Wary Democrats Discover a Severe "Parents Gap"

[Hat tip: again to Laura Ingraham]

Donald Lambro in The Washington Times reports:

An analysis by a Democratic think tank argues that Democrats are suffering from a severe "parent gap" among married people with children, who say the entertainment industry is lowering the moral standards of the country.

The study, published last week by the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), the policy arm of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, admonishes Democrats to pay more attention to parental concerns about "morally corrosive forces in the culture," and warns that the party will not fare better with this pivotal voting bloc until they do.

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"Democrats will not do better with married parents until they recognize one simple truth: Parents have a beef with popular culture. As they see it, the culture is getting ever more violent, materialistic, and misogynistic, and they are losing their ability to protect their kids from morally corrosive images and messages," said the study's author, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, co-director of the National Marriage Project of Rutgers University and a senior fellow at PPI.

"To be credible, Democrats must acknowledge the legitimacy of parents' beef and make it unmistakably clear that they are on the parents' side," Ms. Whitehead said.

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Urging Democrats to change the way they look at cultural issues, the PPI report calls on party leaders to "use the bully pulpit regularly and aggressively to identify with parents' concerns and to attack the irresponsible marketeers of violence and sleaze to young kids."

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Some Democrats, chastened by their losses in last year's elections, are beginning to test a variety of social, cultural and religious appeals that have been at the core of the Republican Party's success at the ballot box.

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In an attempt to reach out to evangelical Christians in the Republican red states, Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, has been talking much more about values and "the culture," and sprinkling his attacks on Republicans with phrases from the Bible.

"We need to kick the money changers out of the temple and restore moral values to America," he said last week in Florida.

But an online survey of 11,568 Dean supporters released earlier this month by the Pew Research Center found that such religious or culturally conservative appeals may not play well with liberal Democrats.

Among the Pew findings, 38 percent of Dean supporters polled said they had no religious affiliation, compared with 11 percent of all Americans; 91 percent supported same-sex "marriage," compared with 38 percent of all Democrats; and 80 percent said they were liberals, compared with 27 percent of all Democrats.

[More]

My Comments (updated):
Democrat efforts to reach so-called "values voters" through "a variety of social, cultural and religious appeals" are unlikely to prove successful because the Democrat Party is just not seen as credible on these issues after over 30 years of being on the wrong side of the Culture Wars. Any attempts to mimic Republican success with traditional "values" issues will rightly be viewed by the voters as the disingenuous gestures they are. However, there is one tried and tested weapon in the Democrat arsenal that could be successfully utilized to breach the "parent gap".

Remember how the Clintons gave the impression that they were sensitive to the needs of parents and families? It seemed that everything the Clinton Administration did - almost every single action that was taken - was couched in terms of being "for the children". Whether or not the policy at issue actually had anything remotely to do with children.

Look for the Democrats to re-adopt the "for the children" strategy in order to try to close the "parent gap" that currently favors the Republicans.