November 14, 2004
On 'Moral Values,' It's Blue in a Landslide
FRANK RICH
FAREWELL to Swift boats and "Shove it!," to Osama's tape and Saddam's
missing weapons, to "security moms" and outsourced dads. They've all
been sent to history's dustbin faster than Ralph Nader memorabilia was
dumped on eBay. In their stead stands a single ambiguous phrase coined
by an anonymous exit pollster: "Moral values." By near universal
agreement the morning after, these two words tell the entire story of
the election: it's the culture, stupid.
"It really is Michael Moore versus Mel Gibson," said Newt Gingrich. To
Jon Stewart, Nov. 2 was the red states' revenge on "Will & Grace."
William Safire, speaking on "Meet the Press," called the Janet Jackson
fracas "the social-political event of the past year." Karl Rove was of
the same mind: "I think it's people who are concerned about the
coarseness of our culture, about what they see on the television sets,
what they see in the movies ..."
And let's not even get started on the two most dreaded words in
American comedy, regardless of your party affiliation: Whoopi
Goldberg.
There's only one problem with the storyline proclaiming that the
country swung to the right on cultural issues in 2004. Like so many
other narratives that immediately calcify into our 24/7 media's
conventional wisdom, it is fiction. Everything about the election
results - and about American culture itself - confirms an inescapable
reality: John Kerry's defeat notwithstanding, it's blue America, not
red, that is inexorably winning the culture war, and by a landslide.
Kerry voters who have been flagellating themselves since Election Day
with a vengeance worthy of "The Passion of the Christ" should wake up
and smell the Chardonnay.
The blue ascendancy is nearly as strong among Republicans as it is
among Democrats. Those whose "moral values" are invested in cultural
heroes like the accused loofah fetishist Bill O'Reilly and the
self-gratifying drug consumer Rush Limbaugh are surely joking when
they turn apoplectic over MTV. William Bennett's name is now as
synonymous with Las Vegas as silicone. The Democrats' Ashton Kutcher
is trumped by the Republicans' Britney Spears. Excess and vulgarity,
as always, enjoy a vast, bipartisan constituency, and in a democracy
no political party will ever stamp them out.
If anyone is laughing all the way to the bank this election year, it
must be the undisputed king of the red cultural elite, Rupert Murdoch.
Fox News is a rising profit center within his News Corporation, and
each red-state dollar that it makes can be plowed back into the rest
of Fox's very blue entertainment portfolio. The Murdoch cultural
stable includes recent books like Jenna Jameson's "How to Make Love
Like a Porn Star" and the Vivid Girls' "How to Have a XXX Sex Life,"
which have both been synergistically, even joyously, promoted on Fox
News by willing hosts like Rita Cosby and, needless to say, Mr.
O'Reilly. There are "real fun parts and exciting parts," said Ms.
Cosby to Ms. Jameson on Fox News's "Big Story Weekend," an encounter
broadcast on Saturday at 9 p.m., assuring its maximum exposure to
unsupervised kids.
Almost unnoticed in the final weeks of the campaign was the record
government indecency fine levied against another prime-time Fox
television product, "Married by America." The $1.2 million bill, a
mere bagatelle to Murdoch stockholders, was more than twice the
punishment inflicted on Viacom for Janet Jackson's "wardrobe
malfunction." According to the F.C.C. complaint, one episode in this
heterosexual marriage-promoting reality show included scenes in which
"partygoers lick whipped cream from strippers' bodies," and two female
strippers "playfully spank" a man on all fours in his underwear.
"Married by America" is gone now, but Fox remains the go-to network
for Paris Hilton ("The Simple Life") and wife-swapping ("Trading
Spouses: Meet Your New Mommy").
None of this has prompted an uprising from the red-state Fox News
loyalists supposedly so preoccupied with "moral values." They all
gladly contribute fungible dollars to Fox culture by boosting their
fair-and-balanced channel's rise in the ratings. Some of these red
staters may want to make love like porn stars besides. (Not that
there's anything wrong with that.) An ABC News poll two weeks before
the election found that more Republicans than Democrats enjoy sex "a
great deal." The Democrats' new hero, Illinois Senator-elect Barack
Obama, was assured victory once his original, ostentatiously pious
Republican opponent, Jack Ryan, dropped out of the race rather than
defend his taste for "avant-garde" sex clubs.
The 22 percent of voters who told pollsters that "moral values" were
their top election issue - 79 percent of whom voted for Bush-Cheney -
corresponds almost exactly to the number of voters (23 percent) who
describe themselves as born-again or evangelical Christians. They are
entitled to their culture, too, and their own entertainment industry.
And their own show-biz scandals. The Los Angeles Times reported this
summer that Paul Crouch, the evangelist who founded the largest
Christian network, Trinity Broadcasting Network, vehemently denied a
former employee's accusation that the two had had a homosexual
encounter - though not before paying the employee a $425,000
settlement. Not so incidentally, Trinity joined Gary Bauer and Fox
News as prime movers in "Redeem the Vote," the Christian-rock
alternative to MTV's "Rock the Vote."
