A couple of days ago the people of my state-of-origin, Missouri, voted to ban gay marriage in the state by 72 to 28 percent.. Proposition 2 ("Shall the Missouri Constitution be amended so that to be valid and recognized in this state, a marriage shall exist only between a man and a woman?") brought out a record number of voters. According to the Springfield News-Leader,

Turnout was at its highest level since the state began tracking it 24 years ago — at least 42.8 percent of Missouri's nearly 3.5 million registered voters cast ballots — according to the office of the secretary of state.

Voter turnout also broke records in several counties, including Greene, where the number of ballots cast Tuesday was comparable to recent non-presidential November general elections.

I've read some analysis suggesting this vote indicates a swing to Bush in one of the larger swing states. To which I say, maybe. But maybe not.

Tuesday was a primary day in Missouri. I've been looking at the numbers, and for what it's worth:

• 241,956 more people voted in the Democratic primary than the Republican primary.
• 41,574 more people voted for Proposition 2 than voted in the two gubernatorial primaries combined.
• A Rasmussen Report poll released on the same day as the primary has Missouri "leaning Bush," but by only 4 points, which is pretty much where it's been for a while. 

What does this mean? Maybe nothing. But it may mean that gay marriage isn't all that much of a "wedge" issue. We can assume that some portion of people who voted "yes" on amending the state Constitution would not be in favor of amending the federal Constitution, for example. And Senator Kerry says he is opposed to gay marriage but thinks it is a state issue. Also, we can assume that many Democrats who voted "yes" may not base their vote for President on that one issue and still plan to vote for Kerry.

The numbers also suggest that lots of voters who rarely vote crawled out of the woodwork to bash gays. Whether they will crawl out of the woodwork again to vote for Bush remains to be seen.  

 

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Fox's Sean Hannity didn't look too happy today when now-retired Gen. Tommy Franks backed up John Kerry's old claims of atrocities in Vietnam.... After Hannity had detailed Kerry's charges--which included stories of beheadings and the shooting of innocent civilians--Franks agreed with them. The "things Kerry said are undeniable," the general told his surprised host, explaining that "things didn't go right" in Vietnam. ...

In the Postmodern worldview, people are united through the concept of tribes, where attraction takes center stage.

tribe n 1 group of (esp. primitive) families or communities linked by social, religious, or blood ties, and usually having a common culture and dialect and a recognized leader. 2 any similar natural or political division. 3 usu. derog set or number of persons, esp. of one profession etc. or family. (Oxford)

The difference between a tribe and a mere association is that the tribes you belong to (you may belong to several) make up a big part of your self-identity. Put another way, a tribe is an association with an institution or other group of people that your ego attaches to. So, when your tribe is threatened, particularly by another tribe, the ego reacts as if the self is threatened.

Further, long-held tribal identities are nearly impossible to shake loose; most people cannot divorce themselves from a tribe without going through all manner of existential angst.

For example, a person raised Catholic may come to disagree with most Church teaching but hesitate to switch denominations because it just plain feels uncomfortable. That discomfort comes from a primordial part of the subconscious warning us it's dangerous to leave the tribe. We might be eaten by saber-tooth tigers, or something.

I see the joining of tribes as an instinct given us by our early hominid ancestors that is hardwired into our species. Human beings can no more avoid joining tribes than they can avoid breathing. We form tribal identities with families, with communities, with nations, with ethnic or racial groups, and with institutions (religions, football teams, political parties). Tribes also form around philosophies or ideologies.

There are even tribes of people who are opposed to tribes. These people can be identified by how much they quote Ayn Rand to show how uniquely individual they are.

Freepers are an obvious example of a postmodern tribe. They will defend their Freeper fellows and leaders, such as George Bush, beyond all logic and reason, and they will do so with all the fierceness (and lack of intellect) of a wolf defending his pack. No facts, no argument, can shake their absolute faith that the Right is right. For individual Freep, Freepery is an extension of themselves, and if you discredit Freepery, you challenge a Freeper's very existence. It may be easier to reason with a wolf than with a Freeper.

