Of course Ruthie J already knows the answer to this question: New Times is but one of the many media outlets whose staffers operate within a bubble of shared assumptions, a bubble sharply punctured on November 2. And while smugness may not be the most Christian of sentiments, Ruthie J has more than earned at least a few moments of vindication. After five years at WMCU -- working long hours, fielding listeners' phone calls, running the news department -- she now hosts her own daily show. Christian radio has become a national force that can't be ignored, and stations like WMCU are being credited as decisive in spurring the evangelical community to turn out on election day and help re-elect President George W. Bush. "The church is saying, 'Enough is enough. We're going to the polls,'" Ruthie J enthuses.
Still, whether it's humility or her radio station's nonprofit status weighing on her mind, she quickly clarifies the details of her on-air partisanship: "I never told people who to vote for. I just told them to vote for the person who you think represents your world view, who has the same set of moral values as you. The war in Iraq, health care, taxes -- those were all important. But if you pick a president who shares your moral views, then you can trust him with the other decisions."
In the end that's precisely what millions did, rendering an electoral outcome that still has many Democrats wallowing in denial, grasping at apocryphal tales of electronic voting glitches. There are indeed "two Americas," as Democratic vice presidential hopeful John Edwards frequently declared on the campaign trail. Yet the divide isn't based on class so much as on culture.
Accordingly many of the liberal pundits obsessed with the 22 percent of voters self-identified as evangelical have cast that demographic as straight out of Invasion of the Body Snatchers: They walk, talk, and dress just like you and me. One may already be your neighbor. Only a stray verbal tic gives them away, perhaps an offhand mention of the "culture of life" or "activist judges." Are they Communists? Canadians? No, they are Christians.
"I was watching Bill Moyers the other night," bristles WMCU program director Dwight Taylor, citing the PBS news host, "and he had a gentleman on who referred to people who regularly attend church as öon the fringe.' Well, there's a number of folks who attend church. We're not part of a fringe group, we're part of the mainstream. "
It's a good thing Taylor didn't spend much time at last week's Miami Book Fair International. Moyers's fan club was out in force for author panels that spotlighted this season's wave of Bush-bashing books. But instead of analysis, an attempt to understand the resounding rejection suffered by the Anybody-But-Bush camp, there was only condescension.
Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair and author of the less-than-subtle What We've Lost: How the Bush administration has curtailed our freedoms, mortgaged our economy, ravaged our environment, and damaged our standing in the world, chalked up Kerry's defeat to nothing more significant than a stiffly Brahmin speaking style. "John Kerry was talking to somebody with a bow tie, a striped shirt, and a blazer," Carter sneered to the packed room before him. "He should have been talking to those people out there, those Wal-Mart people, those people who like to keep their Christmas lights on all year round."
Ah yes, the familiar complaint. If only the Democrats could learn to charm "those Wal-Mart people" -- those not blessed with chauffeurs and a Greenwich Village townhouse like Carter's in which to string their holiday decorations while decrying Bush's tax cuts.
It was left to New York Times columnist and On Paradise Drive author David Brooks to offer one of the few notes of wisdom. "Everyone's giving advice to the Democrats," he scoffed to his Book Fair crowd, particularly when it comes to strategies for wooing areas like Florida's suburban I-4 corridor, so crucial in swinging the state to Bush. His own counsel? Ignore anyone with easy access to the national media: "The people on the coasts and in institutions like the New York Times, which I work for, do not know how to reach people in these fast-growing places. There's a different conversation going on out there. Karl Rove figured it out somehow. The advice the Democrats have mainly been getting has been in one conversation. They need to get in a different conversation."
