Politics: Values Lite.(Brief Article)

The presidential election of 2000 was a stark demonstration of neoconservative author Ben Wattenberg's proposition that "values matter most." Among whites (81 percent of the electorate), regular churchgoers backed Bush and more secular voters Gore. Bush won the culturally conservative states, Gore the culturally liberal ones. Because the country's political divisions so closely track its cultural ones, values were the subtext of the election. For the same reason, they were not its text. Gore and Bush talked about education and Social Security. They could be confident their cultural partisans would stick with them; and they knew that voters in the middle had no appetite for a culture war.

With the election over, both parties are scrambling to build a majority on values. The debate is most intense among the Democrats, as one would expect given that they lost the White House and consequently have no leader. Their last leader, Bill Clinton, left the party a mixed legacy. On the one hand, he moved to fix its weaknesses on issues related to race, crime, welfare, work, family, religion, and patriotism. On the other, his scandals-and the Democrats' die-hard defense of him during them-left a mark of dishonor. Some liberals think that the party will be fine once memories of Clinton's scandals fade, so that there is no need for further repositioning.

New Democrats, however, want to build on the first half of Clinton's legacy. They are joined by such liberals as pollster Stanley Greenberg, who wants the party to move right on values and left on economics simultaneously, in order to win over low-income white men (who backed Bush). Both groups aim to change the perception that-to quote the New Democratic magazine Blueprint-Democrats are "anti-military, anti- traditional family, anti-religious, or anti-Second Amendment." They hope thereby to cut the party's losses among white men, gun owners, married people with kids, frequent churchgoers, and military families.

These Democrats are engaged in a difficult, perhaps impossible, balancing act. On guns, for example, they may try to take a moderate course, promoting "responsible gun ownership" rather than "sweeping national gun control legislation" (again quoting Blueprint). But that approach will not satisfy liberals who want sweeping legislation, appease voters who care about gun rights, or convince the majority of Americans in the middle that any gun legislation will do much about crime. That's why the Democrats' candidate for governor of Virginia, Mark Warner, was forced to grovel before gun-control groups after trying to craft such a moderate position.

Republicans, meanwhile, are seen as the party of ...