- In Washington there's no reason to struggle to find the
words that express the pain and hopes of a nation divided. At the Lincoln
Memorial, to the right of the large, white marbled sculpture of the seated
former president, all you need is carved clear and high across a vast stone
wall. The chiselled words are those of Abraham Lincoln. In his Second Inaugural
Address as president, he tried to heal the disunited states of America,
ripped apart by civil war, where north and south both believed God was
on their side. Lincoln's God was neutral and he believed it strange that
divine intervention was called upon in a time of war. George W Bush and
his successful campaign strategists have no problem claiming God is on
their side. And neither does half of the American electorate.
-
- In two months' time on the steps of Congress, Bush will
make his Second Inaugural Address. Like Lincoln, he faces a dangerously
divided nation. On one side is a traditional church-going Republican electorate,
mostly of rural, mid-west and southern states whose conservative Christian
values are shaped as much by pulpit and prayer book as by factional politics.
On the other side, the supposedly informed, internationally aware, secular
Democrats; the party of the urban Pacific and northeast Atlantic states.
Or as Bill Clinton's chief of staff, Leon Panetta, put it: "The party
of FDR has now become the party of Michael Moore and Fahrenheit 9/11."
-
- After the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon,
after war in Afghanistan, in the midst of chaos and military casualties
in Iraq and surrounded by an ailing economy with burgeoning national debt,
US voters ranked "moral values" as the key issue in choosing
their next president. Of those who put "moral values" at the
top of their list, 80% voted for Bush. For those who placed jobs and the
economy in the top spot, 80% voted for John Kerry. Terrorism and the war
in Iraq trailed third and fourth on the electorate's priority list. It
is no longer "the economy, stupid". For the second term of Bush's
faith-based presidency "it is the congregation, stupid".
-
- It is still sinking in for dispirited Democrats. They
face another four years outside the White House, four years where they
are likely to the minority party in both the House of Representatives and
the Senate.
-
- In post-poll analysis where "values" and "morals"
have been identified as the difference between winning and losing, the
statistics read like a marketing exercise for a Bible-publishing company,
not the dissection of a presidential election. Almost a quarter of the
electorate was made up of white, evangelical and born-again Christians
(with four to one going for Bush). In all religious categories ñ
except the Jewish faith ñ Bush beat Kerry. Jews make up only 3%
of US voters and voted 74% Kerry, 25% Bush.
-
- John Kerry was the first Roman Catholic nominated for
president since John F Kennedy. But white Catholics weren't impressed:
56% of them voted Bush.
-
- Bush is a member of a privileged political dynasty background,
with an expensive Ivy League education and family money that bailed him
out during his years of financial failure. But that is not how he is perceived.
He is seen as a regular guy, straightforward, straight-talking, with strong
religious beliefs. And Kerry? The pejoratives pile up: northeastern elite,
without core values and most damaging of all, liberal.
-
- At the foot of the Lincoln Memorial, a visiting family
from Nebraska give a simple explanation for the way in which they cast
their votes: "We liked Bush better." They expand only a little:
"We understand where he's comin' from. He's a strong leader, and we
need that. We just didn't like Kerry."
-
- Asked if Bush's "values" had made a difference
they nod at each other saying: "Yes, he's a good family man, good
Christian." Bush took the plains state of Nebraska with 67% and swept
the other seats in Congress. In Bush's divided US it now comes down to
this: attend church regularly? Of those who answer yes, 61% will have voted
Republican, 39% for the Democrats. Those who don't know what the inside
of a church looks like? The numbers are reversed.
-
- Karl Rove, the "architect" of Bush's campaign
strategy, designed the assault on the second term based on the assumption
of an electorate polarised on values. There was no attempt to move to the
centre, no mention of compromise. His risky grassroots-based campaign focused
on energising conservatives who'd stayed away in 2000. Bush's faith-based
values were emphasised. Taken alone, this would have been a poor excuse
for a presidential strategy. The United States was already a divided nation.
What made the difference was the climate of fear and uncertainty that the
"war on terror" has engendered. Frightened and ill-informed conservatives
retreated to their closed communities, to their churches, to their prayers,
to their core values.
-
- Andrew Kohut, of the Pew Research Centre, describes the
US as the "united states of anxiety". "This is an anxious
nation. Terror, economic wellbeing, healthcare, values. There's a whole
set of worries reflected in this election," he says. The implication
is that Bush and his team benefited more than Kerry in these cross-currents
of fear and anxiety.
