Page 1 of 2 DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA
War meets values
By Ira Chernus
While the Iraq war has largely faded from our TV screens, some 85% of all
voters still call it an important issue. Most of them want US troops home from
Iraq within a couple of years, many of them far sooner. They support Barack
Obama's position, not John McCain's. Yet when the polls ask which candidate
voters trust more on the war, McCain wins almost every time.
Maybe that's because, according to the Pew Center for the People and the Press,
nearly 40% of the public doesn't know McCain's position on troop withdrawal. In
a Washington Post/ABC poll conducted in June, the same percentage weren't sure
he had a clear position.
When that poll told voters that McCain opposed a timetable for
withdrawal, support for his view actually shot up dramatically. It looks like a
significant chunk of the electorate cares more about the man than the issue.
Newer polls suggest that McCain's arguments against a timetable may, in fact,
be shifting public opinion his way.
McCain's only chance: Values-plus voters
Pundits and activists who oppose the war in Iraq generally assume that the
issue has to work against McCain because they treat American politics as if it
were a college classroom full of rational truth-seekers. The reality is much
more like a theatrical spectacle. Symbolism and the emotion it evokes - not
facts and logic - rule the day.
In fact, the Pew Center survey found that only about a quarter of those who say
they'll vote for McCain base their choice on issues at all. What appeals to
them above all, his supporters say, is his "experience", a word that can
conveniently mean many things to many people.
The McCain campaign constantly highlights its man's most emotionally gripping
experience: his years of captivity in North Vietnam. Take a look at the McCain
TV commercial entitled "Love". It opens with footage of laughing, kissing
hippies enjoying the "Summer of Love," then cuts to the young Navy flier
spending that summer of 1967 dropping bombs on North Vietnam and soon to end up
a tortured prisoner of those he was bombing.
McCain believed in "another kind of love", the narrator explains, a love that
puts the "country and her people before self". Oh, those selfish hippies, still
winning votes for Republicans - or so McCain's strategists hope.
Obama agrees that the symbolic meanings of Vietnam and the "love generation"
still hang heavy over American politics. The debate about patriotism, he
observed, "remains rooted in the culture wars of the 1960s ... a fact most
evident during our recent debates about the war in Iraq".
Obama is right - sort of. The so-called culture wars have shifted away from
social issues to war, terrorism, and national security. The number of potential
voters who rate abortion or gay rights as their top priority now rarely exceeds
5%; in some polls it falls close to zero. Meanwhile, Republicans are nine times
as likely as Democrats, and far more likely than independents, to put terrorism
at or near the top of their most-important list. And Republican voters are much
more likely to agree with McCain that Iraq is, indeed, the "the central front
in the war on terrorism".
Sociologists tell us, however, that the "culture wars" so assiduously promoted
by conservatives are mostly smoke and mirrors. Despite what media pundits may
say, the public is not divided into two monolithic values camps. Voters are
much less predictable than that. And few let values issues trump their more
immediate problems - especially economic ones - when they step into the voting
booth. The almighty power of the monolithic "values voters" is largely a myth
invented by the media.
Yet, the "culture war" story does impact not only debates about the war in
Iraq, as Obama said, but all debates about national security. Beyond the small
minority who are strict "values voters", there are certainly millions of
"values plus" voters. Though they can be swayed by lots of issues, they hold
essentially conservative social values and would like a president who does the
same. This time around, it's a reasonable guess that they, too, are letting war
and security issues symbolize their "values" concerns. Put in the simplest
terms: They are the McCain campaign's only chance.
So just how much of a chance does he really have? At this point, only
two-thirds of those who say they trust him most on Iraq plan to vote for him.
That means less than 30% of all voters are solidly pro-war and pro-McCain. But
another 12% or so who do not trust McCain on Iraq say they'll vote for him
anyway, keeping him competitive in polling on the overall race. Most of them
are surely part of the huge majority who, whatever they think of his Iraq
specifics, trust McCain most to protect us from terrorism and see him as the
person most desirable as commander-in-chief. (There's that "experience" again).
