TFM STREAMLINES THE "WHY BUSH WON" DEBATE

Lots of people have opinions on what issues put Bush over the top in last week's election.

The first bit of conventional wisdom was that "moral values" issues, positions held by evangelical types on "guns, God and gays", made the difference on November 2nd.

Then a bunch of other people chimed in, either due to new evidence or just a desire to be contrarian, saying "hey, it was terrorism after all!"

Still others came forward to tout the economy as the kingmaker issue for Bush. Oh come on, they're being silly.

The main camps on this one are the moral camp and the terrorism camp.

So who's right?

Both!

The day after the election, Kevin Drum identified the decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Court that gay marriage was constitutional there as the "most important event" in the 2004 campaign. Before the election he had chosen Kerry's trouncing of Bush in the first debate, but since Bush won anyway, a change was in order.

Identifying that event would put him in the "moral" camp on the issue of what put Bush over the top.

But there has to have been an event that created a synergy between both camps at some point, right? We've heard from some Christian right-ish pundits since the election that many of these voters "don't separate" the issues of Christian faith and fighting terrorism.

Near as I can tell, one event, one public statement in the entire last four years, wraps these two distant issues into a nice little package better than anything else has.

Let us time-travel back to September 13th, 2001. Take it away, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson!

FALWELL: And, I know that I'll hear from them for this. But, throwing God out successfully with the help of the federal court system, throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools. The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way - all of them who have tried to secularize America - I point the finger in their face and say "you helped this happen."

ROBERTSON: Well, I totally concur, and the problem is we have adopted that agenda at the highest levels of our government. And so we're responsible as a free society for what the top people do. And, the top people, of course, is the court system.

Remember that? Those statements, harshly condemned by the left and the center, mildly criticized/distanced-from by the right, were from an episode of The 700 Club taped and aired two days after 9/11. Falwell apologized a couple days later, then went on to call Mohammed "a terrorist" a year later. Consistent, he.

One must wonder if there were just enough people who either made this assumption on their own or took Jerry and Pat's words for gospel (ahem), so as to render themselves wholly incapable of reasonable discussion about the relative merits of the two candidates' ability to combat Al Qaeda.

Perhaps this is also why the Bush administration dubbed this the "War on Terror". It's clear that the real enemy is radical fundamentalist Islam, while "terror" is an abstract concept. You know, like "shock" and "awe".

The reason it's the "war on terror" and not the "war on Islamic fundamentalists" has nothing to do with PC cultural-relativism. It's because labelling our enemy "terror" obscures the fact that we're fighting far-right religious fundamentalists. It obscures the common ground shared by Bob Jones and Mullah Omar, by Jerry Falwell and Osama bin Laden: Opposition to homosexuality, sex before marriage, women's economic/social equality, and so on.

The right didn't have this problem during the Cold War. That was a war against Communism, thus the enemy was atheist and, to say the least, not Adam Smithian. The American left-of-center, while never even remotely close ideologically to the Soviet Union, was the object of Red-baiting and of trumped-up scandal regarding Communism. Clearly the right was very comfortable with that conflict, both at home and abroad.

But now, the tables having turned, and with us being in a long-term conflict with ultraconservative religious extremists, Bush and the right have resorted to rhetorical subterfuge. The two-part strategy employed shortly after 9/11 by Bush and the televangelists was:

1) Bush disassociates the American religious right from the enemy by calling it a "war on terror".
2) Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson re-associate the American left with the enemy through the above-quoted statements.

This was no coincidence. In the aftermath of 9/11, Bush and the American right laid the groundwork for a state of mind that would hard-wire a substantial bloc of American voters to stick with the President and turn out for him on 11/2/04, regardless of any logical, reality-based debate. That groundwork translated into a support for Bush's "values", which were now a near life/death issue for some of the more Falwellist Americans. The importance of these "moral values" issues essentially "trickled down" from there to some strands of opinionated-if-not-informed mainstream Republicans and right-leaners. That's how Bush won.


POSTSCRIPT: On Saturday night, in between games of air hockey at Dublin's bar in Isla Vista, I heard a large blond sorority girl tell her date that she voted for Bush "because Kerry's a weenie!" That could be it too!