-
- Certainly Democrats realise they must now work out why
they play so badly with voters for whom faith is an important issue. Senator
Blanche Lincoln, an Arkansas Democrat, says: "People are faced with
so many problems they cling to faith and prayers. I don't hesitate to express
the importance of my faith. Democrats have to get comfortable doing that."
Another Democrat, Senator John Breaux, says it worries him that his party
did better with non-church going people: "We have a problem and that's
why we lost across the south."
-
- Henry Ciseros, a Clinton administration official, believes
that when the Catholic bishops started talking "about abortion and
gay marriage, it was enough to matter in the Latino and ethnic Catholic
neighbourhoods. Our position on gay marriage was only marginally different
from Bush's, but that didn't deal with it". Ciceros is underplaying
these issues. Initiatives to ban same-sex marriages were on the ballot
forms of 11 states, many of them of key importance in deciding the next
president. Bush didn't need to talk directly to such issues. His constant
use of the word "faith" throughout the campaign did the job.
-
- There were other influences too. In the key state of
Ohio, the Republican mass-media campaign was underpinned by a quiet local
outreach effort. The metropolitan northern cities of Cleveland, Cincinnati
and Toledo are the equivalent of New York or San Francisco in a map of
the US. But in rural Ohio, in the Bible-belt areas, targeted mailings,
calls and personal doorstep visits pushed traditional values.
-
- John Green, a professor who studies the links between
religion and politics at the University of Akron, Ohio, says one Bush election
pamphlet showed an isolated church and a traditional family. It was headlined
"George W Bush shares your values. Marriage. Life. Faith." Green
says: "It couldn't have been clearer if it had been quoted from the
Bible."
-
- Elsewhere in Ohio, other forces aided Bush. The decision
to put the same-sex marriage initiative on the ballot papers was taken
by Ohio's Republican secretary of state, Kenneth Blackwell. Blackwell,
an elected official also in charge of election rules that seemed to change
from day to day, told his colleagues that the Bush campaign had specifically
asked for it to be included. What the party missed, the churches didn't:
2.5 million inserts on what was at stake over the gay marriage issue was
sent out in church bulletins. Ohio overwhelmingly voted to ban same-sex
marriage or anything approximating to it. Green believes fervent support
for the same-sex amendment may have caused turnout to rise in certain counties
by up to 4%: enough to tip the election Bush's way in vital states.
-
- Yet Kerry exceeded his party goals in every county in
Ohio. The black vote was up. The Ohio cities that should have been won
were won, Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland, saw an increase of
51,000 Democrat votes. And he still lost. The confusing contradictions?
Bush the "faith-based" President who nevertheless took the US
to war and ditched the United Nations in the process, took 76% of the vote
in the non- violent Amish communities of Holmes County. What happened to
the hardline biblical value of turning the other cheek?
-
- While the Democrats now regroup and try to figure how
they can reconnect with rural faith-based America and close the three point
(3.5 million votes) gap between Bush (51%) and Kerry (48%), it is pay-back
time for the Bush administration. The illegitimate democratic fiasco of
2000 was dismissed by Bush and he governed first-term as though he'd been
given a massive mandate. There is no indication that the second term will
be any different. Early signs point to the same electoral arrogance. He
told his first post-poll press conference in Washington last Thursday that:
"I've got the will of the people at my back." He also spoke of
a electorate that had "embraced" his point of view. A day earlier
the vice-president, Dick Cheney, spoke of being given a clear "mandate",
while Bush talked of a "duty to serve all Americans". They couldn't
have it both ways, and the warnings from the conservative right were swift.
-
- Supporters of the Bush victory, whether on social, religious
or economic issues, now expect delivery. Reagan's "moral majority"
backers in the 1980s also expected similar reward, only to be disappointed
at the hesitancy of the administration. There is now clear pressure for
"zero hesitancy" in 2005.
-
- "Now comes the revolution," was the prophesy
revealed in The New York Times by Richard Viguerie. Described as the "dean
of conservative direct mail", Viguerie is said to have proclaimed
to his colleagues: "If you don't implement a conservative agenda now,
when do you?" In a memorandum sent to other conservative groups, Viguerie
voices what other pro-Bush groups believe is their "moral values"
dividend. The memo says: "Make no mistake ñ conservative Christians
and "values voters" won this election for George W Bush. It's
crucial that the Republican leadership not forget this ñ as much
as some will try. Liberals in the media and inside the party [Republican]
are urging the President to ëunite' the country by discarding the
allies who earned him another four years: urging him to discard us conservative
Catholics and Protestants, people for whom moral values are the most important
issue."
