Farewell to Swift boats and "Shove it!", to Osama's tape and Saddam's missing weapons, to "security moms" and outsourced dads. They've all been sent to history's dustbin faster than Nader memorabilia was dumped on eBay. In their stead stands a single ambiguous phrase coined by an anonymous exit pollster: "Moral values." By near universal agreement the morning after, these two words tell the entire story of the election: It's the culture, stupid.

"It really is Michael Moore versus Mel Gibson," said Newt Gingrich. William Safire, speaking on Meet the Press, called the Janet Jackson fracas "the social-political event of the past year." Karl Rove was of the same mind: "I think it's people who are concerned about the coarseness of our culture, about what they see on the television sets, what they see in the movies."

There's only one problem with the story line proclaiming that the country swung to the right on cultural issues in 2004. Like so many other narratives that immediately calcify into our 24/7 media's conventional wisdom, it is fiction.

Everything about the election results - and about American culture itself - confirms an inescapable reality: John Kerry's defeat notwithstanding, it's blue America, not red, that is inexorably winning the culture war, and by a landslide. Kerry voters who have been flagellating themselves since Election Day with a vengeance worthy of The Passion of the Christ should wake up and smell the chardonnay.

The blue ascendancy is nearly as strong among Republicans as it is among Democrats. Those whose "moral values" are invested in cultural heroes like the accused loofah fetishist Bill O'Reilly and the self-gratifying drug consumer Rush Limbaugh are surely joking when they turn apoplectic over MTV. The Democrats' Ashton Kutcher is trumped by the Republicans' Britney Spears.

If anyone is laughing all the way to the bank this election year, it must be the undisputed king of the red cultural elite, Rupert Murdoch. Fox News is a rising profit center within his News Corp., and each red-state dollar that it makes can be plowed back into the rest of Fox's very blue entertainment portfolio. The Murdoch cultural stable includes recent books like Jenna Jameson's How to Make Love Like a Porn Star and the Vivid Girls' How to Have a XXX Sex Life, which have both been synergistically, even joyously, promoted on Fox News by willing hosts like Rita Cosby and, needless to say, O'Reilly.

It's in the GOP's interest to pander to its far-right constituency - votes are votes - but you can be certain that a party joined at the hip to much of corporate America, Murdoch included, will take no action to curtail the blue culture these voters deplore. As Marshall Wittman, an independent-minded former associate of both Ralph Reed and John McCain, wrote before the election, "The only things the religious conservatives get are largely symbolic votes on proposals guaranteed to fail, such as the gay marriage constitutional amendment."

Thomas Frank - author of the year's most prescient political book, What's the Matter With Kansas? - writes, "Values always take a backseat to the needs of money once the elections are won." Under this perennial "trick," as he calls it, Republican politicians promise to stop abortion and force the culture industry "to clean up its act" - until the votes are counted. Then they return to their higher priorities, like cutting capital gains and estate taxes. Murdoch and his fellow cultural barons - from Sumner Redstone, the Bush-endorsing CEO of Viacom, to Richard Parsons, the Republican CEO of Time Warner, to Jeffrey Immelt, the Bush-contributing CEO of GE (NBC Universal) - are about to be rewarded not just with more tax breaks but also with deregulatory goodies increasing their power to market salacious entertainment. It's they, not Susan Sarandon and Bruce Springsteen, who set the cultural agenda that Gary Bauer et al. say they despise.

But it's not only the GOP's fealty to its financial backers that is predictive of how little cultural bang the "values" voters will get for their Bush-Cheney votes. At 78 percent, the nonvalues voters have far more votes than they do, and both parties will cater to that overwhelming majority's blue tastes first and last. Their mandate is clear: The same poll that clocked "moral values" partisans at 22 percent of the electorate found that nearly three times as many Americans approve of some form of legal status for gay couples, whether civil unions (35 percent) or marriage (27 percent).

Frank Rich is a New York Times columnist

© 2004 Knight Ridder

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