"Values" and the Democrats: will the moral grandstanding never end?

AuthorWalker, Jesse

Six months after Election Day, campaign '04 feels a bit like that bourbon-fueled night you made out with the clerk in the next cubicle, or the summer you joined that self-improvement group that turned out to be a cult, or the year in junior high when you wore parachute pants everywhere and insisted against all evidence that you could breakdance. Mistakes were made. In retrospect, everyone involved looked a little foolish. The tactful thing to do is to pretend it never happened.

But if you haven't forgotten it completely, I'd like you to think back to that last week before the ballot, when many Democrats honestly believed that the polls were undercounting the "youth vote" and that this invisible demographic was going to put them over the top. Pretend, just as an exercise, that this fantasy really happened, and that a bunch of cell-phone-wielding kids elected John Kerry last November. Imagine that for the last six months the Republicans have been searching their souls and spinning their wheels, trying to find out how they can get those fledgling voters for themselves.

One faction would claim the best way to appeal to the young is to muzzle every prominent Republican with a track record of appealing to the old. Another group would argue that the GOP needs to change itself more deeply: that it has to adopt youthful concerns as its own, just as soon as it figures out what those youthful concerns might be. Yet another group would insist the Republicans are already young and hip, and that the trick is to frame their message so the kids will understand this. They'd propose ads announcing that Karl Rove sends text messages, that Dick Cheney knows some real live lesbians, and that W. may be versed in the use of powders, wink wink; that running huge deficits is risky, just like snowboarding, and that Bush's favorite judges are totally extreme.

But instead of a GOP desperately trying to be hip, Democrats are desperately trying to be square. Half a year after the election, they're still looking for the magic bullet that will win those "values voters" who purportedly cost them the presidency.

Mother Jones ran a cover story in March--March!--declaring that what's "worse than conservatives' pretense of moral superiority is liberals' pretense...

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