Postmodern tribes differ from ancient tribes in that they are less geograpically based than they used to be. These days it's possible to join a tribe of people scattered about the entire planet. Although we still may classify Americans by city, state, or region -- Southerners, Yankees, Westerners, New Yorkers, Texans, Hillbillies, Hoosiers, etc. -- these identities mean less today than they did a century ago, and a century from now they may be gone entirely.

Many have commented on the Red State-Blue State nonsense within which our current political struggles are framed. Voting patterns do not neatly fall within state borders. What we're really looking at are tribal populations, which still tend to be more concentrated in some regions than in others. Over time, this will change. Even the "solid South" must eventually break up and become more tribally diverse.

Finally, I get to what may be an important point: I believe support for George W. Bush is based almost entirely on tribal loyalty and identity. Mostly he's got a couple of mega-tribes, such as what's loosely called the Religious Right, which is actually made up of several overlapping, socially conservative Christian tribes. And he's got a mega tribe called "political conservatives," which is made up of anti-government, anti-socialist, anti-tax, anti-multicultural (we used to call these people "bigots"), and anti-modernism tribes, among others.

IMO most members of these tribes will stick with Bush no matter how badly he screws up, because he's their tribal leader, and tribes must be defended at all cost. If you lose your tribe, other tribes will catch you and cook you in a big pot and decorate their huts with your shrunken head.. 

Bushism leaves real conservatives in an uncomfortable position, however. Their tribal instincts tell them to be loyal to the "conservative" tribe, but reason tells them Bush ain't no conservative. On the other hand, the pull of tribal loyalty may be strong enough to keep them from voting for Kerry. This will be an interesting group to watch in the coming weeks.

But what about support for John Kerry? I believe support for Kerry is based less on tribal identity than on an expectation he can perform the job of President of the United States well, or at least a damn sight better than Bush. We liberals and progressives and Democrats for the most part, I think, do not (yet) consider John Kerry to be our leader. He's more like the knight we've hired to go out and slay the dragon.

However, the ferocity with which we dislike the Bushies does come, at least in part, from our tribal loyalties.  The Bushies really do want to catch us and cook us in big pots, etc. We are not imagining this.

Some commentators have made a big deal of the perception that most likely Democratic voters are less excited about Kerry becoming President than they are about getting rid of Bush. But what this really says is that support for Bush is based on primordial emotions, mostly fear, while support for Kerry is based more on judgment and reason. 

We don't need to apologize for that.

The TV networks. The broadcast networks get one of the most valuable pieces of corporate welfare that exists anywhere: free use of our nation's broadcast spectrum. In exchange, they owe the public a little bit of public service. That means real coverage of public affairs issues. And it should mean extensive coverage of political conventions and Presidential debates. By opting to air just one hour of the Democratic convention on three of the convention's four nights, ABC, NBC, and CBS let the public down. The once-venerable Big Three networks missed the highlight of the convention -- Barack Obama's fabulous keynote address -- and they skipped newsworthy speeches by Jimmy Carter, Wes Clark, Max Cleland, and many others. Their pathetic efforts at voiceover sophistry and punditry in Boston -- and an equally paltry presentation slated for New York -- give them a couple more well-deserved black eyes.

 

Cable TV. CNN, the leading purveyor of news to Democratic voters, also ended up with egg on its face. All too often, the self-described trusted news source, opted to show its viewers the yakking faces of its own TV personalities rather than the action on the floor. For example, the network missed most of the electric speech by Clark. Sometimes, less commentary and more news would be good news. Fox -- CNN's conservative competition -- was so relentlessly negative that it might as well have advertised its coverage as a donation from media mogul Rupert Murdoch to the Republican National Committee and the Bush campaign. Thank goodness for C-SPAN!

