Two reviews of “Voting to Kill” are in; both are generally positive but also make some criticisms.

First, Scott Johnson of Powerline reviewed Voting to Kill in the print edition of National Review. (You are a subscriber, right? Subscribe, folks, subscribe!) 

So – I’m going to presume that all of you have either subscribed, and have read it, or have bought it at the newsstand, just to read Scott’s review. Scott is overall very generous, and I thank him for the kind words, including his conclusion that the book is “by turns good-humored, optimistic, and shrewd.” Below I’m going to address the bones that he picks, and try to give a sense of where I was coming from.

The third and fourth words of the review are “awkwardly titled.” Well, the title of the proposal was “Vote to Kill”, more directly evoking “shoot to kill” and, I thought, a memorable way of describing the pugnacious attitude of voters in the post-9/11 America. At some point in the writing and editing process, the Powers That Be at Simon & Schuster liked “Voting to Kill”, perhaps to avoid having two “t” sounds next to each other. I was amenable to the change; you’ve got to pick your battles, and when people whose job is to sell books say one title works better than the other, it’s often best to listen to ‘em. 

Scott makes an interesting point, noting that Nixon and Reagan were reelected by landslides; in this new era of Republican leadership that I’m describing, Bush came within an Ohio of losing the presidency to “an incredibly weak Democratic nominee.” So if I’m describing a shift in favor of Republicans, why are they doing worse at the presidential level? I think I might quibble with Scott’s description of Walter Mondale as “a solid Democratic opponent”; and while we can debate whether Kerry was an incredibly weak nominee, 2004 was not a weak effort on the part of the Democratic party as a whole. Their get-out-the-vote efforts largely worked as they were designed. If the GOP turned out a “normal” GOTV effort, we would have President Kerry now; it’s because the Republicans studied their mistakes of 2000 and utilized innovative techniques and made a Herculean nationwide effort that Bush won by the 3 percent margin that he did. 

Yes, the post-9/11 world results in more Republicans, and more motivated Republican voters. But it also probably results in a core of more motivated Democrat voters, who see the entire war on terror as the president’s fault, and believe that electing the right Democrat will clear up this whole mess – the result of American imperialism and insensitivity to other cultures - real quick. Michael Moore doesn’t have enough supporters to build a majority, but the minority that do support him revere him with a wild-eyed intensity, and they show up on Election Day.

Thinking back to that county-by-county map of the 2004 vote, we saw that the Democrats win in big cities and university towns, and lose in the suburbs and rural areas. The difference between 2004 and 1984 or 1972 is that these cities have turned into such rock-solid and extraordinarily vote-rich Democratic turf. Without Philadelphia, Pennsylvania would be a deep red state; same for Illinois without Chicago, or even California without LA and San Francisco. There are those who believe that Kerry’s entire margin of victory in Wisconsin was the result of voter fraud in Milwaukee.

The fact that cities have become seemingly endless wells for Democratic votes probably reflects who lives in those cities – minorities, public sector union members, gays and lesbians, DINKs (double income, no kids), young singles, those who are so rich that they no longer worry about taxes, etc. I go on at length in the book about how 9/11 affected parents of school-age children; the exurbs are the most affordable place to raise a child these days. This is where you find families with young children and this is where you find the Republican base today. I think that’s one of the factors that changed the most since the Reagan and Nixon landslides. 

Finally, Scott disagrees with my belief that Hillary Clinton is a genuine hawk. On this, he’s got 98 percent of the conservative world in his corner, including TKS Dad, while I’ve got…  

…well, just the evidence that if Hillary wanted to be an anti-Iraq war dove, she could do it and suffer little or no political consequence. Kerry, Edwards, hell, even Evan Bayh are all channeling their inner George McGovern, their inner “come-home-America let’s-stop-fighting-for-neocons-and-oil-companies,” to riotous applause from the party’s base. But Hillary refuses to take back her vote for the war, or call for an immediate withdrawal.  

Look, from the moment she appeared on the national scene, Hillary’s reputation was that she had deep reserves of untapped anger, and was capable of lashing out in a cold-blooded vindictiveness on those she considered to be enemies. If we see her, in our mind’s eye, lashing out with such unadulterated – er, maybe bad word choice when it comes to the Clintons; such unmitigated - fury at Ken Starr, Newt Gingrich, Bob Dole, etc.; then why does everyone think she’ll be conciliatory and passive when it comes to Osama bin Laden or Mahmoud Ahmedinijad? We conservatives have been on the receiving end of Hillary’s white-hot anger for, oh, about fourteen years now. If she were to be elected President, a silver lining might be seeing this nuclear reactor of ire, this B-52 of vindictiveness, this relentless wrath focused on somebody else for a change, somebody who actually deserves it, like America’s enemies. 

