Posted on Sun, Nov. 07, 2004

CAMPAIGN 2004

The map showed a sea of red with islands and shoals of blue. Election Day 2004 revealed two Americas — deep differences dividing the 55 million citizens who cast their votes for John Kerry, and the 59 million who just as passionately selected George W. Bush.

The gulf is much greater than questions of what to do in Iraq or how to improve the economy. So great that a wife who voted for Kerry slept at her office rather than home with a husband who celebrated Bush’s win. So great that friends canceled a postelection coffee klatch because they couldn’t sit at the same table and hear each others’ opinions.

So great that Richard Unger was mocked when he told a longtime chum he voted for Kerry.

“She looked at me like I was an idiot,” the software designer says. “And then she started making fun of me. Now, she’s a very nice lady. But in my head I was thinking, ‘Why are you treating me this way simply because I chose a candidate?’”

This, as they sat at a school basketball game in the Pittsburgh suburbs — rooting for the same team.

Blues don’t simply disagree with reds, and vice versa. Increasingly, it seems, each side sees the other as just plain wrong. Not like us. Impossible to be around. They use words like “scary” to describe one another’s vision of tomorrow.

The candidates each talk of healing now, of the need to bridge the divides that separate Americans. But how, if compromise would mean moral surrender? Where do we begin, if we can hardly stand to look at each other?

“This has been way too hard-fought a campaign for us immediately to begin hugging,” says the Rev. Welton Gaddy, a Baptist minister and president of the left-leaning Interfaith Alliance.

“There are huge rifts. It’s raw emotions, anger, disappointment. It’s far more than red and blue states.”

‘IT BOTHERS ME A WHOLE LOT’

“How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?” screamed the day-after headline of one liberal British newspaper.

At a bar in Cleveland, tax clerk Bob O’Malley ponders the same question. A Kerry-Edwards button still clipped to his shirt, he bemoans what he sees as the takeover of America by “far right-wing evangelists.”

“I think we’re a country of morons,” he grumbles. “We’re more worried about two guys getting it on together than we are about losing our jobs. We’ve lost more jobs here in Ohio than any other state in the nation. And yet Ohio voted for Bush!

“It bothers me a whole lot.”

What O’Malley decries Jack Miller lauds as a “step in the right direction for America.”

“I’m trying to think of the guy who said it. He was on Fox News. He said that America has chosen morals over economics, and I thought, ‘Wow, what a great statement,’” says Miller, the children’s pastor at Rolston Road Church of God in Irving, Texas.

“The Democrats seem to be more economic-minded, putting all morals aside. ... It’s time to just stand for what we believe.”

But “what we believe” as Americans perhaps has never been so difficult to define.

While the presidential race was close, the reasons voters chose one candidate over another were widely divergent:

Kerry voters cited the economy as their biggest concern; Bush voters were more concerned about moral values. Kerry voters opposed the war in Iraq; Bush voters thought it was the right thing to do. Kerry voters were seeking a candidate who “cares about people like me” Bush voters wanted a man with “strong religious faith.”

And despite all the pre-election talk about war, terrorism and the economy — moral values edged out all of those matters as the issue that mattered most to voters.

DEPTH OF SEPARATION

What separates Americans today goes far beyond ethnic or economic differences — and might sometimes even make those differences moot. It goes beyond region or locality — the reddest state has significant numbers of blue voters, and the other way around.

It’s about deciding whose philosophical perception of the country’s future is the right one.

What one person considers a matter of principle, another sees as religious extremism. What one person considers immoral, another sees as inclusive.

“What this election makes clear, more than ever before, is two profoundly different visions of America and her place in the world,” says Richard Wood, a University of New Mexico sociologist. “There are folks who literally can’t imagine voting for anybody who supports ‘killing babies.’ For others, the question of supporting a ‘woman’s right to choose’ is a deeply moral issue.

“Those differing visions both have very deep roots, and neither has fully captured the American imagination.”

They also incite deep passions that color issues black or white — with very little room for any gray.

Consider the view of the election through these voters’ eyes:

Cristi Gerecke, 25, of Irving, Texas, a Southern Baptist who voted for Bush, said of the candidates: “To me, it just seemed like one was a good person and one wasn’t as good.”

