On 'Moral Values,' It's Blue in a Landslide

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November 14, 2004

FRANK RICH

On 'Moral Values,' It's Blue in a Landslide

 

FAREWELL to Swift boats and " Shove it!, " to Osama's tape and Saddam's

missing weapons, to " security moms " and outsourced dads. They've all

been sent to history's dustbin faster than Ralph Nader memorabilia was

dumped on eBay. In their stead stands a single ambiguous phrase coined

by an anonymous exit pollster: " Moral values. " By near universal

agreement the morning after, these two words tell the entire story of

the election: it's the culture, stupid.

 

" It really is Michael Moore versus Mel Gibson, " said Newt Gingrich. To

Jon Stewart, Nov. 2 was the red states' revenge on " Will & Grace. "

William Safire, speaking on " Meet the Press, " called the Janet Jackson

fracas " the social-political event of the past year. " Karl Rove was of

the same mind: " I think it's people who are concerned about the

coarseness of our culture, about what they see on the television sets,

what they see in the movies ... "

 

And let's not even get started on the two most dreaded words in

American comedy, regardless of your party affiliation: Whoopi Goldberg.

 

There's only one problem with the storyline proclaiming that the

country swung to the right on cultural issues in 2004. Like so many

other narratives that immediately calcify into our 24/7 media's

conventional wisdom, it is fiction. Everything about the election

results - and about American culture itself - confirms an inescapable

reality: John Kerry's defeat notwithstanding, it's blue America, not

red, that is inexorably winning the culture war, and by a landslide.

Kerry voters who have been flagellating themselves since Election Day

with a vengeance worthy of " The Passion of the Christ " should wake up

and smell the Chardonnay.

 

The blue ascendancy is nearly as strong among Republicans as it is

among Democrats. Those whose " moral values " are invested in cultural

heroes like the accused loofah fetishist Bill O'Reilly and the

self-gratifying drug consumer Rush Limbaugh are surely joking when

they turn apoplectic over MTV. William Bennett's name is now as

synonymous with Las Vegas as silicone. The Democrats' Ashton Kutcher

is trumped by the Republicans' Britney Spears. Excess and vulgarity,

as always, enjoy a vast, bipartisan constituency, and in a democracy

no political party will ever stamp them out.

 

If anyone is laughing all the way to the bank this election year, it

must be the undisputed king of the red cultural elite, Rupert Murdoch.

Fox News is a rising profit center within his News Corporation, and

each red-state dollar that it makes can be plowed back into the rest

of Fox's very blue entertainment portfolio. The Murdoch cultural

stable includes recent books like Jenna Jameson's " How to Make Love

Like a Porn Star " and the Vivid Girls' " How to Have a XXX Sex Life, "

which have both been synergistically, even joyously, promoted on Fox

News by willing hosts like Rita Cosby and, needless to say, Mr.

O'Reilly. There are " real fun parts and exciting parts, " said Ms.

Cosby to Ms. Jameson on Fox News's " Big Story Weekend, " an encounter

broadcast on Saturday at 9 p.m., assuring its maximum exposure to

unsupervised kids.

 

Almost unnoticed in the final weeks of the campaign was the record

government indecency fine levied against another prime-time Fox

television product, " Married by America. " The $1.2 million bill, a

mere bagatelle to Murdoch stockholders, was more than twice the

punishment inflicted on Viacom for Janet Jackson's " wardrobe

malfunction. " According to the F.C.C. complaint, one episode in this

heterosexual marriage-promoting reality show included scenes in which

" partygoers lick whipped cream from strippers' bodies, " and two female

strippers " playfully spank " a man on all fours in his underwear.

" Married by America " is gone now, but Fox remains the go-to network

for Paris Hilton ( " The Simple Life " ) and wife-swapping ( " Trading

Spouses: Meet Your New Mommy " ).

 

None of this has prompted an uprising from the red-state Fox News

loyalists supposedly so preoccupied with " moral values. " They all

gladly contribute fungible dollars to Fox culture by boosting their

fair-and-balanced channel's rise in the ratings. Some of these red

staters may want to make love like porn stars besides. (Not that

there's anything wrong with that.) An ABC News poll two weeks before

the election found that more Republicans than Democrats enjoy sex " a

great deal. " The Democrats' new hero, Illinois Senator-elect Barack

Obama, was assured victory once his original, ostentatiously pious

Republican opponent, Jack Ryan, dropped out of the race rather than

defend his taste for " avant-garde " sex clubs.

 

The 22 percent of voters who told pollsters that " moral values " were

their top election issue - 79 percent of whom voted for Bush-Cheney -

corresponds almost exactly to the number of voters (23 percent) who

describe themselves as born-again or evangelical Christians. They are

entitled to their culture, too, and their own entertainment industry.

