The ongoing GOP rush up shit creek without the vestige of a paddle

1. It's hard to believe, but Bush does disdain evangelicals.
Little Initiative
by Amy Sullivan

Early Monday morning, a tell-all book from a former Bush White House official hit Washington like a small explosion, generating at least a color orange political threat level. Here was a conservative Republican, someone who had been on the inside of the president's signature domestic policy agenda of the first term, leveling damaging accusations of hypocrisy, wide-scale manipulation, and deceit. Conservatives reacted accordingly. They charged the traitor, former Deputy Director of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives David Kuo, with timing the book to do maximum damage in the midterm elections, and they compared him to Judas Iscariot, the disciple who betrayed Jesus. "What David Kuo is saying about the President and his efforts," said David Contreras, Texas director of the Council on Faith in Action, "is nothing more than a cynical attempt to sell books and line his pockets with 30 pieces of silver [a reference to the payment Judas received for turning Jesus over to the Pharisees.]"

The reaction from the left has been, to put it mildly, slightly less vigorous. It is in stark contrast to the way in which liberal commentators and bloggers embraced other revelations, such as former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill's memoir or the latest Bob Woodward book. This time, the responses have ranged from total silence to yawns to fears that the book could backfire on the Democratic Party. In general, most liberals have chosen to distance themselves from Kuo and his case.

This could just be smart politics. After all, Republicans are in such a free-fall at the moment that it might be best for liberals to stay out of the way and let conservatives fling recriminations at each other, as has largely been the case with the Mark Foley scandal. But something else is at play, too. Despite the evidence Kuo presents in Tempting Faith , liberals simply don't believe him. They've spent so much time fear-mongering about American theocracy that a book illustrating the opposite simply makes no sense to them. In fact, the real revelation of Kuo's book is not that the Bushies don't care about evangelicals; it's that liberals are too wedded to their views to capitalize on it.

The first clue that the left didn't see any political value in Kuo's book came last week on msnbc 's "Scarborough Country." Another msnbc show had obtained an advance copy of the embargoed book and reported passages on how White House aides routinely referred to conservative evangelical leaders as "nuts" and "goofy." In response, Lawrence O'Donnell--former Democratic Senate aide and the resident liberal commentator at msnbc --dropped the ball. "I think the good news here is that people working in the White House think that Pat Robertson is nuts," he said. "They should. Pat Robertson is nuts." It seemed a little off-message--after all, this was a politically embarrassing book for the Bushies, and here O'Donnell was praising them. True, Robertson does regularly spout off truly nutty and dangerous statements (his call for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez; his prayer for the death of liberal Supreme Court justices; his belief that UPC symbols are the Mark of the Beast as foretold in Revelation). But what rankled O'Donnell the most was Robertson's "insane" belief that Jews are going to burn in hell. "

While most of them would put it more delicately than Robertson, it is an article of faith for millions and millions of evangelicals that the only way into heaven is through belief in Jesus Christ. (The good reverend has also said he believes Methodists will burn in hell, but that's not really the point.) By condemning and mocking that doctrine, O'Donnell managed an impressive feat. He took Robertson, a figure widely disliked and discredited throughout the evangelical community, and found a way to criticize him that would also insult and alienate evangelicals. Congratulations, Lawrence O'Donnell--you're the new poster-boy for secular liberal intolerance.

In the blogosphere, the liberal reaction was a bit more temperate than O'Donnell's theological attack, but no more strategically smart. Kuo's book should have prompted the left to think about how to exploit tensions in the GOP or even to reach out to disaffected evangelicals. Instead, the major liberal blogs--after a brief "what's this?" look last week when the "nuts" revelations surfaced--have ignored the story. Street Prophets , a Daily Kos -affiliated site has paid attention, but only to criticize Kuo as naïve about politics and wasting his time on old news. Even a website for religious Democrats sniffed that Kuo's allegations were "not particularly newsworthy." Meanwhile, one prominent liberal blogger sent an e-mail warning others that Kuo's book was "total horseshit" and not good news for liberals.

