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Nation that elected Bill Clinton is not on verge of theocracy

by Frank Cagle

Get a grip. Some doom and gloom among Democrats about the outcome of the presidential election is to be expected and completely understandable. But the notion that the Democrats are now a minority party unless they abandon core principles, or that America is moving to a theocracy, is just over the top.

Are we to believe that the country that elected Bill Clinton to the first back-to-back terms for a Democrat since FDR has suddenly, with the re-election of George Bush, become one large congregation of super-patriot evangelical Christians?

You remember Clinton: The pro-choice draft-dodging guy that smoked marijuana but didn’t inhale? The exemplar of Southern Baptist probity in his personal life? Clinton, you remember, carried Tennessee twice. Tennessee elected a pro-choice Democrat as governor as recently as 2002. (Tennesseans didn’t vote for Al Gore because he didn’t campaign here or ask them, and because he’s a prick.)

Liberal columnists can put forth the president of Bob Jones University or the Rev. James Dobson as representative of all the people who voted for Bush. Republicans could also put forward Noam Chomsky and Susan Sonntag. Or Michael Moore and Whoopi Goldberg. So what? Each party has its collection of supporters that represent minority views, extreme views or are just unpleasant characters.

It was a very close election and a few points either way in a small number of states would have elected Sen. John Kerry. But when you nominate a Massachusetts liberal, you lose some points. You can forget the South, to start. When you nominate a man who gave testimony before Congress that Vietnam veterans were baby-killing rapists, you lose a few points. (How many veterans voted?) How many points did “I voted for it before I voted against it” cost?

What if Kerry had picked a popular Ohio Democrat as his vice-president instead of a trial lawyer who couldn’t deliver his home state? What if he had picked Dick Gephardt, who would have brought along Missouri and been very helpful in Ohio?

Clinton had James Carville and Paul Begala. Kerry didn’t have anybody of that caliber. Carville is from Louisiana, Begala from Texas. Kerry was surrounded by his Massachusetts cronies and people who had worked for Sen. Ted Kennedy. Are these people able to speak to Red State America in the way that Carville or Karl Rove can? Clinton and Carville did not run from Washington or Massachusetts, they ran from Arkansas. Bush ran from Texas. Who had the better ear, Bush and Clinton or Kerry?

Isn’t it more reasonable to conclude that it was Kerry the candidate rather than a jihad of conservative Christians that allowed Bush to win?

The Republican Party may appear to be a monolithic movement in the ascendancy. You can look at the House and Senate and the presidential election and make that case. But it is also true that the Republican Party may be on the verge of splintering. The party held together for this election because of the war and because Kerry was just too far for many Republicans to go.

But if liberal Democrats find the prospect of a church-state merger troubling, imagine the feelings of libertarian, fiscal conservatives who tend to vote Republican. A huge percentage of Republican voters from the old Reagan coalition would have deserted this president if they had had any place to go. Bush’s brand of big government conservatism and $450 billion deficits is in the tradition of President Lyndon Johnson.

The Republicans may assume that they can continue to run up record deficits and pay lip service to “morality issues” and stay in power. They will be wrong. It was the fiscal conservatives who deserted the first President Bush, voting for Ross Perot, and gave Clinton his victory. Young Bush can thank his God that there wasn’t a Perot around for this election.

All of this punditry about the Republican theocracy will be funny to read should the Republicans nominate Rudy Giuliani in 2008. Giuliani is pro-choice and went through a very public divorce while mayor of New York. But he was a definite hit at the Republican convention, a hall made up of the party’s hardcore activists.

This election did not represent a new alignment. It did not mean that Republicans are the majority party or that the Democrats are a minority. It probably means that people were uncomfortable changing leaders in the midst of a war. For that and other reasons, more of the growing group of independents decided not to join John Kerry’s party.

Frank Cagle is a political analyst and the host of Sound Off on WIVK FM107.7, WNOX AM990, FM99.1 and FM99.3 each Sunday 8-9:30 a.m. The program is pre-empted this week by Sports Sound Off, coverage of the Vols versus Vanderbilt football game.

November 18, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 47 © 2004 Metro Pulse