The State of the Union
The exit polls seem to indicate that many people (even a majority) that voted for Bush did so because of social issues. While I’m sure there are those that support his view of the war in Iraq, and the greater threat of terrorism, it’s arguable that those issues were not responsible for the increased turnout. Rather, it appears that the culture war, often dismissed by those who wage it most fiercely, is alive in America.
Thomas Friedman of the New York Times believes that we disagree on more than simply what America should be doing (the war, economy, etc.), but also on the very definition of our nation.
Is it a country that does not intrude into people’s sexual preferences and the marriage unions they want to make? Is it a country that allows a woman to have control over her body? Is it a country where the line between church and state bequeathed to us by our Founding Fathers should be inviolate? Is it a country where religion doesn’t trump science? And, most important, is it a country whose president mobilizes its deep moral energies to unite us – instead of dividing us from one another and from the world?
The difficulty in accepting the results of this election for people who share a similar ideology to my own, is in understanding how a president with such a miserable economic record, who has presided over a terribly mismanaged war, could be re-elected. Was it his reputation as the worst environmental president in history? The lost jobs?
Perhaps the truth is simply that voters felt more comfortable with who they believe him to be and what they perceive as his vision for the country. It’s notable that a study done by The Center on Policy Attitudes and the Center for International Studies at the University of Maryland shortly before the election found that a majority of Bush supporters could not correctly identify his positions on most domestic or international issues. Maybe they saw in him a return to “traditional” values, where the rest of us saw a hard turn to the right led by Christian fundamentalists bent on legislating their morality. Maybe the guys who wrote the bible forgot to include hatred, discrimination and intolerance as immoral acts.
