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Democrats and the God Gap
Los Angeles Times ^ | November 7, 2004

Posted on 11/07/2004 1:55:26 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife

The transcripts show that John F. Kerry said the right things to connect with religion-minded voters, with his earnest speeches about God's work on Earth and invocations of faith and Scripture. Yet they landed with a thud on a populace conditioned to view liberal Democrats as faithless intellectuals.

No doubt Kerry's stiff New England style didn't help. This is not what religious faith looks like to much of the rest of the country, especially the South.

Yet one candidate's stiffness cannot fully explain the "God gap" that drives people of faith, and those more concerned with moral issues than economic ones, to vote disproportionately Republican. They just don't believe that the Democrats share their values. More than any other factor, this failure cost the Democrats the presidency and four Senate seats on Tuesday.

Democrats are getting free advice from all over. We do not agree with those who say the Democratic Party must embrace moral issues as now defined by conservatives and exploited by Republican strategists. Opposition to gay marriage and abortion rights will always be Republican issues, and the Democrats shouldn't want them.

What the Democrats should do is recast their own issues in moral terms. It shouldn't be hard. Democrats seem oblivious to their platform's moral potency: innocent children suffering because their families can't get health insurance; platoons of young men and women dying in a war that didn't have to be; the pillaging of God's green Earth. Those are "values" issues too, but the Democrats haven't figured out how to frame them that way.

(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial; News/Current Events; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: democrats; dncplaybook; ethics; god; godgap; gop; howtostealanelection; kerrydefeat; morals; religion; religiousleft; republicans
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If you have to explain....
1 posted on 11/07/2004 1:55:27 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
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To: Cincinatus' Wife

Uh huh. Leftists are as leftists spout.


2 posted on 11/07/2004 1:58:16 AM PST by clee1 (Islam is a deadly plague; liberalism is the AIDS virus that prevents us from defending ourselves.)
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To: Cincinatus' Wife
This was not an issue of morality vs securalism.

This was an issue of whose morality, the Lefts, with its emphasis on the social or the Right, with its emphasis on the individual.

This is a war between two very differents view of right and wrong, good and evil, but both views are nevertheless religious in that both believe theirs is the correct moral stance and the other side immoral.

Hillary is a perfect example of the leftist religious morality.

3 posted on 11/07/2004 2:01:31 AM PST by fortheDeclaration
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To: Cincinatus' Wife
The transcripts show that John F. Kerry said the right things to connect with religion-minded voters, with his earnest speeches about God's work on Earth and invocations of faith and Scripture. Yet they landed with a thud on a populace conditioned to view liberal Democrats as faithless intellectuals.

Kerry's smarmy patronizing just didn't sell. He talked the talk but he didn't walk the walk. People saw through him and he was and is a phoney.

4 posted on 11/07/2004 2:14:58 AM PST by texgal (end no-fault divorce laws return DUE PROCESS & EQUAL PROTECTION to ALL citizens))
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To: Cincinatus' Wife
The transcripts show that John F. Kerry said the right things to connect with religion-minded voters, with his earnest speeches about God's work on Earth and invocations of faith and Scripture.

Translation: "Who are you rustic red state rubes gonna believe, anyway -- Kerry's gassy, empty platitudinizing, re: "God's work on Earth"... or his pro-abortion, anti-values Senate record for the last twenty years? What the hell is WRONG with you freaking farmers anyway, f'chrissakes -- ?!?"

< /sarcasm>

5 posted on 11/07/2004 2:20:24 AM PST by KentTrappedInLiberalSeattle (I feel more and more like a revolted Charlton Heston, witnessing ape society for the very first time)
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To: clee1; KentTrappedInLiberalSeattle; fortheDeclaration; texgal

Exactly!


6 posted on 11/07/2004 2:22:49 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
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To: fortheDeclaration

Liberalism IS a religion. Like the jihadis, they dislike christians.


7 posted on 11/07/2004 2:23:01 AM PST by gortklattu (check out thotline dot com)
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To: Cincinatus' Wife
"John F. Kerry said the right things"

FREE CLUE FOR THE LEFTIES: It ain't about what he 'said' during the campaign - it's about what he 'did' for the past thirty-five years.

