The presidential election results bring to mind a twist on a hip T-shirt slogan from a few years back: “It’s a red thing. You wouldn’t understand.”
The red-staters would be right: I can’t understand how George W. Bush won on Nov. 2. I don’t see how — in the face of overwhelming evidence of Bush’s mistakes, missteps and awful policy — a majority of Americans voted to keep him in office another four years.
How could what pollsters called “values” be the top issue for so many voters when Iraq, the economy, the deficit and health care teeter on the brink of disaster?
Why would a red-stater care more about what total strangers do — two men or a pregnant woman, for instance — than about their neighbor losing his job or their son going off to war in Iraq or their sister losing her health insurance? Are so many people really living their lives in the abstract — believing that Bush is “a good guy” full of “confidence” who will “protect us” — while reality tells the rest of us quite a different story?
What’s wrong with these red state people? Are they delusional? Are they easily bamboozled?
Are they…?
At this point, you have to stop. Take a deep breath. Unclench your jaw.
After all, everyone reading this newspaper — the print version — lives in a red state. Bush won Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it now.
I know those of us “blues” in Ohio feel that we let the country’s Kerry supporters down, just barely losing the state to the “reds.” But, as usual, Ohio is a microcosm of the country at large.
Kerry took all the major urban counties except Hamilton, and even then he did better here than Gore did in 2000. Bush cleaned up in Warren, Clermont and Butler counties, winning 70-30, and overall took Ohio by about the same margin as he did nationally.
The state is split — cities vs. suburbs, metro areas vs. small towns and along education, race and class lines. The country is split North vs. South, the coasts vs. the heartland, urban vs. rural and all the same demographic lines.
And yet the split is so even. Bush might have received the most votes ever cast for a Republican candidate, but Kerry got the most Democratic votes ever. Bush has been the target of the most (2004) and the second most (2000) votes ever cast against a presidential winner.
So why doesn’t it feel so close? Why does it seem that the reds and the blues live on different planets?
We blues generally dismiss religious conservatives as morons who somehow have been duped into becoming Bible zombies. They view us as hedonists looking to spread our immorality throughout the country like a cancer.
They think that, if they give us an inch, we’ll turn their sons gay and make their daughters pregnant, then force them to have abortions. We think that, if we’re not ever vigilant, they’ll put guns in every home and a Bush will be president forever.
As last week’s results clearly show, red-staters have the upper hand in the values argument — but only because we’ve allowed them to set the rules for that argument. We’ve let them establish the red/blue split as values vs. no values.
By definition, they’ll say, liberals have no values. And we secretly wonder some times if they’re not right — mostly because, if values is something conservatives have, we don’t want ’em.
Deep down, though, we treasure our values. We believe people should be treated equally regardless of race, religious beliefs and sexual orientation. Women should have the same social and professional status as men and should control their own bodies. Workers should be paid enough of a wage to live a decent life. Government should provide every child a quality education. We should protect the environment for future generations. Those of us better off are obligated to help those less fortunate.
Those are values we should be proud of. I’d stack them up against anyone’s any day.
They’re values that most red-staters would share — much more than the values Bush actually practices: a war launched with faulty evidence used to justify plans in place long before 9/11, a tax policy that favors the rich, deregulation in order to increase corporate profits and a lowering of health and safety standards.
The chasm isn’t as wide as it seems a week after the election. Common ground is more plentiful than you’d think.
Inspiration comes from one of the few bright spots on Nov. 2, the successful campaign to repeal Article 12. With this odious city charter provision gone, Cincinnati will no longer be the only American city to officially refuse to protect gay and lesbian citizens from discrimination.
The repeal won easily on the same day Ohio, Kentucky and a host of other states passed anti-gay marriage constitutional amendments. But for more than a year, a coalition of gays, straights, blacks and whites spoke one-on-one with Cincinnatians about the moral and economic necessity of treating all people equally.
In the face of an avalanche of negative and confusing advertising messages from their opponents, the repealers spoke the truth, carried the argument and won the day.
Blues can do the same. If we value our country and ourselves.
This article appears in Nov 10-16, 2004.