But the distance between this hard-core red culture and the majority
blue culture is perhaps best captured by Tom Coburn, the newly elected
Republican senator from Oklahoma, lately famous for discovering
"rampant" lesbianism in that state's schools. As a congressman in
1997, Mr. Coburn attacked NBC for encouraging "irresponsible sexual
behavior" and taking "network TV to an all-time low with full frontal
nudity, violence and profanity being shown in our homes." The
broadcast that prompted his outrage on behalf of "parents and
decent-minded individuals everywhere" was the network's prime-time
showing of Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List."
It's in the G.O.P.'s interest to pander to this far-right constituency
- votes are votes - but you can be certain that a party joined at the
hip to much of corporate America, Mr. Murdoch included, will take no
action to curtail the blue culture these voters deplore. As Marshall
Wittman, an independent-minded former associate of both Ralph Reed and
John McCain, wrote before the election, "The only things the religious
conservatives get are largely symbolic votes on proposals guaranteed
to fail, such as the gay marriage constitutional amendment." That
amendment has never had a prayer of rounding up the two-thirds
majority needed for passage and still doesn't.
Mr. Wittman echoes Thomas Frank, the author of "What's the Matter With
Kansas?," by common consent the year's most prescient political book.
"Values," Mr. Frank writes, "always take a backseat to the needs of
money once the elections are won." Under this perennial "trick," as he
calls it, Republican politicians promise to stop abortion and force
the culture industry "to clean up its act" - until the votes are
counted. Then they return to their higher priorities, like cutting
capital gains and estate taxes. Mr. Murdoch and his fellow cultural
barons - from Sumner Redstone, the Bush-endorsing C.E.O. of Viacom, to
Richard Parsons, the Republican C.E.O. of Time Warner, to Jeffrey
Immelt, the Bush-contributing C.E.O. of G.E. (NBC Universal) - are
about to be rewarded not just with more tax breaks but also with
deregulatory goodies increasing their power to market salacious
entertainment. It's they, not Susan Sarandon and Bruce Springsteen,
who actually set the cultural agenda Gary Bauer and company say they
despise.
But it's not only the G.O.P.'s fealty to its financial backers that is
predictive of how little cultural bang the "values" voters will get
for their Bush-Cheney votes. At 78 percent, the nonvalues voters have
far more votes than they do, and both parties will cater to that
overwhelming majority's blue tastes first and last. Their mandate is
clear: The same poll that clocked "moral values" partisans at 22
percent of the electorate found that nearly three times as many
Americans approve of some form of legal status for gay couples,
whether civil unions (35 percent) or marriage (27 percent). Do the
math and you'll find that the poll also shows that for all the
G.O.P.'s efforts to court Jews, the total number of Jewish Republican
voters in 2004, while up from 2000, was still some 200,000 less than
the number of gay Republican voters.
When Robert Novak writes after the election that "the anti-abortion,
anti-gay marriage, socially conservative agenda is ascendant, and the
G.O.P. will not abandon it anytime soon," you have to wonder what drug
he is on. The abandonment began at the convention. Sam Brownback, the
Kansas senator who champions the religious right, was locked away in
an off-camera rally across town from Madison Square Garden. Prime time
was bestowed upon the three biggest stars in post-Bush Republican
politics: Rudy Giuliani, John McCain and Arnold Schwarzenegger. All
are supporters of gay rights and opponents of the same-sex marriage
constitutional amendment. Only Mr. McCain calls himself pro-life, and
he's never made abortion a cause. None of the three support the Bush
administration position on stem-cell research. When the No. 1 "moral
values" movie star, Mel Gibson, condemned the Schwarzenegger-endorsed
California ballot initiative expanding and financing stem-cell
research, the governor and voters crushed him like a girlie-man. The
measure carried by 59 percent, which is consistent with national
polling on the issue.
If the Republican party's next round of leaders are all cool with blue
culture, why should Democrats run after the red? Received Washington
wisdom has it that the only Democrat who will ever be able to win a
national election must be a cross between Gomer Pyle and Billy Sunday
- a Scripture-quoting Sun Belt exurbanite whose loyalty to Nascar does
not extend to Dale Earnhardt Jr., who was fined last month for saying
a four-letter word on television.
According to this argument, the values voters the Democrats must
pander to are people like Cary and Tara Leslie, archetypal Ohio
evangelical "Bush votes come to life" apotheosized by The Washington
Post right after Election Day. The Leslies swear by "moral absolutes,"
support a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage and mostly watch Fox
News. Mr. Leslie has also watched his income drop from $55,000 to
$35,000 since 2001, forcing himself, his wife and his three young
children into the ranks of what he calls the "working poor." Maybe by
2008 some Democrat will figure out how to persuade him that it might
be a higher moral value to worry about the future of his own family
than some gay family he hasn't even met.
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