Values and Bush’s victory

By Newt Gingrich
November 7, 2004

Thankfully, the 2004 election is over. Until Tuesday, the conventional wisdom had been that the country is deeply divided. But what we have learned from Tuesday’s results is not so much that Americans themselves are divided but rather that a majority of Americans are deeply estranged from the establishment left, which is the national mainstream media, the liberal elite, the trial lawyers, Hollywood, the unions, and left-wing ethnic politicians, who collectively make the most noise.

Let’s first consider the facts: More voters went to the polls on Tuesday than in any election in American history. President Bush won 51 percent of those voters, breaking Ronald Reagan’s record for most votes received and becoming the first presidential candidate to receive more than 50 percent of the vote since his father in 1988. Bush won the majority of counties in every state except for each of the five New England states. And Bush was the first president since Franklin Roosevelt in 1936 to increase his party’s majorities in Congress while running for re-election.

Given these facts, President Bush and his campaign team have achieved a remarkable and historic victory.

This accomplishment is even more historic considering that during the campaign our military forces were taking casualties in Iraq, our economy was underperforming, and the price of oil was at record levels. Compounding these conditions exponentially was the media’s willingness to continually batter the president with negative stories, many of which turned out to be unfounded and in one notable case an outright falsehood.

While there remains a temporary narrow partisan division among Americans, there has never been an overriding values division. On a wide number of issues Americans overwhelmingly favor center-right values and reject the values of the establishment left, including the mainstream media, Hollywood and the liberal left. Insulated from most Americans, the establishment left has managed to come across as having completely lost touch with an America that is trying to instill in their children the moral values that the establishment left has rejected.

Kerry solidified this perception in early July when he appeared at a fund raiser in New York with Hollywood glitterati, music stars, and the high-fashion “in” crowd. During the event, celebrity after celebrity degraded themselves by calling the president a “liar” and a “cheap thug” among other pejoratives. After the barrage of slanderous comments, both John Kerry and John Edwards embraced the performers and sang “This Land Is Your Land.” Then Kerry told the crowd that these people represented “the heart and soul of America.” It is still hard to determine if that was a tactical mistake or a complete misunderstanding of the heart and soul of most of the American people.

Celebrities from Cher to Ben Affleck to Barbra Streisand were notably hostile toward the president. Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle, who closely aligned himself with the Hollywood left, was a casualty of the election. Voters in South Dakota determined that he had more in common with Michael Moore, who came to personify the worst of the Hollywood left, than he did with rural farmers.

Also not unnoticed by voters was left-wing billionaire George Soros (described by Lyndon Johnson’s secretary of Health and Human Services as “The Daddy Warbucks” of drug legalization) who gave more than $15 million to at least 19 drug legalization initiatives. Soros pledged a similar amount ($15.5 million) to beat George W. Bush. One 527 group he was supporting hired convicted criminals including burglars, a murderer and a rapist to go door to door to register voters for Kerry.

Julian Bond of the NAACP led a vicious attack against the president, because he knows that if he ever allowed his core constituency group to engage in a debate over values, he would lose his members to the Republican Party in droves and also lose his power. The great opportunity for the GOP is to break into the African-American community which, on conservative values, is more conservative than the Republican Party. One area of strong agreement the Republican Party has with African-Americans is defending traditional marriage.

The Massachusetts Supreme Court decided to allow gay marriages and subsequent officials in states began illegally redefining marriage by marrying same-sex couples. Americans who believe in traditional marriage felt that the courts had gone too far. In response, 11 states put a ban on gay marriage on their ballot. The bans, which were viewed as a defense of marriage and not as an attack on homosexuals, passed in all 11 states. The closest margin of victory was not close – 57 percent in Oregon.

Examples of the establishment left’s disconnect with the American people does not stop with marriage. A work requirement for welfare has the support of 87 percent of Americans while John Kerry and the Senate Democrats blocked it for three years. Americans believe government should help faith-based initiatives help the poor by a 72 percent margin. Kerry and the Democrats were with the 26 percent. More than 84 percent of Americans believe that a violent attack of a pregnant woman where the baby is killed should result in a prosecution for the killing of the baby. Kerry voted against it. While 78 percent of Americans agree that children should be allowed to pray at school, Kerry was on the opposite side.

The continued overwhelming bias of the national mainstream media (amounting to a culture of the left which simply cannot imagine any other value set being legitimate) and the deliberate deception and denial of the Democratic ticket allowed the myth of a narrowly divided country to survive. The Democrats, who cast their lot with the liberal left, knew that they could not win a clear choice election so they began with the help of the media to clutter the campaign with trivia.

Instead of reporting Kerry’s well-documented liberal positions during the campaign, the national mainstream media joined Hollywood and the liberal left by speaking for the Democratic Party.

If the media had done its job and accurately portrayed the remarkably wide differences in ideology and in the values of the two coalitions and defined the choice for the voter, the Republicans would have won the argument and the election even more decisively. But even with the media bias, Kerry could not overcome his own record because his party’s alliance with the left was too pervasive. The majority of voters knew that it would not have been rational for a country at war and in relative economic prosperity to fire the president and replace him with a northeastern liberal.

A cruel irony and just punishment for the establishment left was indeed, once again, the early exit polls. I happened to be with a group of national political reporters when one distinguished media personality announced the now famously discredited early exit polls. The mood among this elite media group was giddy at the prospect of a Kerry administration. Later that same day a Democratic political pundit remarked to me that she would try not to gloat “too much.” As we now know, those five hours of hope for them turned into confusion as the sobering political reality became clear that the country was going to re-elect the president by an overwhelming margin.

On a tactical level, the Democrats had the best voter turnout operation in their history. However, the Republicans had an even better get out the vote effort and simply outperformed the Democrats on the ground.

Americans, not divided on where they want to go, have now decided who will get them there. Unfortunately, the small minority of the Democratic Party which is not likely to accept the results is also the most vocal. The Democratic Party would do well to dump them.

Gingrich, a former speaker of the House, is a senior scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the founder of the Center for Health Transformation. He is also the author of the soon to be released book “Winning the Future: A 21st Century Contract with America” (Regnery).

This morning, reading the papers over my cup of joe I realized the way I approach an article has completely changed. It used to be that after reading a Newt Gingrich article, my only reaction was: “what an out of touch loony.”

Now, frighteningly, I realize just how right he is. And I try to understand his position. I mean, look at the map above – it is much more telling than all these maps floating around of The United States of Canada versus the Confederacy.

What it shows is that it’s not red states versus blue states, but (mostly) cities versus towns. (which is why I quoted Richard Florida last month)

Now obviously, I would argue against a lot of points that Gingrich makes and the evidence he relies on to make them, but that’s not what I’m talking about. We all need to realize that Gingrich’s words reverberate throughout most of rural America and we need to take that into consideration when defining the progressive movement. Now more than ever, we need to understand the other side.