Muzzle Mr. Moore

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

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NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

I read them so you don’t have to – all 12,293,752 words written since last Wednesday morning explaining how Senator Kerry and the Democratic Party lost the election and how, with a clip-clip here and a snip-snip there, the Democrats can win again, minus Mr. Kerry, of course.


The first impression you get reading all this verbiage – after the numbness wears off and you regain the power of thought – is of a vast, hysterical overreaction.


After all, while President Bush rang up a record total in the popular vote, so did Mr. Kerry, winning more votes than any presidential challenger in history. He won roughly 5 million more votes than Vice President Gore in 2000 and 2 million more than Ronald Reagan in his thunderous landslide re-election in 1984.


Flipping a mere 70,000 votes in Ohio would have brought Mr. Kerry the presidency, and today we’d be treated to Karl Rove, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, and other Republican polemicists wracked by spasms of anguished soul-searching and self-doubt. Well, maybe not Mr. O’Reilly.


On the other hand, those last 70,000 votes proved to be stubborn things, dangling just beyond Democratic fingertips, and they’re receding rather than getting closer. For Democrats, the most ominous statistic from Mr. Bush’s victory is this: The president increased his percentage of the vote in 2000 in 45 out of 50 states.


Under Mr. Bush, in other words, not only are the Republican Red States getting redder, the Democratic Blue States are turning a distinct shade of purple. Or mauve. Whatever.


So let’s stipulate that Democrats are ripe for soul-searching. Unfortunately, it turns out they’re no better at self-criticism than they are at winning national elections.


The most popular of the various self-improvement programs Democrats are offering one another is a crash course in learning to be religious – or in learning to talk as though they are.


One statistic from last week’s exit polls quickly achieved talismanic importance. Asked to name the political issue most important to them, 22% of voters – the largest category – named “moral values.” Eighty percent of those voters went for Mr. Bush, 18% for Kerry.


The conclusion Democrats are drawing from this was summarized by Matthew Miller, an aide to former President Bill Clinton: “When Democrats fail to use the language of religion to support progressive goals in areas like health care and education, they continue to miss opportunities to broaden their appeal.” What would Jesus do? He’d increase Pell grants.


Yet these Democrats who call for a tent revival have short memories: During the campaign, their man Kerry did deploy the language of religion in service of his politics. And he wasn’t subtle about it, either.


Several Sundays this fall he ascended the pulpit in inner-city churches and preached on the New Testament’s Letter of St. James, where we are taught that faith without works is dead. In the Kerry translation, “works” apparently meant “government interventions in the marketplace.”


And in a dazzling overreach, Mr. Kerry compared Mr. Bush with the priest and the Levite in the Good Samaritan story, both of whom selfishly declined to help an injured traveler on the highway.


“This president has talked about compassion, but he’s walked right by,” Mr. Kerry said.


So far as I know, not since William Jennings Bryan in 1896 has a major presidential candidate had the brass to call his opponent a Pharisee. It didn’t work for Bryan either.


No, Democrats must look elsewhere to reform their party. How about in the mirror? There they will see an out-sized body mass sprawling across the background, belonging to the filmmaker Michael Moore.


Every party has wackos and extremists in its ranks; they’re an inevitable hazard of coalition-building. In any large gathering of Republicans, for example, you’ll find gold bugs, creationists, and libertarians hot to privatize the sewers living uneasily among the country-clubbers, small-business owners, and stay-at-home moms who give the party a more appealing public face.


Republicans know how to keep their extremists happy – and quiet.


Yet this year, when Democrats were faced with a genuine extremist like Mr. Moore – whose hugely popular documentary “Fahrenheit 9/11” was a catalogue of wild-eyed allegations against Mr. Bush – they encouraged him.


“Half the Democratic Senate,” according to Senator Graham, attended the movie’s Washington premiere. It got a standing ovation. At the national convention, Mr. Moore took an honored seat next to President Carter, who later called the documentary one of his two favorite movies. The other is “Casablanca.”


In place of building a convincing critique of the Bush presidency, the party absorbed Mr. Moore’s bizarre obsessions: over Mr. Bush’s National Guard record, for instance, which most voters deemed beside the point. The party’s fat cats financed advertisements repeating Mr. Moore’s erroneous belief that the Bush administration gave favored treatment to the bin Laden family after September 11, and the movie’s most famous, and unfair, sequence, showing Mr. Bush sitting uncomfortably in a classroom the morning of the terrorist attacks, metastasized into a laugh line used by Senator Edwards.


Perhaps Democrats thought they were bringing Moore into the mainstream; instead, he brought them to the radical fringe. I’m not sure whether a showman like Moore can ever be hushed in the way Republicans have managed to stifle their own wackos. But Democrats need to try.


Otherwise they face the truth of a favorite red-state axiom: “You lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.” And fleas don’t vote.



Mr. Ferguson is a columnist for Bloomberg News.

NY Sun
NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.


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