Tax-cutters are calling evangelicals bullies. Christian conservatives say Republicans in Congress have let them down. Hawks say President Bush is bungling the war in Iraq. And many conservatives blame Representative Mark Foley’s sexual messages to teenage pages.
With polls showing Republican control of Congress in jeopardy, conservative leaders are pointing fingers at one another in an increasingly testy circle of blame for potential Republican losses this fall.
...Whether the election will bear out their pessimism remains to be seen, and the factors that contribute to an electoral defeat are often complex and even contradictory. But the post-mortem recriminations can influence politics and policy for years after the fact. After 1992, Republicans shunned tax increases. After 1994, Democrats avoided gun control and health care reform. And 2004 led some Democrats to start quoting Scripture and rethinking abortion rights, while others opened an intraparty debate about the national security that is not yet resolved.
In the case of the Republican Party this year, the skirmish among conservatives over what is going wrong has begun unusually early and turned unusually personal.
But almost regardless of the outcome on Nov. 7, many conservatives express frustration that the party has lost its ideological focus. And after six years of nearly continuous control over the White House and Congress, conservatives are having a hard time finding anyone but one another to blame.
Well. I fail to see what the Evangelicals in particular have to do with the fact that the Republican Congress and the Republican president have spent money and run up the deficit at a level not seen since LBJ's Great Society. I fail to see what the Evangelicals in particular have to do with the fact that this administration, with the backing of the GOP Congress, has gotten America mired in another Vietnam. I fail to see what the Evangelicals in particular have to do with the rank cronyism throughout this Administration, which helped bring us such triumphs as the Hurricane Katrina response. I say "in particular" because the Evangelicals, by and large, didn't object to any of these things, all of which are key to the coming Republican collapse. (An exception: as conservative political scientist James Kurth has written in an essay I can't link to, but once blogged about, there is a direct philosophical link between crusading Wilsonianism in US foreign policy and American Protestantism; still, I don't see that the Evangelicals were particularly to blame for the Iraq debacle, any more than Jewish neoconservatives were; the Iraq fiasco has many fathers in the GOP camp).
But see, it'll be easy after the November slaughter to blame the Evangelicals, because the media despises them. In fact, Kurth predicted as much in that American Interest essay. Evangelicals and other Christian conservatives had better be prepared for a time in the wilderness. The people who really count in the GOP -- the financial backers, who are not by and large Christian conservatives -- will have it out for them, and the Democrats will not be intellectually or ideologically positioned to appeal to them.
Anyway, in the Times piece, Dick Armey is quoted saying: “The Republicans are talking about things like gay marriage and so forth, and the Democrats are talking about the things people care about, like how do I pay my bills?” I think that's a false distinction. People do care about keeping traditional marriage. But if the Republicans think they can run only on those sorts of issues, which have worked in the past, they're wrong.
Me, I strongly care about the gay marriage issue, but it could not be clearer by the record of this last Congress and Mr. Bush that the Republicans don't give a rat's ass about it, except as something to gin up the holy rollers to vote for them. So I'm not prepared to be used by the Rovians again. Also, I care a very great deal about what's going on in Iraq, in part because I have a close family member in the military. I care a lot about the financial precariousness the president and Congress have left us in. These are all serious moral issues. Abortion and "culture of life" issues are the only thing in my mind that the GOP has going for it, but even then I don't know to what extent they really believe in the sanctity of life, and to what extent they're just using it like they use gay marriage.
I can't bring myself to vote Democratic, because I have no faith in the Democrats. But somebody's got to hold the Republicans accountable for their failures. I doubt very much I'm going to vote for them at the national level, because they have not earned my vote.
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It's not a surprise to me that the GOP has used evangelicals.
What surprises me is how evangelicals keep falling for the same old schtick EVERY SINGLE election year! Wake up, people!
I guess if I want to get elected as Republican, all I have to do is a.) Wear an elephant pin on my lapel, b.) say the words "Jesus" and "traditional" a lot, c.) pretend to know something about NASCAR, d.) shake my head solemnly over the memory of having watched the Democrats kill Terri Schavio as she danced and sang in her hospital room for Tom Delay and Bill Frist, and e.) suggest that "The Flintstones" should be taught to our school children as an accurate picture of pre-historic times.
Good grief. If evangelicals want to be respected as a political power (meaning, the seek and GET results), then thery ought to quit acting like star-struck fools whenever some gasbag pol starts sermonizing.>
"a.) Wear an elephant pin on my lapel"
No, no, Matt, it needs to be an American flag, because otherwise, we wouldn't know you were a patriot.>
David J. White,
"But when you build an addition onto a house, you have to be careful not to demolish or weaken one of the load-bearing walls in the original structure"
Do you believe that allowing gays to marry "demolishes" and/or "weakens" marriage? And if so, how?>
Let's be truthful: Right wingers in this country have from the outset been interested only in establishing themselves as an aristocracy and cared little how they did so.
They used the libertarians to cut government only because they wanted to redirect that money to programs (conveniently, military spending) that would give them more authority. They used the evangelicals because they had "targets" they wanted to eliminate, and as someone said whose name I can't think of right now, "Conservatism needs an enemy."
It is thus no surprise that the right was actually floundering after the Soviet Union collapsed -- it needed another bete noir, and turned out to be Clinton.
Bottom line, "Hate sells.">
Jonathan suggests:
the Republican Party has been faithful to evangelical concerns, while balancing the concerns of other wings. The main ethical concern I remember from the Reagan Revolution was abortion. Reagan's faithfulness brought a gazillion Southern pro-life Democrats into the Republican fold.
Interesting then that 2 of the 3 Reagan SC appointees were faithful ("centrist") upholders of Roe. In fact, we're still waiting for one to die... or retire. Reagan was the original Zen Master at smokescreening the religious right. It all began with him, with the cooperation the Religious Right's all-to-credulous leaders (and followers). Ergo Rove. In fact, in comparison to Reagan, Dubya's SC nominees have been superb. Alas, this alone I find in his favor.>
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