-
- The Protestant pressure group, Focus On The Family, is
said to have warned White House staff that the Bush victory was only a
God-given reprieve for a country "on the verge of self-destruction"
unless it returned to traditional family values, passed federal laws outlawing
same-sex marriage, stopped abortions and stem-cell research and crucially
attended to the delivery of a right-leaning Supreme Court when the opportunity
comes over the next four years. The Catholic Culture Of Life Foundation
sees the balance of the Supreme Court as crucial if it is to overturn the
defining "Roe v Wade" case within the next four years, and effectively
outlaw abortion. The foundation ñ like many other groups expecting
repayment in full for their support ñ have already named which justice
they want on the Supreme Court.
-
- While they wait, the religious right have started their
debate in publications like the Christian Research Journal. Alongside a
critique of the Hollywood movie, The Matrix ñ dismissed as a film
which taps into the "metaphors for postmodern Nietzchean world view
of relativism and nihilism" ñ and an analysis of the bestselling
Da Vinci Code ("a discredited conspiracy theory designed to attack
the origins of Christianity") ñ the journal contends that just
because the Bible is silent on abortion "are we to conclude from this
Ö that elective abortion is morally wrong? There are good reasons
to say no". The journal and its readers are now Bush's natural constituency.
-
- Beyond social reform, the pressure on the White House
is for right-wing economic reform. In Thursday's press conference Bush
said, with a degree of pride: "I earned political capital [in this
election] and now I intend to spend it." The war on terror will continue
and he promised to "persevere till the enemy is defeated". So
where will the rest of the political capital be spent? He repeated his
campaign plan to "strengthen social security for our children and
grandchildren Ö by helping millions of our fellow citizens find security
and independence that comes from owning something ñ from ownership."
In shorthand: the US should prepare for the privatisation of all social
security and the two trillion dollar transition cost that comes with such
a plan.
-
- The emergency tax policies of the first term will be
made permanent, cuts that made the richest 1% of citizens richer and which
increased the tax burden on the average earner. Now the burden on wage
earners is set to increase in an "neoconomist" agenda that seeks
to release savings, dividends and stocks earnings from tax altogether.
The underlying belief? Bush said "70% of new jobs in America are created
by small businesses. I understand that".
-
- He will also understand that those in line to benefit
most from such "tax reforms" are chief executives, financial
sophisticates, industry titans, heirs and heiresses, Wall Street wizards.
And routine mundane tax payments to the US Treasury? This will come from
the remaining constituency of wage-earning breadwinners. According to Daniel
Altman, the author of a new text on neoconomics, the plan is "a recipe
for the worst kind of social unrest that can make an economy stagger, stagnate
or worse". The worse, for Altman, is a "riotous manifestation
of anticapitalist sentiment."
-
- Although Bush says he'll immediately "reach out
to everyone who shares our goals", the reality of last week's vote
is that half of the United States dreads what is coming and the half who
voted for Bush's "moral values" might not understand the consequences
of his economic values.
-
- For the former Democrat Gary Hart, who narrowly failed
to get the Democratic ticket in both 1984 and 1988, the results of the
2004 race depict an anxious nation. "Americans were attacked on their
home soil in 2001 for the first time since 1812. [Hart may have forgotten
about Pearl Harbour.] And worried over the future, they have turned to
their faith. And many might not even know what Bush's faith actually is,"
he says.
-
- Hart is dismissive of claims that the Democrat Party
face an unprecedented crisis. "The party are not in bad shape. Reagan
ran on his religious beliefs. Now Bush has done the same thing. And 54
million Americans didn't agree with him."
-
- Back at the Lincoln Memorial there's the origin of a
more basic analysis. American citizens, Democrat or Republican, can find
engraved in stone the comforting words that "government of the people,
by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth". But
not to be found carved anywhere in Washington is Lincoln's self-deprecating
advice on changing presidents midway through a conflict. In 1864 he said:
"I have not permitted myself, gentlemen, to conclude that I am the
best man in the country; but I am reminded, in this connection, of a story
of an old Dutch farmer who remarked to a companion once that 'it was not
best to swap horses while crossing streams'."
-
- For the next four years, that may be the only consolation
Lincoln has left for the Democrats to hold on to.
-
- ©2004 newsquest (sunday herald) limited. all rights
reserved http://www.sundayherald.com/45833
|