8 posted on 11/07/2004 2:28:02 AM PST by Ed_in_NJ (I'm in old skivvies and New Jersey, and I approved this message.)
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To: Cincinatus' Wife

---"What the Democrats should do is recast their own issues in moral terms. It shouldn't be hard. Democrats seem oblivious to their platform's moral potency: innocent children suffering because their families can't get health insurance; platoons of young men and women dying in a war that didn't have to be; the pillaging of God's green Earth. Those are "values" issues too, but the Democrats haven't figured out how to frame them that way."---

I can't believe that they are STILL talking about not getting their message out. WE understand the message and WE reject it.


9 posted on 11/07/2004 2:32:21 AM PST by Rocket1968 (Democrats will crash and burn in 2004.)
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To: Cincinatus' Wife
...the pillaging of God's green Earth. Those are "values" issues too...

Okay. I see it now. The new Democrat strategy will be that, since God created everything, everything is a "values" issue.

-PJ

10 posted on 11/07/2004 2:32:37 AM PST by Political Junkie Too (It's still not safe to vote Democrat.)
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To: Rocket1968
I can't believe that they are STILL talking about not getting their message out.

2002, the dims are flabbergasted that the electorate hadn't bought into their message.

2004, the dims can't believe that the electorate didn't buy into their message.

Wonder what their excuse will be in 2006.

11 posted on 11/07/2004 2:40:13 AM PST by woofer
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To: Cincinatus' Wife
Democrats seem oblivious to their platform's moral potency: innocent children suffering because their families can't get health insurance; platoons of young men and women dying in a war that didn't have to be; the pillaging of God's green Earth. Those are "values" issues too, but the Democrats haven't figured out how to frame them that way.

Come again? Seems to me they've been harping on the "morality" of these and other issues since they learned to talk (normal kids start with "Mama" and "Dada"; libs start with "those eeeeeeevil Republicans").

12 posted on 11/07/2004 2:41:16 AM PST by maryz
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To: maryz

Their "morality" requires government intervention and guidance.


13 posted on 11/07/2004 2:44:47 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
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To: Cincinatus' Wife

What the DemonRats don't understand is when you disavow God when you are passing the laws for the land you are going to turn off the people who feel that their faith should guide the path they follow. Look at abortion. A liberal, out-of-touch court somehow saw it as being allowed by the Constitution. That decision has so divided this country and the two parties that there probably is no reconciliation possible. I thought the President hit the nail on the head when asked in the third debate about gay marriage. He believed it should be a constitutional amendment because that put the decision in the hands of the people and not at the whim of some radical court judge. The Rats don't understand that this government is of the people, by the people, for the people and not one person will legislate what will be the law for 300,000,000 people. If they had done it constitutionally on the abortion issue, the divide may not be so great because the people would have made the choice and not a liberal court.


14 posted on 11/07/2004 2:45:53 AM PST by MadAnthony1776
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To: Cincinatus' Wife
Yet they landed with a thud on a populace conditioned to view liberal Democrats as faithless intellectuals.

We know one when we see one. Not to mention a lying hypocrite to boot.

15 posted on 11/07/2004 2:47:31 AM PST by mewzilla
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To: Political Junkie Too
Okay. I see it now. The new Democrat strategy will be that, since God created everything, everything is a "values" issue.

This is the socialist "justice" morality they've been spewing for years.

Web of Creation: Transforming Faith-Based Communities for a sustainable world - As a person of faith, become a part of the movement to transform ourselves and our communities in order to create a just and sustainable world.

16 posted on 11/07/2004 2:47:46 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
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To: Cincinatus' Wife
The transcripts show that John F. Kerry said the right things to connect with religion-minded voters, with his earnest speeches about God's work on Earth and invocations of faith and Scripture. Yet they landed with a thud on a populace conditioned to view liberal Democrats as faithless intellectuals.

It's not about the transcripts.

