Wrong Side of Moral Divide

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The New York Sun

The Michael Moore Democrats must be amazed, simply amazed, at the election results. Senator Kerry won the debates, didn’t he? Democrats succeeded in signing up millions of new voters, didn’t they? The polls all showed deep unhappiness with the war and malaise about the economy, didn’t they?


So how could Mr. Kerry lose? What went wrong? Here’s what went wrong: Mr. Kerry and the national Democratic Party got trapped on the wrong side of the moral divide.


When it falls to a shrill demagogue like Mr. Moore to define your agenda, you’re in trouble. When you rely on millionaire Hollywood stars and rock artists to hector the American public about their moral responsibilities, you’re not credible. When you fail to understand that more is at stake in a marriage than the personal happiness of the spouses, you are blind to reality. And when you mistake the gross liberal bias of the press for mainstream thinking, you deserve a severe spanking.


Which is just what the voters delivered to Democrats last Tuesday. No, it’s not that President Bush personally won an overwhelming victory. For an incumbent wartime president, it was a relatively slender margin, percentage-wise. But when you pull back and look at the broader canvas, the rebuke to the Michael Moore Democrats was little short of crushing.


The higher turnout hurt the Republicans not a bit – indeed, they seem to have done even better at the turnout game than the Democrats, shattering the illusion that victory for the left is just a matter of getting “the people” to the polls. And while even Republicans told pollsters they had qualms about the war, they and other voters refused to take the risk that freedom’s enemies would interpret a Kerry victory as a sign that America could cowed into cutting and running.


Osama bin Laden’s clumsy effort to intervene in American politics in all likelihood heightened that concern.


But something even broader appears to have been going on. The stunning defeat of Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle and the pickup of four Republican seats in the Senate – the first gain for the incumbent party in a presidential election year since the Roosevelt era – sent a fairly clear message. The voters don’t like Democratic obstructionism any more than they liked Republican obstructionism in the 1990s.


It’s okay for Democrats to probe the qualifications of a president’s selections for judgeships. Indeed, that’s their constitutional obligation. But it’s not okay to refuse to let a president’s nominees even come to a vote solely on grounds they don’t meet a Democratic litmus test. It’s the job of voters to decide where the mainstream lies, and they have now done so.


That the Democrats are in trouble on the all-important values and morals front was even more clearly signaled by the fact that constitutional amendments to ban gay marriage passed in all 11 states, including Oregon and Michigan, both of which Mr. Kerry won, where they were on the ballot.


True, some of these may be struck down as overly broad or because they intrude on private contract rights. But politicians ignore the underlying message at their peril: The American public is in no mood to have radical changes in basic human institutions foisted on it by 4-to-3 decisions of a Massachusetts state court. Gay activists overreached on this issue, placing their entire agenda at risk.


Republicans, of course, now face the formidable task of governing. Second terms are rarely things of beauty. And for Republicans, there is the distinct danger that they themselves will overreach, inviting a severe reaction in the 2006 midterm elections. Americans want leadership that is morally grounded, but they have never shown much taste for leadership that is self-righteous and disrespectful of the opinions of others.


For Democrats, though, it’s back to the drawing boards. We should all wish them well, because a fully competitive electoral system is in America’s best long-term interests. But if you see Michael Moore seated in the ex-presidential box at the next Democratic convention, you’ll know they still haven’t learned.



Mr. Bray is a Detroit News columnist.


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