their families, and some suburbanites, is more than compensated for by upping the anti-gay evangelical vote. It's a classic wedge issue. Aren't all the evangelicals in states where Bush wins easily anyway? Not at all. In places like Ohio, these voters count in rural areas. If they come out in force, they can tilt the entire direction of the race. "How much time and energy do you give to picking up the 10 percent, who are disengaged from politics, and how do you communicate with them even if you want to?" asked Grover G. Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, in the Washington Post last week. "You can go to the 45 percent [who already support Bush] and ask them to bring a brother or a sister or a friend to the polls." That's the theory anyway.
In Wisconsin, Bush played all the tricks. He won't gay-bash directly. In fact, he has yet to say the word 'gay', 'lesbian' or 'homosexual' in public. He simply asserts that he will stand up and defend "traditional marriage," a proposition with which it is indeed hard to disagree. But his audience knows what he really means - "protecting" marriage from gays - and cheer. Or he will refer to Kerry mockingly as someone who said he shares "conservative values." Or he will lambaste those who hobnob with "spohisticates" and "entertainers from Hollywood," a veiled reference to a large fundraiser Kerry had just held. The message is: I'm one of you and he isn't. He talks funny, has a mega-rich foreign wife, likes the gays, and is super liberal. It's not a subtle message, but it can be an effective one. Slate magazine recently visited Tennessee, a swing Southern state. Their reporter found one Randall Vinson, who told them, "There are three things I know about John Kerry. First, that he speaks three or four languages, and one of them is French. Second, that he's married to an ex-senator's wife who's worth a billion dollars. And third, he is supposedly a Vietnam vet." Karl Rove should be proud of himself.
The base-mobilization has only just begun. Republican groups in several swing states are organizing their own anti-gay marriage constitutional amendments to their respective state constitutions, and if the measures are on the ballot this fall, they will help stoke a big turnout of fundamentalist voters. To give you an idea of the kind of rhetoric being used, here's an email from a conservative lobby group sent out to its evangelical members last week. It was designed to shore up the troops after the failure of the Marriage Amendment: "No true believing Christian or Jew can afford to sit this fight out. The fight is not over. You must continue to speak up to ensure Washington understands we want the Judeo-Christian concept of marriage clearly and formally recognized in our Constitution. You must keep in mind where your Senator stood on this vote as Election Day approaches. This past weekend many Christian churches held "Protect Marriage Sunday" to make certain their congregations understand the importance of marriage before the expected vote later in the coming week. More actions like this will keep the issue on the political front burner." The Southern Baptist Council's "I Vote Values" campaign reminds readers on its website that the founding fathers favored castration for homosexuals. The Traditional Values Coalition has a campaign ad on the web that shows a demonic-green adult man spliced with a young child. The slogan? "Exposed: Homosexual Child Molesters." When Paul Wyrich, the head of the Free Congress Foundation, a key Republican group, was asked how he felt about alienating gay Republicans in this campaign, his response was: "Good riddance."
Bush doesn't want to have a re-run of his father's campaign in 1992, which allowed Patrick Buchanan to foment a culture war in front of a prime-time audience. So he has put up speakers at the convention who are uniformly social liberals: Arnold Schwarzenegger, John McCain, George Pataki, the New York governor, and Rudy Giuliani, another liberal Republican. But beneath the surface, the "values" campaign is in full swing - especially in local media markets. If the distinction between a debate about values and a homophobic campaign gets a little blurry, then that's all part of the plan too. People wonder why America is polarized. It's polarized partly because the parties want it to be. And by November, it will be polarized to within an inch of its life.
July 17, 2004, Sunday Times.
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