David Limbaugh - Is America Lost or Just Liberals?

David Limbaugh - Is America Lost or Just Liberals?
November 9, 2004

Many liberals are beside themselves. Things were bearable when they could delude themselves into blaming their loss of power on a "stolen" election. But with this decisive defeat, they're thinking, "It's not our America anymore."

As New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote, "But what troubled me yesterday was my feeling that this election was tipped because of an outpouring of support for George Bush by people who don't just favor different policies than I do -- they favor a whole different kind of America. We don't just disagree on what America should be doing; we disagree on what America is."

Liberals can live with their belief that nearly half the people are stupid. It was even tolerable to be out of power because they knew it would only be a matter of time before they recaptured power following a proper tutorial of the unwashed masses.

But now that they feel that America has truly slipped out of their grasp, they are even angrier than they were in 2000. Their angst proceeds from an arrogant feeling of superiority and entitlement that tells them they alone should be in power and that conservatives should keep their intolerant, bigoted views to themselves.

They are incredulous that they're not just under moronic rule but in a moronic nation. Yet, there's also that nagging doubt, that ray of hope that if they had just packaged themselves properly, they would have won the election, which would mean that a majority of Americans aren't Neanderthals after all and they wouldn't have to move to Canada.

So in their post-election analysis, we're seeing this conflict. In one paragraph we see a rage born of hopeless defeatism, and in the next, an expression that all is not yet lost and that they can still salvage a better America, "our America." If we just put forward the right candidate with the right zipcode, who will say the right things and with proper emotion we'll be back -- with a vengeance.

Concerning moral issues, for example, they are bashing conservatives for promoting values while simultaneously beating themselves up for not promoting their own. On the one hand, they're saying, "How dare those holy rolling do-gooders inject morals and religion into the campaign?" As columnist Susanna Rodell puts it, "The religious bigots, who think it's Christian to hate gay people … are winning the ideological battle in this country."

On the other hand, they're saying, "Hey, they don't have a monopoly on religion, morals or values." As Rodell puts it, "We're going to have to put our values (you remember the ones: charity, love, that sort of thing) back into the public eye, and we're going to have to be loud about it."

But it is in their proposed solutions to regaining power that they reveal they simply don't get the "morals" issue. To them it's more about appearances and the packaging of values than about the core beliefs supporting them.

As Margaret Carlson wrote of Kerry, "Always religious, he didn't frame what he stood for in Bush's language of good and evil, right and wrong. A Catholic, he lost Catholics, for God's sake."

Always religious? Most people knew better. Kerry could not successfully pass himself off as a devout Catholic just because he said he was -- as an obligatory afterthought, no less.

And Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen wrote, "If you set out to create the perfect Democratic presidential candidate, you would probably choose someone from the South or the border states… and someone who is comfortable talking the language of religion and values, since John Kerry was not."

No, Margaret. No, Richard. It's not about pious appearances, it's not about talking the religious talk. It's about actually believing it. It's about walking the walk, even against the intimidating forces of secular political correctness.

These liberals ought to go with their first instinct: that they do idealize a different America than do most Americans, which are decidedly conservative, and not just on values. (The liberals are so convinced that President Bush botched Iraq, they are attributing their defeat primarily to moral issues, which is partially true. But I happen to believe the main reason the president won is because he has been an effective wartime president, and the people trust that he will continue to be.)

I've been saying for some time now that the idea of an equally divided America is a myth. (If the Old Media hadn't been in the tank for Kerry, there's no telling what the scope of Bush's victory would have been.)

For the liberals to regain authority -- absent external circumstances, which there could easily be, or a major realignment in the electorate, they're going to have to do more than find a candidate who merely pays lip-service to the "right" things but who means them.

