Truth - Al Franken [53]
You’d think those conclusions would be enough for any scholar. But not for Stewart and Ansolabehere. They didn’t settle for just the battleground states. They looked at the change from 2000 to 2004 in all the states with anti–gay marriage initiatives, and compared that to the change in all the states without them—not just at the state level, but at the county level. Sounds like a lot of work, I know. But this is all these guys do. They don’t have real jobs, like you or me. Well, like you.
What they found was remarkable. In states with the initiatives, red counties got redder and blue counties got bluer, with a net advantage of 2.6 percent for Kerry. Whereas in states without the referenda, Bush gained about 3 percent overall. So the initiatives seemed to polarize people, and actually hurt Bush. Isn’t that something? Bush being hurt by a divided America? That’s the kind of counterintuitive result that puts the “T” in MIT.
Did millions of Christian conservatives turn out to vote on social issues like abortion, gay marriage, and Bible banning? Sure. Is this anything new? Not really. The alliance of religious conservatives with the Republican elite was signed in blood back in 1980, when Ronald Reagan was swept into office in part thanks to televangelists like James Robison, Jerry Falwell, and Ayatollah Khomeini. It was a triumph for the conservative movement. Paul Weyrich, founding president of the Heritage Foundation, explained what happened:
The conservative movement, up to that point, was essentially an intellectual movement. It had some very powerful thinkers, but it didn’t have many troops. And as Stalin said of the Pope, “Where are his divisions?” Well, we didn’t have many divisions. When these folks became active, all of a sudden the conservative movement had lots of divisions. We were able to move literally millions of people. And this is something that we had literally no ability to do prior to that time.
So there was nothing new about the Christian conservative vote, unless you count the depths of the shamelessness with which it was wooed by Rove and company. The religious man-on-dog-and-pony show simply brought out the base. The fear-mongering terrified the middle. And the smear campaign convinced just enough of the terrified that Kerry couldn’t protect them. That’s how a terrible, unpopular president, a president who had misled his country into war and failed to produce a single net job by Election Day, a Republican facing an extraordinarily united Democratic mobilization, managed to eke out a record-breakingly narrow victory. And then claim a mandate.
As historians like myself understand, that’s the true story of 2004. But the ground troops of the religious right were fed a very different line.
They were told that Bush owed his victory to them, and them alone. Richard Land, the Southern Baptist leader from those White House conference calls, put it simply: “The faith factor was the difference in this election.”
Another conference call participant, James Dobson,6 pinned the tail directly on the party symbolized by the donkey:
As is now apparent, those who appealed to the unelected and unaccountable courts to legalize same-sex “marriages” had miscalculated and overreached. Ultimately, Democrats paid a price for it. I am among those who believe the President would not have won reelection if it had not been for the power of this issue to drive conservative voters to the polls.
The values voters had spoken. And now it was time for the values voters to get some value for their votes. It was payback time—or else. Dobson laid it out to The New York Times :
I believe that the Bush administration now needs to be more aggressive in pursuing those values, and if they