Posted on 11/12/2004 12:40:48 PM PST by An Old Marine
In 1994, when the Gingrich revolution swept Republicans into power, ending 40 years of Democratic hegemony in the House, the mainstream press needed to account for this inversion of the Perfect Order of Things. A myth was born. Explained the USA Today headline: "ANGRY WHITE MEN: Their votes turn the tide for GOP."
Overnight, the revolution of the Angry White Male became conventional wisdom. In the 10 years before the 1994 election there were 56 mentions of angry white men in the media, according to LexisNexis. In the next seven months there were more than 1,400.
....
Ten years and another stunning Democratic defeat later, and liberals are at it again. The Angry White Male has been transmuted into the Bigoted Christian Redneck.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
It's probably equally important that evangelicals remember the Gingrich meltdown after 1994. There was a whole lot of media noise suggesting that Gingrich as Speaker in a Congress controlled by the Republicans had become the "alternate President" and was really the most powerful man in America, etc. He started believing his own press clippings. And the fall was hard.
IMO we need to avoid assumptions. Especially that the fragile conservative voter coalition that gave us this election is founded on rock rather than sand. Now that the voting is done, everyone is saying that their issues are where the political capital should be spent, rather than on other folks' issues. The honeymoon appears to be ending quickly.
The honeymoon ended about 2 days after bush was reelected. He won because of the evangelical/social conservative vote, and promptly announced that his priorities were tax reform and social security reform. He had at least a mandate lite...but not one unequivicol word about ending abortion or a marriage amendment. It's the dog that didn't bark.
There is no reason to believe that they will show up like that ever again either.
I believe you are right, but it's a case of half-a-loaf. Would we rather be trying to cope with Kerry's agenda? I think not.
I think this article is excellent
I think this article is excellent
"Moral Values" Were Last On Voters' Minds
November 12, 2004
http://www.rushlimbaugh.com
Listen to Rush…
(...cite Krauthammer's column and polls dismissing the anti-gay white male myth)
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
This whole business of "moral values." Now, I told you people when this happened that that was cited as the #1 most important issue on these dubious and questionable exit polls as the reason people voted the way they did.
Moral values: #1 reason. Turns out, folks, that this is just part of the same old strategy used by the left in order to spin their loss in such a way that they maintain a moral and elitist superiority.
This whole moral values question is the reason, the primary reason people voted the way they did on Election Day. It turns out to have been something essentially planted by the press. When you ask voters to list their priorities, it was the war and economy. Let me read through this: (AP:)
"Whether voters named 'moral values' their key issue depended in part on whether that subject was on a list of choices provided by pollsters, according to a Pew Research Center analysis released Thursday. When 'moral values' was included in poll questions, it was named more often than any other issue. When voters were just asked to name the issue most important in their vote for president -- without being given a list -- moral values trailed the Iraq war and the economy, according to the Pew survey. 'The advantage of the open-ended question is it tells you what's at the top of mind for voters -- what they're thinking,' said Cliff Zukin, a veteran pollster and professor of public policy at Rutgers University. 'Much too much has been made of the moral values answer.'" Because it was a multiple choice. However, that doesn't even begin to scratch the surface as to why this happened.
[]
[] Charles Krauthammer has dug deep, and he starts out by saying, you know, in 1994, how did the left spin that loss? They said that Newt Gingrich and others were leading a band of "angry white men." Remember that? Back in '94 we were angry white guys. There's always some variation of the southerner is a hick white racist, bigot, homophobe in what these liberal excuses for their defeats are.
But nevertheless, the myth was born. "Angry White Men: Their votes turned the tide for the GOP." That was an actual USA Today headline. So "Overnight," according to Krauthammer, "the revolution of the Angry White Male became conventional wisdom. In the 10 years before the 1994 election, there were 53 Nexis mentions of angry white men in the media. In the next seven months there were more than 1,400."
Classic example of how the media creates a myth and a template and then it feeds on itself.
Krauthammer writes: "At the time, I looked into this story line -- and found not a scintilla of evidence to support the claim.
Nonetheless, it was a necessary invention, a way for the liberal elite to delegitimize a conservative victory.
And even better, a way to assuage their moral vanity: You never lose because your ideas are sclerotic or your positions retrograde, but because your opponent appealed to the baser instincts of mankind." And that's exactly the pattern that's being created today.
"'Ten years and another stunning Democratic defeat later, and liberals are at it again.
The Angry White Male has been transmuted into the Bigoted Christian Redneck.
In the post-election analyses, the liberal elite, led by the holy trinity of the New York Times -- Krugman, Friedman, and Dowd -- just about lost its mind denouncing the return of medieval primitivism. As usual, Maureen Dowd achieved the highest level of hysteria, cursing the Republicans for pandering to 'isolationism, nativism, chauvinism, puritanism and religious fanaticism' in their unfailing drive to 'summon our nasty devils.'