David Limbaugh is a syndicated columnist who blogs at DavidLimbaugh.com

George Will - Election '04 Epiphanies

George Will - Election '04 Epiphanies
November 9, 2004

WASHINGTON -- In 2000, Americans were reminded that electoral votes select presidents. In 2004, Democrats were reminded that Bruce Springsteen does not. Other Nov. 2 epiphanies include:

In 1984, Walter Mondale's running mate was Rep. Geraldine Ferraro, a Catholic woman from New York. Ronald Reagan carried Catholics, women, New York -- and even Ferraro's district. Vice presidential nominees rarely sway this or that national demographic group. However, a running mate should help carry his or her state. But last week Bush carried North Carolina, getting 295,026 more votes than in 2000, and carried John Edwards' home county, as he did four years ago. Edwards was supposed to cut Bush's appeal in rural America. He did not.

While 44 percent of Hispanics, America's largest and fastest-growing minority, voted for Bush, African-Americans continued to marginalize themselves, again voting nearly unanimously (88 percent) for the Democratic nominee. In coming years, while Hispanics are conducting a highly advantageous political auction for their support, African-Americans evidently will continue being taken for granted by Democrats.

On election night, news organizations were very hesitant to call a winner in Ohio, where Bush led all night and won by 136,483 votes. They were less hesitant about calling Pennsylvania, where Kerry led all night and won by only 127,927 votes.

Republicans should send a thank-you note to San Francisco's mayor, Gavin Newsom -- liberalism's George Wallace, apostle of ``progressive'' lawlessness. He did even more than the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts to energize the 11 state campaigns to proscribe same-sex marriage. All 11 measures passed, nine with more than 60 percent of the vote. They passed in Oregon and Michigan, while those states were voting for Kerry. Ohio's measure, by increasing conservative turnout, may have given Bush the presidency. Kentucky's may have saved Sen. Jim Bunning.

Newsom's heavily televised grandstanding -- illegally issuing nearly 4,000 same-sex marriage licenses -- underscored what many Americans find really insufferable. It is not so much same-sex marriage that enrages them: Most Americans oppose an anti-same-sex amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which is why it fell 49 votes short of the required two-thirds in the House and 19 short in the Senate. Rather, what provokes people is moral arrogance expressed in disdain for democratic due process.

Republicans should send a large spray of flowers to thank the British newspaper The Guardian. It urged readers to write letters to residents of Ohio's Clark County -- the city of Springfield and environs -- urging them to defeat Bush. The backfire from Ohio was so strong (e.g., one resident told The Guardian, ``If you want to save the world, begin with your own worthless corner of it,''), the paper quickly canceled its intervention. In 2000 Bush lost Clark County to Al Gore. This year Clark was the only one of Ohio's 88 counties to support Bush after opposing him in 2000.

Some Deaniacs -- the Howard Dean remnant -- and others argue that the Democratic Party would have done better if its presidential nominee had advocated a more robust liberalism. But one of the party's few happy moments Nov. 2 was the election of Ken Salazar as Colorado's senator. Salazar generally made himself scarce when Kerry came into the state.

For many months Tom Coburn, the Republican candidate for Oklahoma's Senate seat, ran such a weird campaign (e.g., fretting about rampant lesbianism in southeastern Oklahoma) that his opponent, Brad Carson, had hopes of winning even though Bush was on the way to carrying the state by 32 points. Then, in a debate, Coburn asked Carson why he supported Kerry. This was the best Carson could do:

``I'm a Democrat. And I support good people for office. I'm a Joe Lieberman type of guy. Because he shared my commitment to expressing our faith in politics; the idea that you don't leave your religious beliefs at the door but that they are important in politics ... he shared my hawkish views about what needs to be done by America in the world ... ''

Moderator: ``This is Lieberman you are talking about?''

Carson: ``This is Lieberman I'm talking about, yes.''

On election night on public television -- your tax dollars at work -- Bill Moyers said: ``I think if Kerry were to win this in a -- in a tight race, I think there'd be an effort to mount a coup, quite frankly. ... I mean that the right wing is not going to accept it.'' Moyers, the emblematic face of public television, is an intellectual icon in the sort of deep blue precincts that think red America is paranoid.