Bruised purple: hatred in Virginia for voting 'wrong'

For two weeks now, liberal commentators have been lamenting the election results. There is nothing unusual about this; losers do so every four years. But expressing disappointment at the result, and venting anger against the voters, are two different things. This year has seen an inordinate amount of the latter, even locally.

Perhaps it is just a function of time. Sixteen years is a long interval between popular vote losses. In winning his second term in the White House, President George W. Bush became the first president since 1988 win an outright majority of the popular vote. In his two victories, Bill Clinton failed to get more than 49 percent of the vote. And it is not necessary to remind any Democrat that Al Gore received more popular votes than Bush four years ago.

Perhaps it is a function of feeling entitled. During those 16 years, liberal Democrats evidently concluded that they were owed popular vote majorities, and that any other election result must have some nefarious explanation. Recall that in 1994, when Republicans took over the Congress for the first time in 40 years, liberal Democrats made up the “angry white male” myth. Democrats’ comments 10 years ago were gentle, mild and sportsmanlike compared to the venom of 2004.

Virginia was a “red state” in 2004. Its voters backed Bush more solidly than they did four years ago. When the national commentators speak ill of Bush voters, or of red-state voters, bear in mind that they are speaking of Virginia.

Even more striking, though, is the hatred that Virginians have expressed about their fellow citizens. A perusal of the Op-Ed pages and of the Letters to the Editor to the Roanoke Times over the past two weeks shows that even Roanokers are capable of comments dripping with disdain, snobbery and outright hatred. Some of our neighbors are not giving a good impression of the Star City.

A graphic artist at Virginia Western, for example, begins an Op-Ed: “This is an unmitigated disaster for the United States and deeply humiliating. The most irresponsible administration in my lifetime has been endorsed by the self-absorbed voters…” There it is: the blame for the rest of us. We voted for President Bush out of self-absorption. In the same column, the author calls Bush voters fools, idiots, extremists, selfish and shortsighted.

My colleague columnist, former Delegate Barnie Day, vented his spleen in a column called “Zell Nation.” America, he suggests, was bamboozled by “[Rush] Limbaugh, the porcine, thrice-divorced, drug addicted, puff-faced, self-appointed, un-elected arbiter now of our family values, and Anne Coulter, a crane-necked shrew with the intellect of a ferret, and not your average ferret, but one of those runt of the litter ones.” He sums up the attitude of Zell Nation, and, in the process, reveals his own attitude toward the voters, with these words: “Lookit, in Zell Nation, yer either fer us, or agin us, right?”

Of course, those same inarticulate, bamboozled voters also voted for Barnie Day. Twice.

Letters to the Roanoke Times from readers have included the following helpful and constructive phrases, obviously intended to bridge the gap between “red” and “blue” America: “Four more years of [Bush] and we will create our own terrorist disaster – with no help from the outside”; “[Bush supporters] have tried so hard to block our freedom of speech”; “Not morality, but fear and bias ruled the day”; “[Republicans] can’t oversimplify too much or be too mean-spirited”; “We support lying, treachery and incompetence”; and “our long national nightmare has only just begun.”

In between the name-calling, some letter-writers spoke wistfully of secession, but with a shocking parting wish for the rest of us: “We liberals may be able to convince Canada to annex us…. We can then tell the terrorists that we’re Canadian citizens opposed to the Iraqi war.” (Translation: Attack them. Leave us alone.)

It is democracy that is under attack in columns and letters like these. If you define those who are different from you as stupid, selfish and fearful (to say of nothing of puff-faced and crane-necked), it is all too easy to go from there to believing that millions of Americans should not have the vote at all. (Come to think of it, this is an attitude similar to that of the last group to desire secession.)

If our neighbors would stop hyperventilating for a moment, they would see that the 2004 race was closer in Virginia than in any other Southern state except Florida. Virginia has a Democratic governor, and will likely have a close election for governor next year. Relatively speaking, Democrats are doing well here.

But it is hard to imagine how Democrats can believe that the way to get a majority in Virginia is to repeatedly insult the 1,716,959 Virginians who voted for George W. Bush. Or perhaps Democrats think that the next time they ask us for our vote, we’ll forget what they really think of us.

Don’t count on it.