Posted on 01/15/2005 7:14:43 AM PST by Libloather
U.S. conservatives gunning for the presidential payoff
Jan. 15, 2005. 08:14 AM
TIM HARPER
PHOENIX, Ariz.—When U.S. President George W. Bush takes his oath of office next week in the midst of a $40-million, four-day orgy of Republican euphoria, he will be carrying the dreams of a newly emboldened conservative movement. The American right is ascendant. It is empowered. And it is impatient.
Evangelicals and ``faith-based'' groups are looking to Bush to do nothing less than entrench a conservative philosophy, one they believe has long been trampled and one they expect will last a generation or more.
Their fundamental beliefs have changed little with the times. They want gay marriage outlawed by the U.S. Constitution. They want the Supreme Court's landmark Roe v. Wade abortion rights decision overturned. They want abstinence taught over contraception and creationism over evolution. They want the airwaves, the cinemas and the Internet purged of all things perceived prurient.
Now, they have the money and the power. And they believe they have one of their own in the White House.
Inevitably, the gulf between Canada and its neighbour to the south is about to widen.
``I see evidence all around that America is becoming more conservative,'' says Janice Crouse, executive director of the Beverly LaHaye Institute, a powerful right-wing think tank. ``I believe it is a backlash after so many years of so much sexual freedom.''
The institute is part of Concerned Women for America, a fiercely partisan organization that boasts 500,000 members and an $11 million (all figures U.S.) annual budget. Crouse says her group was able to clarify the most important election issues for the American public: abortion and gay marriage.
``It would be egocentric to take credit for the president's re-election,'' she says. ``But traditionally, the person who has been elected to serve in the White House gives back to those who helped him attain that office.''
Tom Minnery, vice president of influential media group Focus on the Family agrees.
Minnery sits in his Colorado Springs office at the organization's sprawling 81-hectare complex, the nation's largest factory of evangelical beliefs. The group receives so much correspondence from its faithful, it even has its own ZIP code. Minnery says Focus on the Family and its founder, the country's most popular evangelist, James Dobson, helped elect Bush.
``We contributed. We helped,'' he says. ``We take credit for people paying attention to the issues. Undoubtedly, some of them voted for the president, (people) who otherwise would have stayed home. He owes the people who voted for him the allegiance to the issues he ran on.''
Focus on the Family and Concerned Women for America are joined by other troops in this Christian army: the Alliance for Marriage, the Family Research Council and the 16-million-strong Southern Baptist Convention, whose Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission is headed by Richard Land, a man with an especially close relationship with born-again Bush.
Minnery reiterates the beliefs that bring these groups together.
``People voted for him because he supported traditional marriage, because he supported faith-based organizations.
``He needs to keep his compact with the people who elected him.''
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Since Bush's re-election victory over Democrat John Kerry in November, political theorists have had no shortage of theories to explain the win.
Americans were fearful of changing leaders in the midst of a costly war in Iraq. Kerry did not convince them he could keep them safe. He had no coherent message. Bush was likeable and more in tune with the heartland.
However, the early verdict, based on somewhat suspect exit polling done for U.S. media, seized on the fact that 22 per cent of voters said they cast their ballots based on ``values.''
Bush's political guru, Karl Rove, fed the perception immediately. He is also credited with mobilizing the 4 million evangelicals who sat on the sidelines in 2000.
Democrats, says Luis Lago, of the Pew Forum on Religion, relied on ``527s,'' lobby groups which spent tens of millions mainly on television advertising and are named for the section of the tax code that allows them to exist. Republicans, on the other hand, relied on those dubbed the ``316s,'' the faithful whose favourite Bible verse is John 3:16. (``For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.'')
But whether this was the values election may now be irrelevant, says John Green, an expert on evangelicals and politics at the University of Akron in Ohio.
"They believe they made the difference, and in politics, belief is half the battle,'' says Green, a political science professor. "When you believe, you get active, you mobilize.''
In the most exhaustive study of the power of the religious right in 2004, Green found an estimated 20 million to 24 million evangelicals voted for Bush, a number that translates to between 33 and 40 per cent of the president's total votes.
