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http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17788 . . . The choice to support Bush—and Republicans generally—gives quite average Americans a chance to feel superior. On moral terrain, they show singular virtue by not doing such things that will lead them to resort to abortion. They can take pride in their heterosexuality, regarding gays as immorally self-indulgent. And the time and energy they devote to worship shows their dedication and discipline. Finally, they see nothing wrong with periodic wars (Swift Boaters were an ex-post defense of Vietnam) since fighting marshals character and courage, whereas doubting conveys an aroma of cowardice. They are also fiscally superior. While most are far from wealthy, these voters tend to live in areas where living costs are not sky-high, and their salaries cover pleasures like trips to Disneyland and Caribbean cruises. Most have enough health coverage, do not feel their jobs are endan-gered, and aren't yet worried about their retirement. In short, they can differentiate —and distance—themselves from all those "losers" that Democratic candidates ask us to worry about. Hence they feel able to disdain the word "liberal," since that connotes handouts for complainers who don't show the energy to make it on their own. So the Bush candidacy was framed to make a majority by giving some 60 million people a chance to feel good about themselves. Andrew Hacker Professor of Political Science Queens College New York City . . . To the Editors: Convincingly debunking the "moral values" storyline concerning the fall election, Mark Danner suggests that Bush's victory turned instead on the fears raised by terrorism and the war in Iraq. The Republicans, he argues, constructed a narrative that relentlessly contrasted Bush's presumed "forthrightness, decisiveness, and strength" with Kerry's "uncertainty, hesitation, vacillation." But how, one must ask, did that story work so well as to effectively override the plain facts—the nonexistence of WMDs in Iraq, for example, and the disconnect between Iraq and September 11—which Danner cites? The answer, I would propose, lies at the level of theme and subtext.
The Republican storyline reached Americans at the gut level because it was fundamentally about masculinity—about who is and who is not a "real man."
The masculine-feminine binary virtually defined the Republican campaign. Bush played the tough, aggressive "stand-up guy" who would "stay the course" because "sometimes a man's gotta be a man." Kerry, meanwhile, was transformed into a soft, flip-flopping, effete elitist—a "girly man," in the immortal words of the Hollywood action hero now governing California, or, in Jon Stewart's satirical synopsis, "a pussy." In the Republican narrative, in short, "Democrat" translated as "weak" and "liberal" as "effeminate."
. . .
Paul Cohen
Professor of History
Lawrence University
Appleton, Wisconsin
. . .
Mark Danner replies:
. . .
As I tried to show in my article, and as the writers of these letters make clear, this election had, like most, more to do with emotions and attitudes than it had to do with facts. Andrew Hacker artfully describes the Bush campaign's success in creating a majority of "quite average Americans" who were offered, in supporting Bush and the "values" he stood for, "a chance to feel superior." On "issues" like abortion, health care, gay marriage, and the Iraq war, among many others, the Bush campaign did not appeal to voters' "policy preferences." Instead, as I tried to show and as Mr. Hacker makes vividly clear, the campaign worked to create a "community of attitudes" that privileged self-sufficiency, independence, and self-reliance—in short, the typically "masculine" values on the side of the "masculine-feminine binary" that, as Mr. Cohen points out, Republicans have played on in their campaigns for many years.
The added element this year was a strong ratcheting up of fear—the fear of attack, the fear of vulnerability in the post–September 11 world. Fear bolstered the need for the qualities that Bush was made to represent; fear was the question, as it were, to which Mr. Bush's clarity, forthrightness, and strength were posed as the answer. Kerry, for his part, was made "the anti-Bush," exemplifying in his flip-flopping and shilly-shallying everything that Bush stood against—and everything that, if allowed into the White House, could put the country at greater risk. Voters should support Bush not only because casting a ballot for him reaffirmed the values they shared with him and thus, in Mr. Hacker's terms, made them "feel superior" but because that vote would help keep the threat Kerry was made to represent—one of self-indulgent, indecisive, "feminized" weakness—out of the White House. (To take one example: Bush's opposition to gay marriage—and Kerry's implied "softness" on the issue—seems to have been particularly important in bolstering the President's support among older men, whose votes were, as Scott Turow has pointed out, critical to his reelection.)
. . .
All of which means the careful construction of attitudes that Hacker and Cohen describe, which formed the election campaign's true "inside story," generally fell outside the mainstream narrative put forward in the press. The public, offered the impression that they are being given a pathway into the inner sanctum, in fact is simply offered another constructed story carefully designed to reinforce the kind of attitudes campaign strategists have decided, in the real "behind the scenes" meetings, are critical to their candidate's success. What the public gets is mostly mummery and play-acting, and—for 51 percent of them at least—the chance to feel superior.
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