The problem is that Kuo's book creates cognitive dissonance for liberals. Conspiracy theories about theocracy have haunted liberals for the last few years, and, if you believe that religious conservatives lead Bush around by the nose, evidence to the contrary is impossible to absorb. Everyone on the left "knows" that the faith-based initiative is a slush-fund, a jackpot for religious conservatives. If it turns out instead to be a political sham that produced only 1 percent of the new funds it promised for faith-based organizations, liberals need rethink their theocracy-phobia.

Since they haven't done so yet, they're missing a golden opportunity. Evangelicals have become increasingly disillusioned with the Bush administration and the Republican Party in general over the last two years. While 78 percent of white evangelicals voted for Bush in 2004, only 57 percent approve of the job he's doing now, and only 52 percent say they are likely to support Republicans in the November elections.

Those numbers have not dropped because conservative evangelicals picked up Kevin Phillips's American Theocracy and became worried that Bush was too religious. Instead, evangelical support has plummeted in large part because they, along with other religious conservatives, have begun to suspect they've been played by Republicans--used for their votes and then ignored.

There is great anger among conservative evangelicals over the fact that, when Bush entered his second term, he chose to spend his political capital not on an effort to ban gay marriage (as he had all but promised them), but on Social Security privatization. The Abramoff scandal, with the demeaning e-mail references to evangelicals and the manipulation of religious groups to benefit casinos, deepened the suspicion that they had been had. And the Mark Foley scandal, which has revealed an acceptance of homosexual behavior among the congressional Republican leadership, has led evangelicals to believe that, as Ross Douthat recently put it , Republicans don't share their values; they just pretend to share their values. Kuo's book shows conclusively that all of these evangelical fears are well-founded. While it's true that Democrats probably couldn't make evangelicals vote for them in droves, they could at least depress turnout by stoking evangelical anger at the Bushies.

Tempting Faith is unlikely to be the cause of disillusionment for evangelicals--they were already disenchanted enough--but it does confirm the worry and anger that has been festering. By ignoring that fact, liberals are serving the GOP by letting these emotions subside. As Kuo notes in the book, the White House was able to get away with ignoring the faith-based initiative because, "As we expected--and as we came to count on--the press wanted to write a single story: how President Bush's faith-based initiative was brutalizing the historic wall between church and state and how it was political payment to the religious right." No wonder liberals are afraid of a trap.

(Amy Sullivan , a contributing editor at The Washington Monthly , is writing a book about religion and the left.)


2. Republican Woes Lead to Feuding by Conservatives – by DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

WASHINGTON — 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.

“It is one of those rare defeats that will have many fathers,” said David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, expressing the gloomy view of many conservatives about the outcome on Election Day. “And they will all be somebody else.”

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.

“It is pre-criminations,” said Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, the conservative magazine. “If a party looks like it is going to take a real pounding, this sort of debate is healthy. What is unusual is that it is happening beforehand.”

Some conservative leaders have often been quicker in the past to turn on Republican officials and one another than their rank-and-file supporters. But this year polls show broad disaffection at the grass roots, prompting some Republicans — including former Speaker Newt Gingrich — to worry that the public sparring could dampen turnout.

This year’s antagonists also include some new critics, including Mr. Gingrich’s one-time lieutenant, Dick Armey , the former House Republican majority leader.

In recent weeks, Mr. Armey has stepped up a public campaign against the influence of Dr. James C. Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family and an influential voice among evangelical protestants. In an interview published last month in “The Elephant in the Room,” a book by Ryan Sager about splits among conservatives, Mr. Armey accused Congressional Republicans of “blatant pandering to James Dobson” and “his gang of thugs,” whom Mr. Armey called “real nasty bullies” — arguments he reprised on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal and in an open letter on the Web site organization FreedomWorks.

In an interview this week, Mr. Armey said catering to Dr. Dobson and his allies had led the party to abandon budget-cutting. And he said Christian conservatives could cost Republicans seats around the country, especially in Ohio.