He believes it was, in fact, Rove who mobilized the evangelicals who sat out the election four years ago. About 79 per cent of Americans who call themselves evangelicals voted for Bush, up about 8 per cent from 2000.
Though he is not sure their high expectations will be fully met, Green says he understands their optimism.
"Evangelicals have been active in politics since the late '70s, but there was a time when they despaired, wondering whether their efforts were having any effect,'' he says.
"However you read 2004, you can see they have some power.''
The bar has been set, and Democrats are spooked.
The party is rethinking its longstanding pro-choice position on abortion, wondering whether it, too, has to find religion to connect in 2008.
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`We take credit for people paying attention to the issues. Undoubtedly, some of them voted for the president, (people) who otherwise would have stayed home.'
Tom Minnery,
Focus on the Family
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While much was made of the Republicans' complete domination of the U.S. South, the end of a 40-year political turnaround, the Bush victory was really fuelled in the southwestern and mountain states, where populations are exploding.
It is here, where SUVs emblazoned with "Support Our Troops'' ribbons careen down highways carved out of sagebrush and rock, hitting the 120 km/h speed limits under endless sky, that the Bush mandate was forged.
Arizona, which welcomes 450 new residents daily, plus Texas, Nevada and Utah are among the solidly red states that will gain electoral votes by 2010, while the big Democratic states, such as New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts, are shrinking and will lose those electoral votes in five years.
On Nov. 2, Bush won nine of the 10 fastest-growing U.S. states. Many conservatives in those states are leading the charge, and not all of them have evangelical designs.
Here in Phoenix, 33-year-old Darcy Olsen, a woman who once organized Greenpeace petitions in her native Utah, now carries the torch for Barry Goldwater, the native son many consider the father of modern conservatism.
But Goldwater conservatism, based on the freedom of the individual, limited and defined powers for the federal government and a libertarian take on social issues, is a world away from George W. Bush conservatism or the Ronald Reagan conservatism that preceded it.
If the Goldwater philosophy is going to make a comeback, Olsen says, it will be at the state level, where conservative groups like her Goldwater Institute push hard for more powers to regulate policy, such as the legality of same-sex marriage.
Olsen represents a breed of conservatives not always enamoured of Bush when it comes to taxation and spending questions, though she praises the president as a man of integrity: "If you lost your wallet, George Bush is going to return it unopened.''
But Olsen says that if Bush had been a Democrat, his profligate spending and the ballooning deficit, which hit $413 billion under his watch, would have sparked outrage among conservatives.
Because they held their tongues, she says, they expect better in a second term.
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American conservatives have reason to hope.
When the new U.S. Congress was sworn in earlier this month, it included 232 elected Republicans in the House of Representatives, the largest number since 1946.
The Republicans have 55 of 100 Senate seats.
The champions of the right are men like senators Sam Brownback of Kansas, Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and newly elected Tom Coburn of Oklahoma.
Brownback will reintroduce a bill that would require doctors who perform abortions after 20 weeks into a pregnancy to tell their patients that the fetus feels pain. Doctors must then offer anesthesia for the fetus.
Before returning to Washington, he told reporters at home that after decades of work, ``values'' conservatives have gained an ideological majority in Congress and across the country.
Santorum, a close ally of Focus on the Family founder Dobson, once compared homosexuality to bestiality. He believes students in his home state of Pennsylvania should be taught that the theory of evolution is just that, and not a proven fact.
Brownback and Santorum have been mentioned as possible candidates for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008.
During his winning campaign, Coburn claimed lesbianism was so rampant in the southeast corner of Oklahoma that schoolgirls were allowed to visit the bathroom only one at a time. He has called for the death penalty for abortionists.
Coburn is also a fierce fiscal conservative, and his book, Breach of Trust, which chronicles how Republicans let spending get out of control, is a bible to many.
Bush supporters will also continue to dominate the airwaves during his second term.
It is not just the cable television pre-eminence of Fox News, with its notorious broadcaster Bill O'Reilly, but also the radio voices of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage and Laura Ingraham and the poison pen of self-styled ``conservative diva'' Ann Coulter.