On another front, I had mentioned to Mark Tapscott, editorial page editor of the Washington Examiner, that I was curious what a liberal hawk would think of my book. As luck would have it, Marc Danzinger, a.k.a. Armed Liberal, is another Examiner Blog Board member, fits that label like a glove and agreed to review it. 

His review can be found here; his further thoughts can be found here. He notes:

Simply put, voters believe that the GOP will kill our enemies, and don’t believe the Democrats can or will. I’ll declare my bias: As an analyst, I agree with the core analysis conceptually, and as a voter — a liberal Democrat who voted for Bush over Kerry for exactly that reason — it hits me personally as well.

Marc more kind words, but also describes its central point as “a good argument made by an ultimately frustrating book.”

Here, the book is trapped by its style — because he is making a point by accreting anecdotes rather than setting out theories — and it takes four long chapters for him to make his case; and it remains somewhat unsatisfying.

Interesting. There are a couple of ways to make an argument or make a point. If I tell you, “crime in the city is up 5 percent,” your mind will register and process the information one way; if I tell you the details of that expanded five percent – the helplessness Granny felt when she had her purse snatched, the anger of the buddy finding his car broken into, the frustration and wasted hours of the guy who has to replace everything in his wallet that the pickpocket took, the fear of the woman who was mugged at gunpoint – it has a much more powerful impact.  The first method is abstract, bloodless; the second paints an emotionally-gripping, attention-grabbing portrait in its details. When I was setting out to illustrate the contrast between the two parties, I went for the second option.

For example, I didn’t just want to say, “liberals, if not elected Democrats, said some clumsy, insensitive, or foolish things after 9/11”; I went out and listed those comments of Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, posters on an anti-globalization chat board, Katha Pollitt, Amos Brown, Ted Rall, Oliver Stone, Richard Gere, Robert Fisk, Howard Zinn, Gloria Steinem, Alice Walker… Rather than only use a few examples and be accused of cherry-picking the data, I decided to list one after another after another until the collective weight of them all refuted any counterargument; I think that after one reads the chapter, you can’t really argue that ‘only a few bad apples’ among our academic, media and Hollywood elites reacted way out of the mainstream after 9/11. Because we don’t have exact data  - “45 percent of Hollywood celebrities described their political views as ‘those of a raving moonbat’” – this is about the only way I could make the argument.

I suppose this method can lend itself to long chapters and piles of anecdotes. I also have a minor quibble with Marc’s point:

My primary wish for the book is that he had dipped a little more into theory — or into the cultural anthropology of the Democratic Party. Because it’s now led by people like me — by the cohort that came of age during Vietnam and the aftermath of the Summer of Love. In The New York Times, Andrew Rosenthal writes about a protest concert with CSN & Y and wistfully — mourns the fact that, “This, perhaps, is the ultimate difference between the Vietnam generation and the Iraq generation: When you hear Young and company sing of “four dead in Ohio,” their Kent State anthem, it’s hard to imagine anyone on today’s campuses willing to face armed troops. Is there anything they care about that much?”

 

The leadership of the intellectual engines of our society — academia, media, journalism, policy — all look back with the same hazy nostalgia at the mixture of purpose, license and power they think we had back then. It would have been interesting to trace the roots — cultural and intellectual — of the Democratic Party leadership and the thousands of staffers, analysts and thinkers who make up the bones of the party.

I was told a long while back that this is the cardinal sin of book reviews – playing the “instead of writing about X, I wish the author had written about Y” chord. (I was taught that you don't judge the book based on how it compares to the way you would have written it; you judge it based on whether the author made the point to set out to, and on the value of that overall point.) 

Having said that, Marc's right, it would have been interesting to get into that. (Of course, the book is 366 pages or so as is, and Good God, man, I’ve got to stop somewhere!) The other thing is, that as a right-of-center-guy, I’ll admit that I’m on the outside looking in when it comes to the Democrats. I set out to write a book that would get some Democrats to say, “Huh, you know, he’s got a point,”; I have a feeling that if I had set out to explain why Democrats believe what they believe, the book would have come out a bit more critical. Something like, “Because, you know, a coterie of the elites of these self-absorbed Baby Boomers have always believed that they knew better than us, and they think our furious anger at those who murdered our countrymen is a symptom of our lack of sophistication.”

A book tracing the roots of the Democratic Party leadership’s beliefs and how they have evolved* would probably make some interesting and illustrative reading. 

I hope some publisher signs up Marc Danzinger to write it.

*Actually, I reject that notion; I believe that most Democrats’ beliefs were “intelligently designed” by the editorial board of the New York Times and have remained constant since their inception, highly resistent to pressure to adapt despite dramatic changes in the environment around them.