Slight of Hand

Funny, I seem to recall that last week, this election was a referendum on The War.

Now that the results are in, the stealth doves who failed to fool enough of us red-staters to win the election can’t accept our answer. That leaves them spinning furiously to retroactively change the question and blunt the sharp tip of defeat. New party line alert: “It was all about gay marriage, and how Karl Rove used it to get all of us mouth-breathing rednecks out of our trailers and down to the polls.”

Or, “vote for us, you banjo-picking racists!” Nice setup for 2008, doncha think?

Just what I was thinking on the porch today, as I was picking my banjo and spittin’ tobacky.

So was this election a referendum on gay marriage? Let’s start with the anecdotal evidence. I live in a red-hued area in my blue state of exile, and throughout the election cycle, I took several long drives through Pa., Va., and parts of Md. as deep-red as tuna sashimi. Now, when red-staters are fired up, we generally express it with bumper stickers. Not all of us, just enough of us to take the popular pulse during a drive. I did see the occasional gay marriage bumper sticker. Half were pro; most of the “antis” were in Hispanic neighborhoods that went overwhelmingly for Kerry. Nor do I recall gay marriage being among the top three issues in the campaign. Both candidates actually claimed they opposed gay marriage; both found some room for civil unions. Abortion was seldom came up–perhaps less than I would have liked. On the other hand, the yellow-ribbon car magnets that say “Support Our Troops” are omnipresent.

Read our bumpers: it’s the security, stupid!

You want your statistical evidence, you say? Right here. It was enough to convince Andrew Sullivan, an openly gay blogger who broke with Bush over gay marriage.

The liberal wing of the Democratic party now finds itself where it was in 1980, 1984, and 1988–in danger of being marginalized by moderates in the Clinton mold (and please, without all the sticky baggage this time, k?). What the Democrats desperately need is a Tony Blair; someone to rescue them from their Kinnockian appeasement, their reactionary stuck-in-the-seventies irrelevance, their fevered Michael Moore self-hatred, which scared millions of conservates and moderates to the polls out of mortal terror that their candidate might just secretly agree with their Fall-of-Saigon fantasy.

I think Moore did a tremendous job at helping mobilize Republicans this year. You only have to think back to John McCain’s speech at the RNC when he made a passing reference to Moore as “a disingenuous film maker.” The roar inside Madison Square Garden was immediate and intense.

Republicans across the country went to the polls on Tuesday with an anger of their own. The increased turnout wasn’t driven by some right-wing bigotry toward gays (as Brooks points out) but I believe a bitterness toward people like Michael Moore. Middle America was simply pissed off at listening to a fat schlub like Michael Moore and his ilk on the far left tell them how oppressive, greedy, militaristic, and imperialistic we are as a country and what a liar and a moron our President is.

A Democratic tranformation along the lines of the British Labour Party is, of course, what the P.C., pacifist, multi-culti left fears more than anything. They know that it’s their death knell, something that demands a desperate response. That’s why they’re scraping together the banjo-picker theory, trying to sell this contrivance that winning the votes of red-staters is so far beneath their contempt as to be unworthy of the moral price. Get me a hawkish Dem who unapologetically believes in freedom and our right to defend it, and you earn a shot at my vote. Please–no more of this: