Bush v. Kerry

I've found a couple interesting quotes in stories on the election over the last couple of days.

In this MSNBC story, we find the following:

Betsy Bodenhamer, a 33-year-old teacher’s aide and mother of two from Galesburg, Ill., says she has always voted for Democrats in recent presidential elections. This year, she’s leaning toward Bush.
“I think if Kerry gets elected, he’s going to pull everybody out of Iraq and they’ll have to fend for themselves,” she said. “Situations like 9/11 will happen again and again.”

And in this Newsweek internet exclusive, we find this quote (from this NYTimes story):

Tom Ampleman, a blue-collar union member who lives near this suburb just outside St. Louis, says he voted for Bill Clinton twice and then Al Gore, but he is now grappling with deep religious misgivings about the Democratic Party.

"I haven't declared myself a Republican, but if I had to go in there and vote right now I probably would vote for the Republicans," Mr. Ampleman said recently, sitting in his pickup truck at a public park here.

"I'm not happy with the moral issues at all with the Democrats," continued Mr. Ampleman, who works as a welder at an aerospace company. "The Republicans will hurt me in the long run in providing for my family, but it's probably more important to watch out for the unborn and that kind of stuff."

Now, I disagree with Mr. Ampleman when he says that Republican policies will be more harmful to his ability to provide for his family, but regardless... statements like this befuddle liberals to no end. How -- they wonder -- can people vote for politicians whose policies are harmful to them? Ampleman gives them the answer: because on the most important issues, those politicians have it right, and voters like these are more interested in voting according to principle than pocketbook.

You realize what's going on here? You have voters who act against their own self-interests, and liberals -- who constantly attack and villify conservatives as the supporters of the rich and opporessors of the little guy, i.e. as the ones who act solely according to their own self-interests -- are upset and dumbfounded!

For more on this, read the Newsweek exlusive I linked... the title of the story is, "It's About Abortion, Stupid," and its point is that

Democrats stick to the uninspiring and oversimplified notion that people reliably vote their pocketbook, period. In this view, even Iraq is as much as anything else an economic disaster. “This is the Clinton legacy; never strike a moral issue,” complains one Kerry adviser who feels his alternative view has not been heard.

The author also notes, regarding Mr. Ampleman,

I find it wonderful that there are Tom Amplemans out there for whom voting is not only an economic calculation—a what’s-in-it-for-me? decision—but a moral exercise, a matter of trying to do the right thing.

But Democrats don’t seem to get that. And they don’t get Tom at all.

Crazy world, as Scorpions said.

(Hat tip to Emily of After Abortion for linking the Newsweek article.)