The Chronicle went to press on Monday, before the election, so neither the writer nor those she interviewed knew the results of Tuesday’s election.
“Values,” according to conventional wisdom, was a major factor in both of the elections won by George W. Bush. Was that also the case in this year’s election?
For an update, The Chronicle spoke with several prominent, politically savvy rabbis and professors about their views on the role of values in the 2008 presidential election.
Defining the terms, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee political science professor Mordecai Lee explained, “In the last 15 years or so, the term ‘value-based voter’ or ‘value-oriented voter’ had a very specific meaning.
“It was about a package of conservative political issues that appealed to a certain base that was relatively consistent in supporting the Republican Party.”
And in this election too, when people talked about the values issue, Lee said, they did so “in the context of left-right political-religious ideology.”
But unlike the elections of the recent past, Lee said, in this election, three new factors played out with regard to values.
The first was that unlike Republican contenders, former governors Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney, Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain was “the wrong guy,” in terms of epitomizing what the values voters were looking for. And he tried to make up for that by choosing Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate, Lee said.
Secondly, among conservative Christians, “there were some values-oriented clergy who started feeling bad that they were being a bit selective about which passages of the Old Testament and New Testament ‘counted’ in the sense of why was opposition to gay marriage and abortion more important than, say, stewardship of the land or loving thy neighbor as thyself.”
This resulted in a reaction within the values movement that realized that their agenda had gotten too narrow, Lee said.
And finally, this time Sen. Barack Obama and the other Democrats seeking their party’s nomination, “learned that the concept of values is not inherently right-wing theologically or right wing politically,” Lee said.
So while “those sorts of Judeo-Christian values and belief in God simply have not been part of Democratic lingo for years,” Lee said, [recently,] “without in any way changing their core beliefs, Democrats have learned to talk about their values.”
During the campaign, Obama talked about the values that were consistently reflected in his policy positions rather than presenting himself as a policy wonk with an encyclopedia of policies, Lee said, and “that apparently really resonated with the sliver of voters who could go either way.
“After all, winning elections is only partly about mobilizing one’s base. Winning elections is really about winning the undecideds,” Lee said.
Progressive spiritual leader and editor of Tikkun magazine Rabbi Michael Lerner, of Berkeley, Calif., agreed that there was a growing sophistication around religion and values among Democrats in this election, though he said he does not think that values had “the same saliency in 2008 as they did in 2004.”
Lerner expressed in his 2006 bestselling book, “The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country From The Religious Right,” his view that Americans are searching for meaning in a despiritualized world.
The left, he said, has in the past and still does contain overtly anti-religious elements and is otherwise “dominated by self-interested politicians who rely on the backing of the wealthy and corporate dominated media.”
That is why, without an alternative vision, many Americans have found answers in right-wing religious communities, Lerner said in his book.
In a telephone interview last week, Lerner told The Chronicle, “While [in the 2000 and 2004 elections, Democratic nominees] Gore and Kerry were tone deaf to concerns of liberal church-going religious people, it’s hard not to notice that Obama is alive to religion and the religious spirit, and that makes it harder for the right to portray him as anti-religious.”
Like Lee, Lerner noted that in the last few years, evangelicals have broadened their view of what constitutes a spiritual issue, and have recognized that such things as caring for the poor and for God’s earth should also be included.
“That has made it harder for the Republican Party to direct all the attention on values issues,” Lerner said.
Orthodox Rabbi Avi Shafran, of New York, who is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America, granted that a case can certainly be made that Obama’s emphasis on social justice and the common man is “a deep and very laudable value.”
But for Orthodox Jews such as himself, he said, the term “’values’ means moral issues and that’s a different set of values. It’s one that’s a little more in sync, though not entirely, with a conservative [Christian] approach to issues like abortion, or gay marriage or even end-of-life issues,” Shafran said.
“There is still a big piece of America that is still traditional” in the sense of conservative social values, Shafran said, and from his perspective, “I’m happy with the fact that America maintains those values.
“It’s widely understood that Sen. John McCain chose Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate because of her appeal to ‘values concerned’ voters, Shafran said. “And whether it’s the Bible Belt or whether it’s the ‘Talmud Belt,’ so to speak, there is a certain resonance there, I think.”
“Values, in that more limited sense of the word where we’re talking about moral issues, I think, will always be an important part of American politics — it was in the last election and I think it was in this election also.”`
Just as Republicans are perceived as being more in sync with conservative values regarding these types of issues, Democrats are seen as being much more liberal on them, which is part of the traditional pull of the Democratic party on the larger Jewish body politic, Shafran said.
“But the Orthodox world stands apart from that and always has and probably always will in terms of its percentage of Democratic versus Republican adherents as well as who the particular candidate that they’re voting for will be.”
Shafran said that he expected the majority of Orthodox Jews voted for the McCain-Palin ticket and “the values point plays a role in that in many people’s minds.”
University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor Ken Goldstein, an authority on political polling, agreed that there was not “a huge difference between 2004 and 2008” when it came to so-called “values voters” choosing a president based on conservative social values.
But, Goldstein told The Chronicle in a Friday interview, though “the Bush campaign did a tremendous job of mobilizing their base” in 2004, the values voters’ influence was exaggerated due to problems in the wording of exit polls.
And though he had “little doubt that John McCain and the Republicans got the great majority of votes from evangelicals and fundamentalist Christians,” this year, the real difference in this election was the “pretty significant shift in party affiliation, ” toward the Democrats, which usually “tends to change at a much slower pace,” he said.
“Views about Bush, views about the economy, [and] views about the war” have led to this change. It is a response to a fundamentally different world, Goldstein said.
In this election, the rhetoric was also different, he said. “We’re not talking a lot about gay marriage and we’re not talking a lot about these other [values issues].”
That has little to do with differences between Sen. John Kerry and Obama or between President George W. Bush and McCain,” Goldstein said, “and more to do with the fundamental environment” that we live in today.
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