The fact of the matter is that a great many people really don’t care about foreign policy. There are lots of people who do (and they tend to be reliable voters, I imagine), but most only care insofar as it touches their day-to-day lives (such as when they feared for their safety following 9/11). On the other hand, people care a great deal about social issues. Social issues touch on everyday issues and on everyday ideas. Gay marriage and abortion, in particular, are religiously charged. More people care about their own government’s endorsement of sinful acts than about whether some abstract number of tax dollars goes to support a military venture in a faraway country that hasn’t affected daily life in the slightest (it seems).

That last also implies that people who care about gay marriage are more likely to act. Foreign policy is understood on a much more intellectual level than are social issues. One can intellectually agree with a foreign policy platform, and one can pay attention to the news from Iraq, etc, without feeling a visceral need to vote for the guy who will handle it best. On the other hand, social issues are understood more emotionally, and it’s hard to have a position on a social issue while not believing that it’s worth working to make sure your side wins.

I was rambling. The gist of the above is that the conflict between foreign policy and social issues doesn’t exist in the mind of a representative voter. Gay marriage wasn’t a tie breaker for individuals, but for the electorate. Many voters just didn’t care that much about foreign policy.

While gay marriage may have secured a couple of states, the war secured a whole bunch more.

the fact that YOU, p.c., do NOT believe same is incredible to me. there are republican strategists who, on record, confirm that dirty tricks like what republicans did in ohio WORK, that if they didn’t work, the party wouldn’t use them.

but go ahead and craft your revisionist history.

in the meantime, might i suggest to people who are interested in reality …

here’s an excerpt from a nyt article quoting a conservative christian leader …

Conservative Christians, both Protestant and Catholic, were first in line to stake their claims, citing polls showing that a plurality of Bush supporters named “moral values” as the most important issue and arguing that a drive to ban same-sex marriage boosted turnout in Ohio.

“Make no mistake – conservative Christians and ‘values voters’ won this election for George W. Bush and Republicans in Congress,” Mr. Viguerie wrote in a memorandum sent to other prominent conservatives. “It’s crucial that the Republican leadership not forget this – as much as some will try,” he said, underlining the final clause.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/04/politics/campaign/04conserve.html

here are some more articles on same …

Bush matched his 2000 performance in Ohio’s urban areas, but his campaign more decisively brought out waves of voters in his rural base. Compared with 2000, his vote totals and margins of victory soared all across Ohio’s Appalachian southeast and its southern and western farm belt. He even won over Ohio’s Amish, capturing Holmes County in the heart of Amish country with 76 percent of the total.
….
Campaign operatives and analysts point to the same motivating factor: Bush’s conservative positions on social issues, particularly his opposition to abortion and his advocacy of a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. The president developed a national strategy based on those issues during a year when many voters put morality-based themes at the top of their own agendas, exit polling showed.

It all came together perfectly in Ohio where Issue 1, a proposal to amend the state constitution to define marriage as only the union of a man and a woman, passed overwhelmingly on Tuesday.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23754-2004Nov3.html

(btw, the amish don’t care about war.)

Exit polls indicated that voters who identified moral values as their top issue overwhelmingly supported Bush.

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/politics/20041104-9999-1n4faith.html

point made?

2004 was a referendum on neo-con foreign policy.

i took this to mean that voters in 2004 reelected bush as a show of support, a validation of neocon f.p. — that neocon thinking had a mandate.

i disagree. bush won by only 3M votes … the race was extremely tight in several states. bush squeaked by in states like ohio and iowa because the republican party worked assiduously tying a democratic victory to legalized gay marriage and the subsequent takeover of the world by the homosexual cabal.

in that sense, the election was certainly not a referendum supporting bush and his neocon friends. if anything, the opposite is true. bush won 2004 because of the threat of gay marriage.

he should have been way ahead in the polls, but the increasing perception that the war had been mismanaged “rendered this election more competitive than it would otherwise be.”

***
ian — you are correct … the gay-marriage issue was specifically targeted in swing states and through the bible belt to motivate base turnout.