9/11, Not "Moral Values"

An article in this week's New Yorker magazine, "Permanent Fatal Errors" discusses what has essentially come to be accepted by many as the reason for the Bush victory in the recent election, the issue of "moral values."

A gathering of political scientists and prominent pollsters, including Democratic pollster Mark Mellman and Republican Jan Van Lohuizen(both pollsters for their respective presidential campaigns), met at Stanford shortly after the election to discuss this very issue, and they came to the conclusion that the real issue in the election wasn't moral values, but 9/11.

The potential story line that floated fastest to the surface after the election was that voters were sending a message about moral values. This is a little strange, because the "moral values" peg is entirely an artifacts of the very exit polling that led Mellman to his brief and illusory moment of Election Night triumph. These polls, as everyone knows, were a fiasco.

To the pollsters the real issue was not moral values, but terrorism. And behind terrorism lay the specter of 9/11, and how people felt about and voted on it. The polling evidence was much clearer on this issue, indicating that people whose predominant concern was terrorism favored Bush by a comfortable margin. The writer's conclusion was that the Democrats would be better off to stick to their guns, and not attempt to alter any major positions or shift to the right to attempt to pick up some of those who voted for Bush.

I've been wary of giving credence to the moral values argument, mostly because it seemed so vague and illusory to me, but also because I had a hunch that the real elephant in the room, the issue which hung over the election but was only discussed indirectly through Iraq and the "war" on terror, was 9/11. Polls demonstrated time and time again during the campaigns that when terrorism was in the news, it tended to favor Bush. The real question then is, how is this possible?

On the issue of terrorism, as with most issues at the heart of the campaign, people tended to vote based on their perception. And many Bush voters percieved Bush as the person capable of offering a strong response to terrorism. The reasons for this are diverse, but there's something to be said for Bush's boldness and his unwillingness to admit to mistake or error. He gives the appearance of strength, which was reassuring to many voters. (This of course drives us on the left nuts, as we think strength without intelligence is actually weakness, but whatever.)

Of course the reason so much time and energy has been spent trying to understand what drove so many voters to vote for Bush instead of Kerry is trying to figure out what Democrats should be doing in the next election. The idea that 9/11 may have been the deciding factor is both disheartening and reassuring. It's disheartening because it implies there is precious little Kerry could have done to win the election, other than reversing in one campaign the decades long tendency of the American people to trust Republicans over Democrats on National Security issues. But it's also reassuring, in that the failure is not a condemnation of Democratic policy and positions; rather, it's more of a historical fluke, and one that takes more than a few years to overcome.

That of course does not mean that Democrats should simply lie back and wait for the effect of 9/11 and the war on terrorism to subside, and hope to start winning elections again. Kerry only began the effort to overthrow the Republican monoply on issues of national security, and Republicans, learning a trick or two from Orwell, have learned that a state of constant "war" on terror only benefits them. It will take some effort, discipline and introspection to overcome that.
And 9/11 does not adequately explain the failure of Democratic congressional candidates across the board. That is probably due more to a whole host of issue, including some of the "moral values" issue. Addressing that is a much more complex problem.

Regardless, we should be careful to learn the correct lesson from this campaign, and adapt accordingly.