Most of the al Qaeda surveillance of five financial institutions that led to a new terrorism alert Sunday was conducted before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and authorities are not sure whether the casing of the buildings has continued, numerous intelligence and law enforcement officials said yesterday.

 

More than half a dozen government officials interviewed yesterday, who declined to be identified because classified information is involved, said that most, if not all, of the information about the buildings seized by authorities in a raid in Pakistan last week was about three years old, and possibly older.

 

"There is nothing right now that we're hearing that is new," said one senior law enforcement official who was briefed on the alert. "Why did we go to this level? . . . I still don't know that."

That dull thud you hear may be the John Kerry flop of 2004.

 

The media wanted a post-convention bounce for the Democrats' presidential nominee. The Washington Post, acting as political consultant, highlighted the rosy findings of its convention focus groups among swing voters. They tried.

But polling suggests that the Boomer centric "Boston Me Party" that nominated John F. Kerry, may have been a flop. The most recent CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll, conducted Friday and Saturday (the best time to measure a possible post-convention bounce), actually found Bush ahead of Kerry 50 percent to 47 percent among likely voters and behind Kerry by three points among registered voters in a two-way race. In a three-way race this research found Bush ahead 50 percent to 46 percent among likely voters and tied at 47 percent among registered voters.

Note that this poll also has a 4-point margin of error. So much for the three-point lead. 

NRO must switch allegience from ABC/WaPo to CNN/USA Today/Gallup because the latter is the only poll that puts Bush ahead. The most recent ABC/WaPo, American Research Group, CBS/New York Times, Newsweek, and Zogby polls all show Kerry moving ahead.

This is no time to be complacent. We've got several weeks to go. I've seen enormous shifts in poll numbers as Election Day approaches. Still, the Dems are off to a good start. Smells like victory to me.

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... the one topic the D's, in their determined-not-to-be-negative mode, are avoiding like said skunk is Iraq. ... The more or less official Democratic line is whether you were for the war or against it, the administration screwed up the implementation beyond recall, which I suppose works politically and has the added virtue of being true.

Nonetheless, I don't think it gets us far enough: We spent at least 20 years after Vietnam arguing about what we needed to learn from that experience, and I don't want to see the lessons of Iraq confused.

It is not just a matter of Use Overwhelming Force and Have an Exit Strategy (two lessons from Vietnam). It really is much more important to understand why we should not have invaded in the first place.

Not just a case of bad information on the WMD, on the supposed ties to al Qaeda, on the nonexistent nuclear program, etc. We need to get it through our heads that the real mistake was invading in the face of almost universal opposition from the rest of the world.

There may be a time and place where we will have to act unilaterally, but this wasn't it. Painfully, clearly not.

I'm sure I've said this before, but to this day there are people who insist we could have "won" in Vietnam, without considering what "winning" would actually look like (occupation and insurgency without end) and what the point might have been. These are the same people who today think we already have "won" in Afghanistan and Iraq, and those pesky insurgents are just die hards who won't face reality.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Pope: Women Are Holsteins

The Vatican yesterday depicted what it claimed were women's characteristic traits: 'Listening, welcoming, humility, faithfulness, praise and waiting.'

... 'women, in order to be themselves, must make themselves the adversaries of men'. Such confrontational thinking was 'leading to harmful confusion ... which has its most immediate and lethal effects in the structure of the family'.

Gender war also encouraged a perilous blurring of the distinctions. 'To avoid the domination of one sex or the other, their differences tend to be denied, viewed as mere effects of historical and cultural conditioning.'

Translation: Women should just accept being Holsteins.

Such a view ignored qualities that arose from a woman's unique ability to give birth. This 'allows her to acquire maturity very quickly, and gives a sense of the seriousness of life and of its responsibilities.

Men are not supposed to sense the seriousness of life and of its responsibilities?

 A sense and a respect for what is concrete develop in her, opposed to abstractions which are so often fatal for the existence of individuals and society,' says the first high-level pronouncement on gender issues since the Pope's 1995 'Letter to Women'.