Moral muddle.

AS of this writing, the fast-changing conventional wisdom among the liberal cognoscenti in Washington and New York seems to be this: Karl Rove used "morals" to win the election. Damn that evil genius! How did he come up with that?

But his brilliance doesn't end there. Bush's Rasputin also figured out that in order for Bush to win he would need to "divide" the country--into at least two blocs, with the largest bloc voting for Bush. On November 2, Bush got more votes and--mirabile dictu!--he won. No wonder Bob Shrum and Joe Lockhart lost; pitting them against this kind of extraterrestrial perspicacity is like forcing them to play chess with a Vulcan.

Faced with the results of the dastardly mastermind's handiwork, the assembled forces of enlightened opinion soothed themselves by simply declaring anyone who votes on values to be a troglodyte. Maureen Dowd banged her spoon on her table and screeched about how the "jihadist" Bush team appealed to American "primitivism." "They don't call to our better angels," Dowd lamented, "they summon our nasty devils." The novelist Jane Smiley wrote in Slate, "The election results reflect the decision of the right wing to cultivate and exploit ignorance in the citizenry."

There are many motives for such childish petulance. The most obvious is that the media were so convinced Kerry would win--and so surprised by the exit polls highlighting "moral values" when he didn't--that they just assumed something "unfair" had happened. In this case, that would be that "God's People" (Howell Raines's sneering phrase) had poured forth from their tin shanties and revival halls carrying a jug of moonshine in one hand and a few rattlesnakes in the other to put their kin in the big White House with indoor plumbing. There's also plain old-fashioned contempt for religious voters. "Can a people that believes more fervently in the Virgin Birth than in evolution still be called an Enlightened nation?" fretted Garry Wills.

But the most important explanation for this frenzy of Christophobic bigotry, Bush hatred, and asininity is far more simple: bad analysis. Religious and pro-life voters had the same share of the vote in 2000. It isn't surprising that values were a big part of this month's election, because they are a big part of every election. The issues that capture moral concerns change, of course, but "moral/ethical" issues were judged the most important in 1992, 1996, and 2000, as well as in 2004. They were also Number One prior to the election that swept the Gingrich Congress into power.

And while Karl Rove did indeed run a brilliant campaign, he didn't make same-sex marriage an issue, divisively or otherwise. Rove didn't Jedi mind-trick the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court into rewriting the marriage laws, and he didn't make San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom illegally authorize gay weddings. If it was so obvious in hindsight that Rove had done all of this, why didn't the mainstream media cover it? Last I checked, the New York Times had some antennae pretty finely tuned to "gay bashing," and yet they insisted along with everyone else that this election was going to be about the economy or the war. The cognoscenti lost, and they can't help taking it out on the yokels.