New York Review of Books
In response to How Bush Really Won (
To the Editors:
Mark Danner's "How Bush Really Won" [NYR, January 13] is easily
the best explanation I have seen. His conversations with
The majority that the Bush-Rove campaign mustered came from the center of
the middle class. By my calculation, their median family income
was a quite modest $60,725, yet still enough to live respectably in
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
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
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
Queens College
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
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
This is neither new nor surprising. The Republicans have regularly played
the masculinity card in recent elections, particularly when bloodthirsty
Russian bears or Islamic wolves are sighted in the woods. And the story, as
Danner suggests, has often trumped the facts. How else did a combat-averse Yale
Yankee morph into a plain-spoken
Paul Cohen
Professor of
"Issues don't win elections, constituencies do." As this political
chestnut suggests, issues serve politicians mainly as a way for them to
consolidate constituencies—and "make a majority," as Andrew Hacker
puts it. Nonetheless intellectuals—amateur or professional, and pundits first
among them —like nothing better than to talk about issues and to debate the
facts out of which they are built. That Mr. Bush's reelection seems to fly so
dramatically in the face of these so-called "plain facts"—the fact
that the stated reasons for the Iraq war have been thoroughly and publicly
disproved; the fact that his tax cuts have overwhelmingly benefited the
well-to-do at the expense of those in the middle class—drives intellectuals to
distraction.
Shortly after the election, an e-mail circulated widely purporting to show
that people in the pro-Bush "red states" simply had lower IQs than
people in the "blue states." That the chart was soon shown to be
fabricated does not change the widely held conviction among Democrats that
those who voted for Bush could only have done so because they were not as
intelligent as those who voted against him.
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
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.)
That this "masculine-feminine binary" has played a central role in
how Americans talk about politics and "issues" has hardly escaped
notice; the linguist George Lakoff, for one, has
written extensively on it, notably in his book Moral Politics. Still, if
emphasizing and reinforcing these attitudes was central to the campaign, why
was the subject not discussed prominently in the press? Why did these questions
largely remain, as Mr. Cohen puts it, at "the level of theme and
subtext"? And why didn't Democrats "challenge the Republican story
directly" as Mr. Cohen urges them to do?
The answer to this, in my view, has to do at least in part with the peculiar
kind of "horse-race coverage" that has come to dominate American
political campaigns. In the major newspapers and, above all, on the television
networks, campaign coverage is typically led by "inside stories"
about "campaign strategy." Articles often rely on unnamed
"campaign strategists" who are quoted explaining what is "really
going on" within the campaign. More often than not, this is a charade: the
supposed "inside story" is just another version of the
"message" that the campaign wants to get out to the public, another
way of manipulating the news by creating a narrative that in fact helps
reinforce the plotline designed and chosen by the campaign in the first place.
Far from telling readers and viewers what is "really" happening in
the campaign, the "inside story" stratagem is simply another way to
get across the carefully crafted plotline developed by the campaign itself.
On March 5, for example, The New York Times
published a piece headlined "Bush Campaigns Amid a Furor over Ads,"
about a supposed controversy over the campaign's first television ads, which
offered a glimpse of a dead fireman being carried out of the World Trade Center
site. In the article the Times reporters revealed that the campaign was
"scrambling to counter criticism that his first television commercials
crassly politicized the tragedy of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks."
Indeed, the controversy was so serious, according to the Times, that it
had "complicated efforts by Republicans to seize the initiative after
months in which Mr. Bush has often been on the defensive." Newsweek,
for its part, in an article headlined "A 'Shocking' Stumble,"
reported that the ad controversy "threw campaign officials on the
defensive—and raised questions about the Bush team's ability to effectively
spend its massive $150 million war chest, some GOP insiders say."
Seven months later, and two weeks after the election, Newsweek
published another and very different "inside account," this one based
on exclusive access to the campaigns which was granted on the understanding
that nothing from this reporting would be published until after the election.[*]
Here is what Newsweek's writers now told us about what "two Bush
strategists" really thought of their campaign's "shocking
stumble":
McKinnon and Dowd were ecstatic. At a strategy meeting the
next day—the same morning the Times headline appeared—they joked about
how they could fan the flames. Controversy sells, they said. It meant lots of
"free media"; the ads were shown over and over again on news shows,
particularly on cable TV. The "visual" of the rubble at the World
Trade Center was a powerful reminder of the nation's darkest hour—and Bush's
finest, when he climbed on the rock pile with a bullhorn. What's more, the
story eclipsed some grim economic news....
At that Saturday's Breakfast Club, they were still laughing
about the ad flap.... Dowd told the group they had received $6 million to $7
million worth of free ad coverage. "Unfortunately, we've been talking
about 9/11 and our ads for five days," Dowd deadpanned at a senior staff
meeting. "We're going to try to pivot back to the economy as soon as we
can."
There were chuckles all around.
So much for the "inside story." As so
often in journalism, the source offered the reporter access and the scoop; in
exchange, the reporter in effect granted the source— in this case, the Bush
strategist—the power to shape the storyline. The reporter thus publishes a
supposed "inside story" about "scrambling" within the
campaign that is in effect a kind of "false bottom" constructed by
the campaign itself and intended to "fan the flames" of what is in
fact a largely bogus story. The deeper reality—in this case, the determination
to focus relentlessly on September 11 and the President's
"leadership" role in it ("the nation's darkest hour and Bush's
finest") and thus to emphasize the "masculine" values of
steadiness, forthrightness, and strength that this role exemplified—may have
been plain to those political professionals who were looking closely but it was
much less clear to voters relying on the press for the supposed "inside
story" of the campaign. The Bush campaign's "shocking stumble"
was, in Daniel Boorstin's term, a
"pseudo-event"; indeed, our political campaigns are built largely of
such pseudo-events and rely fundamentally on the press and the commentariat to play their necessary part in constructing
them and conveying them to the public. Both sides are immersed in this
language, of course, and it is hard to see, given the terms of the game, how
Democrats could "challenge the Republican story directly"—or even
what "directly," in this context, might actually mean.
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.
[*]
See "How Bush Did It: The Untold Story of an Epic Election," Newsweek,