Tuesday, January 13, 2004, 12:00 a.m. Pacific
Democrats try to forge a new moral majority
CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa; Rep. Richard A. Gephardt is the bread-and-butter candidate who talks about lost jobs and trade. But in the middle of his stump speech at a packed rally in the public library here last Friday, a sermon broke out.
Health coverage, he said, is not about economics. "It's a moral issue," he insisted. "It is immoral for people not to be covered by health insurance." And he closed by riffing with a preacher's rhythm on the refrain "We're all tied together" to evangelize about mutual responsibilities and social obligations.
Gephardt is not alone in explicitly using the m-word. In the union halls, veterans' posts and civic centers across Iowa, Democratic presidential candidates stumping for next week's caucuses have lost their allergy to invoking moral language to talk about public policy.
Not long ago, a politician who used the word "moral" was about to talk about "permissiveness" and "cultural decline." But the new "moral majority" being forged on the campaign trail is built on a yearning for community and a promise of social justice.
At a rally in Altoona on Sunday, Sen. John Edwards, an underdog who is rising in the polls, spoke of the nation's obligation to "35 million Americans who are living in poverty."
"This is not about economic issues," he insisted. "This is about right and wrong." Reducing poverty, Edwards said, is "a moral responsibility."
The day before, at a convention center in Dubuque overlooking a frozen Mississippi River, Sen. John Kerry, who has also gained ground, transformed the fiscal into the spiritual. "We don't just have a broken budget in the United States of America, we have a broken value system," he said to loud cheers. "The American people can't just have an economy they work for. They need an economy that works for them."
Howard Dean's recent forays into religious talk went down with a thud. But there's nothing contrived about what many of his supporters see as the most moving part of his stump speech, a reverie on the best of the 1960s; the civil-rights movement and the nation's commitment to end poverty.
"What we've lost is our sense of community," Dean told an overflow crowd on Saturday in the chapel at the University of Dubuque, "and the idea that we're all in this together." The loss of community, Dean said, was the most important issue in the election and Democrats had "nothing to be ashamed of" in their commitments to easing suffering and reducing inequality.
It's common to describe an America divided into red and blue, the Bush states and the Gore states, the Bush lovers and the Bush haters. The split is often described in moral terms; religion, gay rights and abortion.
It's still true that a candidate who announces support for abortion rights and gay rights will get cheers from Democratic crowds. But judging by what the candidates are saying and the response they're getting at one event after another, the red/blue divide that matters this year is a different one. It pits a stark individualism against community.
Gephardt is direct about this. "I think Bush believes we're all separated, isolated individuals," he says. In Gephardt's alternative world, Americans remember that when too many are jobless, merchants will have no one to sell to and that children who grow up in poverty are more likely to turn to crime. How can we ignore our obligation to help others when all of us; at this point, Gephardt tells the story of his own rise from poverty; received so much help along the way?
Edwards offers a similar critique of Bush in a stump-speech litany about a nation divided into two: "two tax systems," "two health care systems," "two education systems," "two governments"; one for the "powerful" and the "privileged," the other for "the rest of us."
That Democrats are now willing to talk about morality is taken as a victory by Sen. Joe Lieberman, who has been unapologetically public about his religious commitments.
"I'm very pleased by it," said Lieberman, who is not competing in Iowa but was in Des Moines Sunday night for a debate. "If we remain silent on this subject, we will lose a bond with the American people that the Republicans will exploit. If we just get programmatic and bureaucratic...we're not using a language people use every day."
A century ago, progressive Christians developed what became known as "the Social Gospel" to address the inequities of an industrializing America. This year's primary campaign has called forth a new Social Gospel; nonsectarian and less explicitly religious, but no less important.
E.J. Dionne's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is postchat@aol.com