The crucial voters are the 10% to 20% who want troops out of Iraq soon, won't
yet commit to McCain, but "trust him" most to do the right thing on Iraq and
terrorism. They are choosing the man, not the policy position, on the war. A
lot of them fall among the 5% to 20% - depending on the poll you pick - who
won't yet commit to either candidate.
McCain can swing the election if his campaign can only convince enough of them
to vote with their hearts, or their guts, for the "experienced" Vietnam war
hero, the symbol of the never-ending crusade against "Sixties values". So he
and his handlers naturally want to turn the campaign into a simple moral drama:
Sixties values - or the nation's security and your own? Take your pick.
Obama's American values
Could that "values" script get a Republican elected, despite the terrible
damage the Republicans have done - and for which voters blame them - in the
last eight years? Many Democrats apparently think it might. They're afraid,
says Senator Russ Feingold, that "the Republicans will tear you apart" if you
look too weak and soft. That's why the Democratic Congress, weakly and softly,
continues to give the Bush administration nearly everything it wants when it
comes to funding the war in Iraq, as well as eavesdropping on citizens at home.
And the Democratic presidential candidate now goes along, with little apology.
The Obama campaign recognizes the larger "values" frame at work here. Look at
the commercial its operatives made to kick off the general election campaign.
In it, Obama says not a word about issues. He starts off by announcing:
"America is a country of strong families and strong values." From then on, it's
all values all the time.
And the "strong values" the commercial touts are not the ones that won him the
nomination either. Not by a long shot. You'll find nothing about "change" or
"hope" there. It's all about holding fast to the past. Nor is there a thing
about communities uniting to help the neediest. America's "strong values" -
"straight from the Kansas heartland" - are "accountability and self-reliance
... Working hard without making excuses." You're on your own. It's all
individualism all the time.
Sandwiched between self-reliance and hard work is the only community value that
apparently does count: "love of country".
Obama's second ad (which Newsweek described as "largely a 30-second version" of
the first) features images of the candidate warmly engaging hard-hatted and
hair-netted workers, all of them with middle-aged wrinkles, blue collars, and
white skins. Both commercials ran in seven traditionally Republican states as
well as 11 swing states. As they were released, Obama gave major speeches
supporting patriotism and faith-based initiatives.
As Republican consultant Alex Castellanos put it, the Obama campaign made "an
aggressive leap across the 50-yard line to play on Republican turf". Before
they sent their man around the world to focus on war and foreign policy, to
meet the troops in Afghanistan and General Petraeus in Baghdad, they felt they
had to assure the "Kansas heartland" that he shares true American values.
And Obama's message-makers know where that mythical "heartland" really lies:
not in Kansas, Dorothy, but on a yellow brick road to an imagined past. The
America conjured up in his commercials is a Norman Rockwell fiction that
millions still wish they could live in because they feel embittered (as Obama
so infamously said) by a world that seems out of control. They prefer a fantasy
version of a past America where so many, who now feel powerless, imagine they
might actually have been able to shape their own destinies.
Perhaps the frustrated do cling to "guns or religion or antipathy to people who
are not like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment", as
Obama suggested. But his ad-smiths know that they cling far more to illusions
of a secure past, when (they imagine) everyone could count on clear, inviolable
boundary lines - between races and genders, between competitive individuals in
the marketplace, between the virtuous self and the temptations of the flesh,
between the US and other nations, between civilization and the enemies who
would destroy it.
All of these boundaries point to the most basic one of all: the moral boundary
between good and evil. McCain and Obama are both wooing the millions who
imagine an absolute chasm between good and evil, know just where the good is
(always "made in America"), and want a president who will stand against evil no
matter what the cost. They want, in short, a world where everyone knows their
place and keeps to it, and where wars, if they must be fought, can still be
"good" and Americans can still win every time.
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