http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/14/arts/14r...ticle_popular_1
Why go red? Message of article: Beware pandering to fools. You may be exposed someday.
On 'Moral Values,' It's Blue in a Landslide
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.