Bookshelf

Blues

Here in the bluest borough of the bluest city of the bluest state in all our red-white-and-blue American Union, it has not been a happy week. A cocktail of emotions was being felt in these parts after last week’s Presidential election, and the most potent ingredient was sadness. We’ve got the blues, and we’ve got ‘em bad.

The grief that so many felt at Senator Kerry’s defeat was quite unexpected, and profound enough that, for the moment at least, it held off bitterness and recrimination. On both sides, this was a campaign that vast numbers of people threw their hearts into. There was a huge volunteer outpouring for Kerry, from Bruce Springsteen and George Soros on high to the hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, who manned phone banks and travelled to “swing states” and wrote the first political checks of their lives. To be sure, something along these lines had happened before, in the campaigns of Adlai Stevenson, Eugene McCarthy, Robert Kennedy, and George McGovern on the Democratic side, and of Barry Goldwater on the Republican. But this time the scale was larger and the yearning was greater, because in contrast to the campaigns of 1952 and 1964 and 1968 and 1972, all of which had the quixotic quality of gallant but doomed struggles, the chance of victory in 2004 seemed real, especially as Election Day approached. And this time the stakes felt higher—higher than in any election for at least three decades and maybe longer.

During the campaign it was routinely remarked that the Democrats’ fervor was rooted much more in anti-Bush than in pro-Kerry sentiments. That was certainly true at the beginning, when many primary voters calculated that a decorated war hero, even one from liberal Massachusetts, would be more “electable” than a volatile Vermont doctor. It was far less true at the end. Grave and formal, steady and decent, more emotionally accessible as Election Day approached, John Kerry wore well. He earned the respect of his supporters and had begun to earn their affection. (Perhaps that will protect him from the kind of scapegoating to which Al Gore was so relentlessly subjected.) All Kerry needed to become thoroughly presidential was the Presidency. His supporters risked heartbreak, and they found it.

Along with the sadness, there is puzzlement. Incumbents, especially in time of war, have a built-in advantage. But this incumbent had led the country into a war, the war in Iraq, that half the public had come to see as a mistake, and had led the country down what more than half the public saw, in pollster’s shorthand, as “the wrong track.” The election’s outcome defies logic, and perhaps that is the point. The early analyses credited Bush’s victory to religious conservatives, particularly those in the evangelical movement. In voting for Bush, as eighty per cent of them did, many of these formerly nonvoting white evangelicals are remaining true to their unworldliness. In voting for a party that wants to tax work rather than wealth, that scorns thrift, that sees the natural world not as a common inheritance but as an object of exploitation, and that equates economic inequality with economic vitality, they have voted against their own material (and, some might imagine, spiritual) well-being. The moral values that stirred them seem not to encompass botched wars or economic injustices or environmental depredations; rather, moral values are about sexual behavior and its various manifestations and outcomes, about family structures, and about a particularly demonstrative brand of religious piety. What was important to these voters, it appears, was not Bush’s public record but what they conceived to be his private soul. He is a good Christian, so his policy failures are forgivable. He is a saved sinner, so the dissipations of his early and middle years are not tokens of a weak character but testaments to the transformative power of his faith. He relies on God for guidance, so his intellectual laziness is not a danger.

What people on what might be called the cultural blue side, which includes many who voted for Bush, find deeply unsettling about him is not his religious faith—he is hardly the first devout President—but the way he speaks of making decisions with his gut, which, he has often suggested, takes its direction from God. In his second term, given the validation he received on Election Day, he is likely to be more confident—in himself, in his “instincts,” and in Almighty Gut. He will be less inclined than ever to listen to his earthly father, or to his earthly father’s earthly surrogates, such as Colin Powell.