Well, we seem to have moved on from the “moral values” phase of election post-mortem, courtesy of folks like David Brooks, E. J. Dionne Jr., Charles Krauthammer, and James Q. Wilson; I think they’ve overstated their case somewhat—moral issues had a great deal of traction this year, and where Bush drew a considerable chunk of his support based on such issues, Kerry botched them, as Terry Eastland and Richard Wolffe point out—but we’re still talking about only 22% of the electorate who put such concerns at the top of their list (and that, of course, doesn’t tell us by how much, or what was second, or how important moral values were for other voters). Dionne’s point is well taken that this presidential election was too complicated to be explained that simply.
Still, it was entertaining to watch the reaction of many liberals to the importance of moral values to this election—Ellen Goodman’s column is one example: they essentially said, “What we have to do is explain that our issues are moral-values issues too—that poverty is a moral-values issue, and opposing the war in Iraq is a moral-values issue, and raising taxes is a moral-values issue,” and so on and so forth. Such an approach fits the Democratic Party’s preferences for simple solutions (Want more revenue? Raise taxes. Want to address poverty? Give poor people money. Want to address international crises? Call the UN.); it’s also remarkably condescending, assuming that folks voted Republican out of ignorance, and that all the Dems need to do is set us straight and we’ll vote donkey. The truth is, as Mark Steyn and David Limbaugh point out, we know those are moral issues, and we think the Democrats are on the wrong side of those, too—and that the Democrats won’t succeed in winning back voters they’ve turned off until they set aside that condescension.
BTW, for a fairer Democratic perspective on this, check out Gary Hart’s column in the New York Times.