Democrats need a twang
So I'm driving to work the other day in Washington (D.C.--very blue), listening to my favorite country music singer, Martina McBride (Tennessee--very red), and suddenly I'm thinking about the election. About Martina the Mom singing "Blessed" about her children; about the Lonestar ballad "My Front Porch Looking In" honoring family; about Toby Keith's "American Soldier." (Oh, and I don't want to die for you / But if dyin's asked of me / I'll bear that cross with an honor, / 'Cause freedom don't come free.)
What does this have to do with the election? Maybe nothing but possibly everything. As journalists and academics and politicians dissect the importance of the so-called values vote, one thing is clear: The Democrats need a little more country in their voice. And this isn't about the red state/blue state divide, which is overrated anyway. It's about authenticity and family and national pride. Everybody shares those values; the Democrats just haven't spent enough time singing about them lately.
Not so far apart. In truth, there isn't a huge values chasm. Consider the much-ballyhooed gay marriage divide. The red-staters aren't homophobes, and the blue-state folks aren't promoting homosexuality. Take it straight from the exit polls: Only 25 percent of voters support gay marriage, with 35 percent for civil unions. Besides, both candidates supported civil rights for gay couples, and neither supported gay marriage. True, George W. Bush supported a constitutional amendment banning it, and John Kerry did not. But then again, Vice President Dick Cheney agreed with Kerry.
Here's the problem: It's become difficult for a Democrat to talk about morality and religion these days. Crazy but true. Why? "It's somehow seen as code for restrictions on personal liberties that the secular wing of the party doesn't want to see," says pollster Andrew Kohut. That's really too bad, because without this conversation the Democrats can't overcome their own bad PR created by the likes of Michael Moore and Whoopi Goldberg. Remember Whoopi's rant last summer at a New York Kerry fundraiser? She thought it was funny to make a sexual pun about the president's surname. Actress Meryl Streep asked "which of the megaton bombs Jesus, our president's personal savior, would have personally dropped on the sleeping families of Baghdad." Then Kerry told the crowd that "every single performer" had "conveyed to you the heart and soul of our country."
Not my country. Time to wake up: When did the party of the little guy, the middle class, and working moms become the party of the intelligentsia, of Hollywood moguls, of left-wing billionaires? "Mr. and Mrs. Middle America said those aren't my values," says one top GOP presidential adviser. And don't pin it on the far right or evangelicals. As presidential adviser Karl Rove says, "This is a broader and more subtle issue" than it first appears. While one fifth of voters cited "moral values" as key to their ballots, there's no way to compare it with 2000 since that question wasn't offered then. So who are these people? Maybe they're us. Democrats and Republicans.
They're not the folks arguing every night on cable TV or the authors of the polemics that (sadly) top the nation's bestseller lists. The mass media may be polarized, but the nation is not. At a post-election Democratic therapy session last week, former Bill Clinton adviser Doug Sosnik offered this sage advice: "The leadership of our party has a cultural disconnect. . . . I don't know how many politicians in town that are leaders of our party voluntarily go to Applebee's . . . . You look at the swing voters out there, what their sporting events are, the music they listen to, the celebrities, the television programs, it's just not what the East Coast leadership [watches] . . . we've got to be more like them." At least don't look down on them.
Or buy a country music CD. Like Tim McGraw's new hit "Live Like You Were Dying," in which he sings, I finally read the Good Book / And I took a good long hard look / At what I'd do if I could do it all again. Democrats, sing along. No lip-syncing allowed.
This story appears in the November 22, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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