And their own show-biz scandals. The Los Angeles Times reported this

summer that Paul Crouch, the evangelist who founded the largest

Christian network, Trinity Broadcasting Network, vehemently denied a

former employee's accusation that the two had had a homosexual

encounter - though not before paying the employee a $425,000

settlement. Not so incidentally, Trinity joined Gary Bauer and Fox

News as prime movers in " Redeem the Vote, " the Christian-rock

alternative to MTV's " Rock the Vote. "

 

But the distance between this hard-core red culture and the majority

blue culture is perhaps best captured by Tom Coburn, the newly elected

Republican senator from Oklahoma, lately famous for discovering

" rampant " lesbianism in that state's schools. As a congressman in

1997, Mr. Coburn attacked NBC for encouraging " irresponsible sexual

behavior " and taking " network TV to an all-time low with full frontal

nudity, violence and profanity being shown in our homes. " The

broadcast that prompted his outrage on behalf of " parents and

decent-minded individuals everywhere " was the network's prime-time

showing of Steven Spielberg's " Schindler's List. "

 

It's in the G.O.P.'s interest to pander to this far-right constituency

- votes are votes - but you can be certain that a party joined at the

hip to much of corporate America, Mr. Murdoch included, will take no

action to curtail the blue culture these voters deplore. As Marshall

Wittman, an independent-minded former associate of both Ralph Reed and

John McCain, wrote before the election, " The only things the religious

conservatives get are largely symbolic votes on proposals guaranteed

to fail, such as the gay marriage constitutional amendment. " That

amendment has never had a prayer of rounding up the two-thirds

majority needed for passage and still doesn't.

 

Mr. Wittman echoes Thomas Frank, the author of " What's the Matter With

Kansas?, " by common consent the year's most prescient political book.

" Values, " Mr. Frank writes, " always take a backseat to the needs of

money once the elections are won. " Under this perennial " trick, " as he

calls it, Republican politicians promise to stop abortion and force

the culture industry " to clean up its act " - until the votes are

counted. Then they return to their higher priorities, like cutting

capital gains and estate taxes. Mr. Murdoch and his fellow cultural

barons - from Sumner Redstone, the Bush-endorsing C.E.O. of Viacom, to

Richard Parsons, the Republican C.E.O. of Time Warner, to Jeffrey

Immelt, the Bush-contributing C.E.O. of G.E. (NBC Universal) - are

about to be rewarded not just with more tax breaks but also with

deregulatory goodies increasing their power to market salacious

entertainment. It's they, not Susan Sarandon and Bruce Springsteen,

who actually set the cultural agenda Gary Bauer and company say they

despise.

 

But it's not only the G.O.P.'s fealty to its financial backers that is

predictive of how little cultural bang the " values " voters will get

for their Bush-Cheney votes. At 78 percent, the nonvalues voters have

far more votes than they do, and both parties will cater to that

overwhelming majority's blue tastes first and last. Their mandate is

clear: The same poll that clocked " moral values " partisans at 22

percent of the electorate found that nearly three times as many

Americans approve of some form of legal status for gay couples,

whether civil unions (35 percent) or marriage (27 percent). Do the

math and you'll find that the poll also shows that for all the

G.O.P.'s efforts to court Jews, the total number of Jewish Republican

voters in 2004, while up from 2000, was still some 200,000 less than

the number of gay Republican voters.

 

When Robert Novak writes after the election that " the anti-abortion,

anti-gay marriage, socially conservative agenda is ascendant, and the

G.O.P. will not abandon it anytime soon, " you have to wonder what drug

he is on. The abandonment began at the convention. Sam Brownback, the

Kansas senator who champions the religious right, was locked away in

an off-camera rally across town from Madison Square Garden. Prime time

was bestowed upon the three biggest stars in post-Bush Republican

politics: Rudy Giuliani, John McCain and Arnold Schwarzenegger. All

are supporters of gay rights and opponents of the same-sex marriage

constitutional amendment. Only Mr. McCain calls himself pro-life, and

he's never made abortion a cause. None of the three support the Bush

administration position on stem-cell research. When the No. 1 " moral

values " movie star, Mel Gibson, condemned the Schwarzenegger-endorsed

California ballot initiative expanding and financing stem-cell

research, the governor and voters crushed him like a girlie-man. The

measure carried by 59 percent, which is consistent with national

polling on the issue.

 

If the Republican party's next round of leaders are all cool with blue

culture, why should Democrats run after the red? Received Washington

wisdom has it that the only Democrat who will ever be able to win a

national election must be a cross between Gomer Pyle and Billy Sunday

- a Scripture-quoting Sun Belt exurbanite whose loyalty to Nascar does

not extend to Dale Earnhardt Jr., who was fined last month for saying

a four-letter word on television.

 

According to this argument, the values voters the Democrats must

pander to are people like Cary and Tara Leslie, archetypal Ohio

evangelical " Bush votes come to life " apotheosized by The Washington

Post right after Election Day. The Leslies swear by " moral absolutes, "

support a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage and mostly watch Fox

News. Mr. Leslie has also watched his income drop from $55,000 to

$35,000 since 2001, forcing himself, his wife and his three young

children into the ranks of what he calls the " working poor. " Maybe by

2008 some Democrat will figure out how to persuade him that it might

be a higher moral value to worry about the future of his own family

than some gay family he hasn't even met.

 

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