Saturday Morning Musings

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What a difference a week and a big electoral victory make! This is a much calmer and more pleasant Saturday than the last one.

The Mainstream Media and Religious Voters

I was just looking again at a Washington Post column by David Broder, "An Old Fashoned Win." There are a lot of liberal-leaning journalistic pieties expressed in this piece, which concludes with a somewhat ominous statement:

[T]he democratic process -- in an election that fulfilled all of its most
important requirements -- endorsed the Bush presidency. And if we know anything
about him, we know he will exercise the full powers of his office.

Just makes you want to huddle by the fire with your loved ones and reassure them, doesn't it?

Broder also observes:

A crucial element of the [Bush] strategy is the mobilization of religious
conservatives, those who are normally more conscientious about going to church
than about voting. Exit polls showed more than one in five voters Tuesday named
moral values as the most important issue determining their vote -- more than
cited terrorism, the economy or Iraq. More than three-quarters of them supported
Bush.

Does anyone else see that little slap at religious conservatives-- "those who are normally more conscientious about going to church than about voting?" According to Evan Thomas of Newsweek on the November 5 Laura Ingraham broadcast, the mainstream media (a church in which Broder is a high priest) is very uncomfortable with religion and with openly religious people. Broder's unintentional expressions in his writing of that discomfort provide an interesting example.

Along Those Same Lines . . .

David Brooks in today's New York Times begins his column with the following:

Every election year, we in the commentariat come up with a story line to
explain the result, and the story line has to have two features. First, it has
to be completely wrong. Second, it has to reassure liberals that they are
morally superior to the people who just defeated them.

. . .

Here are the facts. As Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center points out, there was no disproportionate surge in the evangelical vote this year. Evangelicals made up the same share of the electorate this year as they did in 2000. There was no increase in the percentage of voters who are pro-life. Sixteen percent of voters said abortions should be illegal in all circumstances. There was no increase in the percentage of voters who say they pray daily.

Read the whole thing, it's excellent.