Browsing in the children’s book section of the Family Christian Store, she elaborated: “I guess I’m just more conservative and I’m just scared of what Kerry would do to our country. ... Things like gay marriage. I’m just afraid of what he would let fly by.”

Carol Smith, 60, of Mission Hills, Kan., a Presbyterian minister who voted for Kerry, said of the election: “It’s like a death, except that it’s the death of a country.”

Smith, an advocate for homosexuals whose son is gay, slept for days at her office away from her husband, who was happy Bush won, to “work through my grief.” She wrote a poem that concluded: “I still think God hears a liberal’s prayers. It’s as if the towers have come down again, but this time we have nobody else to blame. Who do we bomb now?”

I’M RIGHT; YOU’RE NOT

No matter what side Americans are on, each “arrogantly assumes that they’re smart and they’re right and they’re logical — and the people on the other side are just irrational and mean,” says Michael Horton, author of “Beyond Culture Wars: Is America a Mission Field or a Battlefield?”

“Both sides,” he says, “treat each other not just as if their ideas are unfounded or wrong, but as if they’re evil people.”

Horton is an evangelical Christian who is surprised so many Americans are surprised at the widespread importance placed on moral values.

“The message I’m getting across-the-board is: How did this possibly happen? That evangelical Christianity is sort of a weird, fringe, cultlike, right-wing phenomenon, and they couldn’t possibly represent mainstream America,” says Horton, a Bush supporter.

He calls that a caricature that leads to alienation. “The ‘cultural elite’ become one bloc and those ‘right-wingers’ become another bloc, and at that point we don’t talk. We demonize.”

At a coffee shop in Henderson, Nev., there was plenty of eye-rolling as Bush and Kerry partisans analyzed the election. But heads on both sides nodded when retired schoolteacher Hugh Hawkins said, “We’ve got problems and I just can’t see a solution. We are becoming balkanized.”

Undoubtedly this election was more “passion-producing,” says sociologist John Evans at the University of California, San Diego. But the country, he argues, is no more divided than it was four years ago or four years before that.

Americans’ differences simply rose to the surface with a vengeance this year — fueled by acrimony over the outcome of the 2000 presidential race, concerns over war and terror and the very vocal debate over the new social issue of the day: gay marriage.

The candidates’ own dissimilarities further stoked dissension.

On the one hand was Bush, a conservative Republican from Texas who speaks openly of morality and of having “recommitted my life to Jesus Christ.”

On the other was Kerry, a left-leaning Democrat from Massachusetts, a Roman Catholic whose social views are contrary to some of the church’s.

“The public isn’t any more polarized, the candidates are more polarizing,” Evans says. “The people who want to represent us represent more extreme perspectives.”

He and others who study social trends say, if anything, Americans have grown more consensual rather than divergent about matters such as their belief in God, patriotism and the importance of family. While those areas of agreement don’t always translate over to social and political values, Americans, fundamentally, are more alike than not.

And even when they do differ, it’s not always a bad thing, right?

“Division is better than apathy,” says Eliza Keller, a high school senior in New Hampshire. In the same breath she admits the election skewed her view of the grown-up world she’ll soon enter.

“It’s a little scary to me, knowing that both sides are so passionate about their views — and so closed-minded.”

Can the differences be bridged? This might be one area in which all sides agree.

Not likely, they say.

Views so deeply rooted in moral doctrine — however a person chooses to interpret “moral” — aren’t likely to change. But Americans suggest they and the nation’s leaders could do more to forge at least some understanding — a way to live together in a society of opposing convictions.

“Learn to accept people the way they are, not how you would like them to be,” says Santa McKenna, a Cuban-American hairdresser in Florida.

“Be more substantive in what we say ... rather than attacking people personally,” says Jerry Folk, a Lutheran minister in Wisconsin.

“The president could do something magnanimous, like naming a Democrat to his cabinet,” suggests Larry Gore, a Bush supporter in Pennsylvania.

“Find a sense of community that goes beyond my needs, my wants ... that draws the lines of community very broadly, so ultimately there is no ‘them,’” says V. Gene Robinson, the nation’s first openly gay Episcopal bishop whose election itself caused great division among churchgoers.

Sociologist Evans’ advice? “Burn all the red and blue maps.”