It wasn’t exactly “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” but Frank Luntz did go down to Alabama — and ran a Roy Moore focus group in a devilishly biased way.
Asking leading questions loaded with incorrect implications, the GOP-establishment messaging consultant was flabbergasted when he couldn’t get his desired answers and the Alabama focus-group stayed steadfast in its support for Republican Senate candidate Moore.
Moore, who many believe is the victim of a smear campaign involving 40-year-old sexual misconduct allegations, will face Democrat Doug Jones in Tuesday’s special election for now-attorney general Jeff Sessions’ open Senate seat.
In a segment that aired on HBO’s Vice News Tonight on December 8, Luntz (shown) began with a tactic common among secular moderns. As Breitbart reported:
“Are you all Christians here?” Luntz opens the seven-and-a-half-minute long segment. “Yes,” all of the focus group participants, who joined Luntz in a Birmingham area restaurant, replied.
“Is Roy Moore a good Christian?” he followed up.
“Yes,” one woman replied. “Absolutely,” another said.
“Absolutely?” Luntz followed up in disbelief. “Yes,” the woman shot back. “Without any doubt whatsoever?” Luntz asked again.
It’s interesting how people of little or no faith will not only seek to use Christians’ faith against them, but also behave as if they know precisely what Christianity would dictate in a given situation.
For instance, in assessing Moore vs. Jones, Christians would have to consider the possibility that one of the more damning allegations against Moore may be true. This, however, would have to be weighed against the race’s far greater scandal: that Jones is pro-prenatal infanticide — up until the moment of birth, apparently — and pro-”transgender” agenda to the point of believing boys claiming girlhood should be able to use girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms. Note, too, that these aren’t positions Jones took 40 years ago; he takes them today. And as I illustrated here, Jones is, in fact, a full-fledged radical leftist.
One or two of the focus-group members, alluding to Jones’ leftism, mentioned that their support for Moore was a lesser-of-two-evils calculation. As Scottie Porter, a real estate developer, put it:
[Moore is] not my choice; I’m not voting for him because I like him. I’m voting for him because I don’t want Doug Jones. But Roy Moore is entitled to the presumption of innocence in the law and in the Bible just like anybody else should be. There are only accusations; there have been no charges filed. All you have is a group of women who have come forward.
Later on, other respondents defended Moore as a man of integrity. Nonetheless, the group didn’t seem clear on the nature of the allegations — and Luntz did not clarify matters.
Either out of guile or his own moral confusion, Luntz implicitly conflated the seven women who say they dated Moore and that he acted like a perfect gentleman, with two women who make actual allegations.
As for the latter, Beverly Young Nelson, perhaps Moore’s most damning accuser, has been refuted by numerous witnesses and, most recently, admitted to having lied: She revealed she had altered a yearbook entry that she claimed was written by Judge Moore.
Then there’s Leigh Corfman, who claims she was 14 when Moore took her out, but who herself has a suspicion-raising checkered past that includes sexual-misconduct charges against other men. Note that none of this means her allegations aren’t true, but we also don’t know that they are true. Yet there’s one thing we do know: There’s something wrong with this picture, in that this allegation absolutely doesn’t fit with Moore’s pattern of behavior.
This brings us to what Luntz lumped in with actual allegations: Courting-type behavior with of-age young ladies in relationships that generally had the parents’ blessings. As I explained last month:
[C]ertainly, such male-female age gaps aren’t in fashion today. Yet historically, such gaps weren’t unusual. Why, truly pushing the envelope, famed comedian Charlie Chaplin married an 18-year-old when he was 53; they lived happily and had eight children together.
Moreover, greater age gaps are more common in the Deep South, and especially were so 40 years ago. This explains the mothers who were thrilled at the prospect of Moore courting their daughters.
Lastly, Moore is a devout Christian. From this more traditionalist perspective, age gaps between age-of-consent individuals are not as significant as whether a man and woman abide by God’s laws governing sexuality (e.g., no premarital relations). Interestingly, though, the cultural-relativism preaching Left, which rails against the “imposition of values,” has no tolerance for Deep South Christian culture.
Moreover, the hypocrisy here is striking. Late congressman Gerry Studds (D-Mass.) had a relationship involving actual sex with a 17-year-old boy, and not only weren’t there calls for his political destruction, he was re-elected until his retirement in 1997.
Then there was Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA), who might have been guilty of involuntary manslaughter in the drowning death of a young woman in 1969 and who was guilty of sexual misconduct in the infamous “waitress sandwich” incident in 1985. His consequences?
The establishment lauded Kennedy — dubbing him the “Lion of the Senate” — his whole life and after his death.
Question: So when did the establishment, and the Left in particular, find their moral compass, that previously absent thing with which they’re now condemning Judge Moore?
As for Luntz, his political compass misfired as well. He confronted the focus group with the statement, “Not a single African-American is in this group” and asked what it said about Alabama; he passionately stated that “97 percent of the African-American community is going to vote for Doug Jones,” implying that something was wrong with the state or with Moore himself.
This is intellectual dishonesty — at best. Being a politics wonk, Luntz surely knows the GOP has long derived 90 percent of its votes from whites. He surely knows that every election, nationwide, black Americans vote Democrat by a 90-plus-percent margin (in 2012, some black Pennsylvania precincts gave 100 percent of their vote to Barack Obama). In other words, Alabama aligns closely with established patterns.
Perhaps, however, black Americans might think more highly of Moore if the wider media did their job and reported that — as even the leftist New York Times admitted — as a judge Moore consistently sided with the little guy (and notably, black defendants) against the powers-that-be. And perhaps everyone would like him more if we heard about the army buddy who describes the judge as a man of the highest character. Then there’s the Guardian, another liberal paper, that launched an investigation into time Moore spent in Australia in the ‘80s — and found that no one described him as anything but a gentleman.
Unfortunately, whatever the truth on Judge Moore, that’s not a description that can be applied to his establishment attackers.
Screen-grab at top: Frank Luntz running Roy Moore focus group aired on HBO’s Vice News.