"Whence comes this fable? With President Bush increasing his share of the vote among Hispanics, Jews, women (especially married women), Catholics, seniors and even African-Americans, on what does this victory-of-the-homophobic-evangelical rest?
Its origins lie in a single question in the Election Day exit poll.
The urban myth grew around the fact that 'moral values' ranked highest in the answer to Question J: 'Which ONE issue mattered most in deciding how you voted for president?'
It is a thin reed upon which to base a General Theory of the '04 Election. In fact, it is no reed at all.
The way the question was set up, moral values was sure to be ranked disproportionately high. Why? Because it was a multiple-choice question and moral values cover a group of issues, while all the other choices were individual issues. Chop up the alternatives finely enough, and moral values is sure to get a bare plurality over the others."
Here are the choices on this exit poll ballot, and the question: Which one issue mattered most in deciding how you voted for president? Education, single issue. Taxes, single issue. Healthcare, single issue. Iraq, in the minds of the pollsters, single issue. Terrorism, single issue. The economy and jobs, single issue. Moral values.
"'Moral values' encompasses abortion, gay marriage, Hollywood's influence, the general coarsening of the culture, and, for some, the morality of pre-emptive war.
The way to logically pit this class of issues against the others would be to pit it against other classes..." So you're going to say: Look at the choices moral values, then you would have "'war issues' or 'foreign policy issues' (Iraq plus terrorism) and 'economic issues' (jobs, taxes, health care, etc). If you pit group against group, moral values comes in dead last."
War issues were at 34% in this exit poll. That's Iraq 15% and terrorism 19%. You get 34%. Economic issues variously described come in at 33 percent.
[]
So what are the economic issues? Well, economy and jobs is 20%. Healthcare is 8% and taxes are 5%, and so you add all those up to equate to moral values, and what you have here, moral values at 22%, economic issues at 33%, and war issues at 34%.
And when you look at the pre-election polls, what did come in #1 on everybody's mind when they were asked this question before the election? The war on terror and Iraq, #1 concerns, right?
Why did Kerry spend the whole last week trying to talk about it? That was #1 on everybody's poll issue.
Here comes the exit poll and all of a sudden we're told that the #1 issue was moral values?
I was scratching my head over this. This wasn't even a part of the campaign. It really wasn't a part of the campaign. What happened was the president lived it. The president set a great example, but he wasn't out there spinning or pontificating about this, I mean, regularly and continuously. So the real ranking here would be war issues 34, moral issues at 22, and economic issues 33.
So moral issues would actually finish last in this exit poll, if it were done fairly and accurately.
"And we know," Krauthammer says, "that this is the real ranking. After all, the [] exit poll is just a single poll. We had dozens of polls in the run-up to the election that showed that the chief concerns were the war on terror, the war in Iraq and the economy."
Ah, yes. But the fallback is then to attribute Bush's victory to the gay marriage referendums that pushed Bush over the top, particularly in Ohio." This also helps the liberals keep up their opposition to the war on terror and the war in Iraq by saying, "It wasn't even #1 on people's minds. It was moral issues."
Then they run around trashing people who are moral and make big jobs about hayseed, hick Christians in the South, all the while stepping up their opposition to the war on terror because it didn't finish #1 in this poll.
As Krauthammer says: "This is more nonsense.
George Bush increased his vote in 2004 over 2000 by an average of 3.1 percent nationwide.
In Ohio the increase was 1 percent -- less than a third of the national average. In the 11 states in which the gay marriage referendums were held, Bush increased his vote by less than he did in the 39 states that did not have the referendum. The great anti-gay surge was pure fiction." The great anti-gay surge, pure fiction created by the left to say, "See? We are morally superior to these hick, hayseed, Christian gun rack toting people in the South and in the red states."
This as Krauthammer concludes: "This does not deter the myth of the Bigoted Christian Redneck from dominating the thinking of liberals, and from infecting the blue-state media.
They need their moral superiority like oxygen, and cannot have it cut off by mere facts. And so once again they angrily claim the moral high ground, while standing in the ruins of yet another humiliating electoral defeat."
They cannot even be honest about why they lost.
They have to lie to themselves about why they lost in order to still feel superior to everybody else.
END TRANSCRIPT
Read the Articles...
(AP: Top concern for voters may depend on question)
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0411120323nov12,1,3166377.story?coll=chi-newsnationworld-hed
(Townhall: The myth of the bigoted Christian redneck - Charles Krauthammer)
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/charleskrauthammer/ck20041112.shtml
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