Chapter 20: Myth—Politics Doesn’t Matter

Page 5

I heard a political writer postulate that the voters in the “Red States” 4

were voting against their family’s economic interests by voting Republican. He reasoned that poorer people would be better off with Kerry as president. Really? Incredulous as it might seem, maybe these poor people realize it is better to be “poor and honest” than “rich and dishonest.” In the most basic

analysis of the 2004 presidential election, I believe it really boiled down to this fundamental understanding of the majority of U.S. citizens. The elitists do not understand how anyone can vote against their economic interests. Yet those with God understand that His morality must come first, not last.

Another political writer 5 wrote: “Disappointed Democrats have had two weeks to argue about what went wrong for John Kerry on November 2. And they’ve had any number of plausible theories to choose from: Too many religious conservatives came out for President Bush; too few young

people came out for Kerry; and so on. But none among the most commonly circulating postmortems has yet won an enthusiastic Democratic embrace.

Except, that is, for this one: George W. Bush won reelection because

… well, because there are just too many damn dumb people in this country, that’s why.” The article continues by illustrating how the elitists explain our collective stupidity, “Americans who persist in thinking well of their president are able to do so only because they ‘suppress awareness of

unsettling information’ and instead ‘cling so tightly to beliefs’ that have otherwise been ‘visibly refuted’ by the media and rejected by ‘the majority of people in the world.’ ”

Intellectually, if you really think about it, how dumb is the 51% of the electorate who refused to elect two lawyers from the Senate into the office of presidency? Even I could make a sound intellectual argument that it is the other 48% who voted for Kerry and Edwards, the two lawyers, which are the

really clueless part of the electorate. And, listen, one of the lawyers was an experienced trial lawyer to boot. Still, despite all the political rhetoric, this election was about moral values, moral values, and moral values. Even if many of our citizens and half of those who call them self a Christian do not

fully understand why, morality does matter to the soundness of our society. The majority of U.S. citizens historically knew this much in their hearts.