“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?” he said.

Mr. Armey also pinned some of the blame on Tom DeLay , the former Republican House majority leader, who “was always more comfortable with the social conservatives, the evangelical wing of the party, than he was with the business wing.”

Mr. Armey, who identifies himself as an evangelical, said he was tired of Christian conservative leaders threatening that their supporters would stay away from the ballot box unless they got what they wanted.

“Economic conservatives,” he argued, were emerging as the swing voters in need of attention, in part because they had become more likely to vote Democratic in the years since President Bill Clinton was in office. “A lot of people believe he brought us from deficits to surpluses, and there is a certain empirical evidence there,” Mr. Armey acknowledged.

In a statement on Thursday, Dr. Dobson said Mr. Armey was “still ticked” over a long-ago House leadership race in which Dr. Dobson endorsed someone else, and he restated his warnings to Republicans that social conservative voters “would abandon them if they forgot the promises they had made.”

In a recent newsletter from Dr. Dobson’s organization, Representative Mark Souder, an Indiana Republican counting on Christian conservatives to turn out for his re-election, called Mr. Armey’s comments “disgusting” and insulting to “the many Christians around the United States who devoutly hold conservative moral beliefs.”

Christian conservatives began complaining last year that the Republicans had put proposed Social Security changes and tax changes ahead of issues like abortion and same-sex marriage, risking the support of social-issue voters.

Over the summer, Congress held a rush of votes on just those issues — an election-year ritual intended to motivate those voters — and in an interview last week Tony Perkins, president of the Christian conservative Family Research Council, said he believed it had begun to revive some grass-roots enthusiasm.

“But the Foley scandal just let the air out of the tires,” Mr. Perkins said.

Others dismissed the Foley scandal as largely irrelevant outside of Mr. Foley’s district. Several conservatives said Republican incumbents were using it as a scapegoat.

“It will make you feel better to say, I didn’t lose the election; Foley lost it for me,” said Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform. “Your wife and kids will believe it.”

Mr. Norquist said the Iraq war was the biggest drag on Republican candidates even before their big wins in 2004.

“Some people think we did it just to prove we could do it, like people who go running with weights on their ankles,” he said.

Many blame neoconservatives who argued most vocally for the invasion of Iraq. “The principal sin of the neoconservatives is overbearing arrogance,” Mr. Keene said. Neoconservatives, in turn, blamed Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld ’s insistence on holding down troop levels for the fouling up of the war

“There is a bit of a battle between people who say, Hey, your tax cuts wrecked our war and people who say, Hey, your war wrecked our tax cuts,” said David Frum , a former Bush speechwriter who was among the war’s proponents.

Mr. Frum argued that the problem with the Iraq war was in its execution, not in the idea behind it. “The war has to be seen through the prism of Hurricane Katrina,” he argued, “because conservatives will support a tough war if they are confident in the war’s management.”

William Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard and another prominent advocate of the invasion, said he doubted that soaring spending was turning off as many voters as tax-cutters like Mr. Norquist or Mr. Armey suggested.

“The spending bill that was supposedly going to destroy the Republican Party was the Medicare drug bill,” he said. “I have heard almost no one talk about it one way or the other.”

Mr. Kristol argued that the Bush administration was suffering politically for applying too little force, not too much. “I am struck that people have the sense in North Korea and Iran that things are spinning out of control,” he said.

Mr. Frum and others blamed the Republican Senate’s support for the president’s guest-worker immigration proposal for angering the grass-roots talk-radio crowd. But Mr. Norquist, who favored the immigration proposal, argued that the election would provide a verdict on “restrictionism” in the fate of Randy Graf, a Republican candidate in Arizona running on calls for tighter borders. Polls show Mr. Graf faces long odds.

Mr. Gingrich, for his part, made the best of the fray, saying, “I would rather have a movement active enough to bite itself rather than a movement so moribund it didn’t realize it was irritated.”