17 posted on 11/07/2004 2:48:47 AM PST by Jim Noble (FR Iraq policy debate begins 11/3/04. Pass the word.)
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To: gortklattu

...........To appreciate the continuity of communism in the mentality of the left, consider how many recent Hollywood promotions of the industry Reds and how many academic apologies for Stalinist crimes (in fact, the vast majority of recent academic texts on the subject) have been premised on the Machiavellian calculations and Hegelian sophistries I have just described.

Naturally, today's leftists are smart enough to distance themselves from Soviet Communism. But the Soviet dictator Nikita Khrushchev was already a critic of Stalin forty years ago. Did his concessions make him less of a Communist? Or more?

On the other hand, conservative misunderstanding of the left is only in part a product of the left's own deceits. It also reflects conservatives' inability to understand the religious nature of the progressive faith and the power of its redemptive idea. For instance, I'm often asked by conservatives about the continuing role and influence of the Communist Party, since they observe quite correctly the pervasive presence of so many familiar totalitarian ideas in our academic and political culture. Though still around and sometimes influential in the left, the Communist Party has been a minor player for nearly fifty years. How can there be a communist left (small "c" of course) without a Communist Party?

The short answer is that it was not the Communist Party that made the left, but the (small 'c') communist Idea. It is the idea, as old as the Tower of Babel, that humanity can build a highway to Heaven. It is the idea of returning to an Earthly Paradise, a garden of social harmony and justice. It is the idea that inspires Jewish radicals and liberals of a tikkun olam, a healing of the cosmic order. It is the Enlightenment illusion of the perfectibility of man. And it is the siren song of the serpent in Eden: "Eat of this Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and you shall be as God."

The intoxicating vision of a social redemption achieved by Them-this is what creates the left, and makes the believers so self-righteous.

And it did so long before Karl Marx. It is the vision of this redemption that continues to inspire and animate them despite the still-fresh ruins of their Communist dreams.

It is this same idea that is found in the Social Gospel which impressed the youthful Hillary Clinton at the United Methodist Church in Park Ridge, Illinois. She later encountered the same idea in the New Left at Yale and in the Venceremos Brigade in Communist Cuba, and in the writings of the New Leftist who introduced her to the "politics of meaning" even after she had become America's First Lady. It is the idea that drives her comrades in the Children's Defense Fund, the National Organization for Women, the Al Sharpton House of Justice and the other progressive causes which for that reason still look to her as a political leader.

For these self-appointed social redeemers, the goal-"social justice"-is not about rectifying particular injustices, which would be practical and modest, and therefore conservative. Their crusade is about rectifying injustice in the very order of things. "Social Justice" for them is about a world reborn, a world in which prejudice and violence are absent, in which everyone is equal and equally advantaged and without fundamentally conflicting desires. It is a world that could only come into being through a re-structuring of human nature and of society itself. ............


http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a39611fde5615.htm


18 posted on 11/07/2004 2:53:59 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
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To: Cincinatus' Wife
I'm getting so tired of hearing this. Has it occured to anyone in the blue states, where this repeated religious drivel keeps coming from, that GWB was re-elected because:

He's honest

He's doing his best for America

He's taking the fight to our enemies abroad

He's cutting the taxes that strangle us all

Has it occured to any of these liberals who're repeatedly posulating this "god gap" nonsense, that Kerry was none of those things, and just maybe a lot of us godless types want the better life that's possible under President Bush, than the nightmare that was sure to be Kerry's presidency.

I know this is going to hurt the L.A. Times, and New York Times writers to the core, but a lot of us godless types voted GWB back into the oval office, and we're damned glad we did.

Hell, that's news to a lot of people here on freep to, who're just convinced that non-christians are somehow enemies of the state.

19 posted on 11/07/2004 2:54:16 AM PST by Melas
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To: Melas

The left wants to portray Bush supporters as non-thinking religious robots.

It isn't going to fly. It might even make people see the Democratic Party isn't their party anymore.


Despite the best efforts of the msm and a 3 to 1 - 527 ad buy bashing Bush, he still gets 4 more years.


20 posted on 11/07/2004 3:01:54 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
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