McCain-Palin Playing the Culture Card

by Lisa Van Dusen | Sun Media

There's a great scene in an episode of 30 Rock from last season in which Alec Baldwin's lovable-demagogue network VP, Jack Donaghy, stands in the middle of an NBC executive dining room full of Republicans and introduces his Democratic congresswoman girlfriend, played by The Sopranos' Edie Falco.

"She wants to tax us all to death and make it legal for a man to marry his own dog," Donaghy tells the hushed executives. "But I think what we have is special."

Instead of a backlash, the revelation prompts a series of AA-style confessions from conservative diners who stand up one by one and state their own violations of America's culture war rules.

"I gave to NPR last year!"

"My children go to public school!"

"I'm gay!"

"I'm black!"

Falco's character responds with, "In 1984, I voted for Ronald Reagan!"

The scene is an absolute gas because it's so far-fetched it would never happen in real life, at least not in today's America.

In the broadest terms, the culture war divisions are right vs. left, south vs. north, west vs. east, red state vs. blue state, rural vs. urban, pro-life vs. pro-choice, white vs. non-white. In extreme culture-war caricature terms, one side finds the other overly intellectual, elitist, bleeding of heart, tax-loving, appeasing, unpatriotic, Godless and too enamored of foreign objects, especially italicized French words.

The other side finds the first side narrow-minded, dogmatic, blindly patriotic, overspending, intolerant, anti-diplomatic, irrational, xenophobic and bewilderingly enamoured with firearms and country music.

REAL DIVISIONS

Any pollster will tell you that behind those cliches are real divisions and when the spreads narrow and the issues, catchphrases and code get played for votes, elections can be won or lost on them, which is what makes culture wars so tactically attractive.

When Sarah Palin was named John McCain's running mate on Aug. 29, and especially after she made her speech to a Republican Convention where the lines were already being drawn, it seemed McCain was declaring, in big red, white and blue neon lights, "This Means Culture War."

Four days after her speech, on Sept. 7, the government seized control of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. By Sept. 15, Wall Street woke up to find Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch gone and went to bed with waking nightmares of the biggest single-day plummet since 9/11.

What was arguably the only kind of disaster that could blow a culture war off the table in a country where money trumps just about everything else was already getting more serious by the hour until the Congressional bailout mess crystallized both the size of the problem and the candidates' approaches. Now, the issue outweighs every other voter concern.

But because Palin has proven to be a drag on the McCain ticket in national polls and her appeal is limited to a base that already understands the culture war lexicon, she has been tasked with what may be the most personalized culture war offensive in memory, the targeting of Obama as mysterious, foreign, unknowable, unpatriotic, friendly with terrorists and dangerous.

THE REAL OBAMA

When McCain, who apparently just found out about Barack Obama's disqualifying unknowability, says, "Who is the real Barack Obama?" he's telling people who still feel uneasy about Obama because of his race that it's OK to be suspicious: It's not about what we know but what we don't know.

These allegations, conveniently unprovable and therefore impossible to disprove, are meant not to broaden the base but as a customized appeal to a specific kind of base voter and to any Independents whose responsiveness to that kind of talk outweighs everything else, even the economy.

With battleground states slipping one by one into the Obama column on the strength of voters whose economic concerns do outweigh everything else, the Republican strategy now focuses on saving the states Bush won in 2004 and on taking Pennsylvania, whose 21 electoral votes could push the winner over the 270 college votes needed.

Pennsylvania, where Joe Biden's Scranton roots and nearby Delaware base help the ticket, is also where Obama lost a brutal six-week primary fight to Hillary Clinton last spring, partly because it was small-town Pennsylvanians he was talking about in that off-the-record quote about what bitter people cling to.

With that sort of ammunition lying around, McCain and Palin would have to be running an entirely different sort of campaign to not resort to some old-fashioned culture warmongering.