Right-wing talk radio still drowns out Al Franken's commentaries on Air America or Bill Maher's late-night monologues on HBO. The airwaves feature regular attacks on the United Nations and France, for its position on the Iraq war, and personalities routinely condone the abuse of Arabs in the custody of Americans.
Most of all, the attacks on ``liberals'' are relentless.
An afternoon spin of the talk-radio dial features sound bites from Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy accompanied by the sound of drunken hiccups. Kennedy's criticism of ``water-boarding'' as a torture technique by American troops is then compared to the drowning of his female companion on Chappaquiddick Island, Mass., more than a generation ago. On another station, the voice of New York Senator Hillary Clinton is followed by the mocking bars of Helen Reddy's one-time feminist anthem: "I am woman, hear me roar.''
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Even with the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the war in Iraq dominating his first term, Bush did deliver to the Christian right.
In the 2004 fiscal year, his administration spent $154 million to fund abstinence programs nationwide. His request for the fiscal year 2005 almost doubles that, for a total of $270 million.
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`We now have a more conservative generation. This is not a passing fad; this will go on for generations.'
Janice Crouse,
Concerned Women for America
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He will renominate 20 conservative judicial appointees who failed to get a vote in the last Senate, and he has appointed Brownback and Coburn to the Senate judiciary committee, where their anti-abortion and pro-traditional marriage views will have a high-profile impact.
And in 2003, according to figures compiled by the Associated Press, the Bush White House awarded $1.17 billion to "faith-based'' service organizations, a figure expected to be substantially higher in 2004. The report found that some of the money went to programs where prayer was a central part of their mandates, and some went to organizations, like the early-childhood program Head Start, that do not consider themselves religious at all.
Rev. Don Strauch, who calls himself an "evangelical socialist,'' runs TMM Family Services in Tucson, Ariz., out of a spartan building on the outskirts of the city.
The group received $25,000 to help with an extensive program that includes building new homes and providing down-payment grants to first-time homebuyers, providing foster care homes for children and shelters for homeless mothers.
The separation between church and state must be permeable, Strauch maintains, and for years, he says, the wall between the two meant the scales were tipped against organizations like his.
"You don't have to come to Bible studies or pray or say `Jesus' to get in here,'' he says.
"But it would be my hope that if someone came to us with no religious orientation, something in them would be touched and they would recognize the need for God in their life.
"But we don't push. They have to recognize the need.''
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Home to more than 100 evangelical Christian ministries and five Christian radio stations, Colorado Springs is the cradle of the new conservative movement.
It is a city where 125 local churches and Christian organizations paid to insert 91,000 copies of the New Testament in pre-Christmas Sunday editions of The Colorado Springs Gazette, a move that drew fire from Jewish and Muslim groups as well as many journalists.
Resting on the edge of the snowcapped Rockies, Focus on the Family dominates the landscape.
Its mission statement is ``to cooperate with the Holy Spirit in disseminating the Gospel of Jesus Christ to as many people as possible and, specifically, to accomplish that objective by helping preserve traditional values and the institution of the family.'' And Focus on the Family carries it out on 1,298 radio and 82 television stations, reaching an estimated daily audience of 32 million in the U.S. and 220 million worldwide in 122 countries.
It publishes nine magazines and produces videos for children and teens. It also rates books, movies and music for ``family-friendly'' content. Each month, Focus on the Family receives 173,000 letters and 5,900 e-mails, and a staff of 150 handles 250,00 phone calls. It sends out 4 million pieces of mail each year.
The organization employs 1,200 people in Colorado Springs, and each one, down to mailroom employees, is screened for his or her Christian beliefs.
But from its yearly budget of $146 million, it is the $250,000 it now spends on political action that has garnered the most attention.
Dobson now heads Focus on the Family Action, and for the first time, he endorsed a presidential candidate — Bush, of course. He says he believed the institution of marriage was under such a threat that it was time for him to enter the political realm.
Now his phone calls to the White House are quickly returned by 40-year-old Tim Goeglein, Bush's liaison to the Christian right.
Earlier this month, Dobson updated his 3 million American followers on the political situation.
