I sympathize with Duncan, but Tim Russert is right: "values" are "all about teh gay and what goes on in uteruses." Once the word "values" became ascendant in political discourse, Democrats started trying to reclaim it. So health care's a values issue, progressive taxation is a values issue, the environment is a values issue, etc. But they're not.
This is something Geoffrey Numberg writes about in his coming book, Talking Right. Over the last couple of years, "values" got a definitional infusion. It's no longer a simple synonym for moral issue, at least not when we're talking in the political sense. Republicans have anchored it to a couple specific issues, and every time Democrats try to broaden the word back out, they just reactivate a frame -- a whole narrative, really -- that cuts against them.
It's notable that the CAP poll Duncan links to doesn't actually use the word "value," it asks about the most pressing "moral crisis." Which sort of proves the point. Voters don't think hot woman-on-woman action is challenging the republic, but they sure think the left is bad on "values." For that reason, Russert actually gets it correct: "values" has become a bastardized version of itself, and liberals should stop pretending differently. Luckily, the term has no internal importance and, for now, can be cast safely aside. The left needs to concentrate on creating and popularizing its own political vocabulary, not launching uphill battles to reclaim words the right long ago won. Restoring those terms is certainly an important long-term project, but with the midterms looming, we need to stop fighting the last election.