"Not in many years has there been such optimism among those of us in the conservative Christian movement,'' he wrote.
"President George W. Bush has been returned to office, after promising during the long campaign to support the institution of marriage, to defend the sanctity of human life, to reduce the tax burden on families, to promote abstinence over condom distribution and to appoint judges who will interpret the law and not arrogantly create it.''
He told the faithful that 26 million evangelicals voted, 80 per cent of them for Bush, and said the country turned to the president to halt the "moral freefall'' in the land.
Dobson then warned five Democratic senators in red Republican states that they are in his "bull's-eye'' if they attempt to block the appointment of a conservative justice to the Supreme Court during the Bush term.
Like Dobson, many other U.S. conservatives believe they must lay down a solid foundation for future generations.
Crouse, of Concerned Women for America, says she's pleased to see more younger Americans are espousing ``moral'' values.
"We have seen the passing of the '60s generation who believed anything goes,'' she says.
"We now have a more conservative generation. This is not a passing fad; this will go on for generations.''
But, warns Focus on the Family's Minnery, the current climate doesn't mean his fellow conservatives should rest on their laurels.
"The pendulum is swinging back, but the culture is still toxic,'' he says.
"What Hollywood produces is abhorrent. What kids use on the computer for video games is very problematic. The access to obscenity on the Internet is a tragedy.
"So if the country is moving more conservative, it has a long way to go.''
Boo.
4 day orgy ?
Liberals can't believe they're living in a nightmare. I'd love to see DU shuttered permanently but it won't happen.
A conservative bacchanalia has liberals uptight and acting like prudes. Life's funny when those who've done so much to make a mess of this country whine about it being put right again.
Can you imagine how the Dems will feel if they lose even more seats during the 2006 elections?
"Newly emboldened"?
Where has this idiot been for 20 years?
'Newly emboldened' means "wow, now even I'm starting to get it: we're LOSERS!
Yeah aint it great? At least it isnt the Homosexual orgy it would have been if the liberals had won.
Methinks he has the partys confused. This belongs in a conversation about Dems.
The depth of Lib-Demo-leftwing depression will be enormous as sore losers attempt to exagerate the "Conservative" glee and wild euphoria they see everywhere. Underneath all this "doom and gloom" is their sullen, black determination to fight it all to the death.
The battle is far from over. Nothing has been "won". "White bread America" has categorically rejected the nonsense of the left-wing elitists who had blindly assumed that the "flyover states" didn't count.
They were wrong. Tee Hee!
Fun to see this. It shows how enraged the left still is. Screeding lefties lose elections.
Hey, that sounds catchy, don't it?
By the way, if Conservative values are so bad and archaic, why is it that some in your leadership are now talking about adopting some of them. Is it just to win elections or do you really believe in those values ? Wait never mind I forgot we're talking about rats, I think I already know the answer.
That is in part true. However, many other factors elected President Bush, perhaps the most pronounced are that George W. Bush loves America; believes in America and is an American.
John Kerry can make none of those claims, he may try, but they won't stick. Today he is in France, doing the work of ???? - Perhaps the United Nations, where his (Kerry) true allegiances are.
Kerry is a Socialist – Bush is an American patriot. Why can’t the left understand this?
hello, hello, anyone out there, I wrote to this guy and ask him if he could imagine what would be going on in DC if Kerry would have won, with his witch, oops, I mean wifes billions.
This stuff about spending too much is just demos whining and crying, not a mention would have been made if one of them was being sworn in, enough, we won, you lost
Its unreal. First they whine because the President shuts down early and nobody is partying all night like they did in the old days of slick willie. That was real party and real "orgy" even in the WH sink.
Now the reps are evil neros for having a inaguration party
He forgot to mention the ban on music and dancing.
Schadenfreude
Oh BS! While Bush may love America, so do many liberals, despite their misdirection. President Bush was elected largely, in fact almost entirely due to the activism of the Christian Right and the Evangelicals and their skillful use of wedge issues between believers and non believers. Now you as well as others want to diminish their roll, the same as we accuse democrats of not really acknowledging and doing things for their black voters once the ballots are counted.
I better double up on my vitamins :)
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