STEALTH?:

THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT'S HUMBLE SERVANT (Max Blumenthal, 11/15/04, AlterNet)

With a scant domestic plank to run on and a staggering record of failure to run from, Bush's hopes seemed dismal. Yet Bush had an ace up his sleeve: the Christian right. For the whole of his presidency, Bush had used the bully pulpit as a megaphone to project his committment to the Christian right's Calvinist worldview. Keenly aware of their grassroots muscle, Bush granted their leaders a degree of access few other domestic constituencies have ever enjoyed. And while he neglected healthcare and underfunded his own signature education reform program, Bush exhausted his political capital to advance the Christian right's social agenda. In doing so, he convinced them that he was, as Merritt said in his account to the Dallas Morning News, God's man in the White House. They responded by leading the charge for his re-election in the shadows of the official Bush/Cheney campaign, behind church walls, at stadium-sized rallies and across radio waves, in places largely away from the media's gaze. And when they carried Bush to an unlikely but overwhelming victory on Nov. 2, they consolidated America's majority party as an instrument of their moral crusade.

"Bush's victory not only establishes the power of the American Christian right in this candidacy, but in fact established its power to elect the next Republican president," lamented Arthur Finkelstein in an interview with the Israeli daily Ma'ariv. Finkelstein, who is an advisor to New York's moderate Republican governor George Pataki, added that "Republican party became the Christian right, the most radical in modern history ever."

To be sure, Bush is not a dyed-in-the-wool theocrat. When he kicked alcohol and became an evangelical Christian, it was the mainstream evangelical icon Billy Graham who oversaw his rebirth. And though he was involved in evangelical bible study groups in Midland, Texas in the 1980s, it was not until he declared a run for the Texas governorship that he was exposed to the hardline ideology of the Christian right. In 1993, as Bush groped for an approach to handling poverty that would set him apart from the mold of the mean-spirited, Gingrichian grinch, his consigliere, Karl Rove invited self-described "social Calvinist" intellectual Marvin Olasky to join the campaign as Bush's social welfare guru.

In his influential polemic, "The Tragedy of American Compassion," Olasky put forth his theory that poverty is a spiritual problem that government policy has not caused and can not necessarily cure. Thus, Olasky argued, government should loosen its grip on the social sector and return it to the biblically-ordained care of the church. Olasky's theories were to a large extent derived from the teachings of 19th century neo-Calvinist politician Abraham Kuyper, (Olasky is a Kuyper Institute fellow) who declared, "The family, the business science, art, and so forth are all social spheres, which do not owe their existence to the state ... but obey a high authority within their own bosom; an authority that rules by the grace of God b ...." Bush took this essentially theocratic idea and with Olasky's help, repackaged it as "compassionate conservatism," a label that helped cast Bush as a moderate in the media spotlight.

However, to those among the Christian right who understood the gravity of Olasky's influence on the Texas governor, Bush's rise was cause for encouragement. And to Bush's friends in the corporate community, meanwhile, were soothed by the anti-government, laissez faire ideology undergirding his "compassionate conservatism." To them, Bush wore his religion on his sleeve like any other president; his Christian fundamentalist agenda was little more than free market fundamentalism with a pious patina. [...]

For the religious right, Bush was like any other stealth candidate. No matter how unqualified for office he was, no matter how shallow his understanding of policy might have been and whether or not he was decimated by Kerry in the debates, they saw him as one of their own. And they would reward him with their votes in record numbers.

Maybe you have to argue that Mr. Bush has been stealthy in order to minimize his mandate? But as Mr. Blumenthal himself argues, George Bush has the most sweeping and revolutionary domestic plank since the New Deal. Here's how he described it, in an unstealthy moment, at the 200o Convention:

ur new economy must never forget the old, unfinished struggle for human dignity.

And here we face a challenge to the very heart and founding premise of our nation.

A couple of years ago, I visited a juvenile jail in Marlin, Texas, and talked with a group of young inmates. They were angry, wary kids. All had committed grownup crimes.

Yet when I looked in their eyes, I realized some of them were still little boys.

Toward the end of conversation, one young man, about 15, raised his hand and asked a haunting question... "What do you think of me?"

He seemed to be asking, like many Americans who struggle ... "Is there hope for me? Do I have a chance?" And, frankly ... "Do you, a white man in a suit, really care what happens to me?"

A small voice, but it speaks for so many. Single moms struggling to feed the kids and pay the rent. Immigrants starting a hard life in a new world. Children without fathers in neighborhoods where gangs seem like friendship, where drugs promise peace, and where sex, sadly, seems like the closest thing to belonging. We are their country, too.

And each of us must share in its promise, or that promise is diminished for all.

If that boy in Marlin believes he is trapped and worthless and hopeless -- if he believes his life has no value, then other lives have no value to him -- and we are ALL diminished.

When these problems aren't confronted, it builds a wall within our nation. On one side are wealth and technology, education and ambition.

On the other side of the wall are poverty and prison, addiction and despair.

And, my fellow Americans, we must tear down that wall.

Big government is not the answer. But the alternative to bureaucracy is not indifference.

It is to put conservative values and conservative ideas into the thick of the fight for justice and opportunity.

This is what I mean by compassionate conservatism. And on this ground we will govern our nation.

We will give low-income Americans tax credits to buy the private health insurance they need and deserve.

We will transform today's housing rental program to help hundreds of thousands of low-income families find stability and dignity in a home of their own.

And, in the next bold step of welfare reform, we will support the heroic work of homeless shelters and hospices, food pantries and crisis pregnancy centers -- people reclaiming their communities block-by-block and heart-by-heart.

I think of Mary Jo Copeland, whose ministry called "Sharing and Caring Hands" serves 1,000 meals a week in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Each day, Mary Jo washes the feet of the homeless, then sends them off with new socks and shoes.

"Look after your feet," she tells them ...... "They must carry you a long way in this world, and then all the way to God."

Government cannot do this work. It can feed the body, but it cannot reach the soul. Yet government can take the side of these groups, helping the helper, encouraging the inspired.

My administration will give taxpayers new incentives to donate to charity, encourage after-school programs that build character, and support mentoring groups that shape and save young lives.

We must give our children a spirit of moral courage, because their character is our destiny.

We must tell them, with clarity and confidence, that drugs and alcohol can destroy you, and bigotry disfigures the heart.

Our schools must support the ideals of parents, elevating character and abstinence from afterthoughts to urgent goals.

We must help protect our children, in our schools and streets, by finally and strictly enforcing our nation's gun laws.

Most of all, we must teach our children the values that defeat violence. I will lead our nation toward a culture that values life -- the life of the elderly and the sick, the life of the young, and the life of the unborn. I know good people disagree on this issue, but surely we can agree on ways to value life by promoting adoption and parental notification, and when Congress sends me a bill against partial-birth abortion, I will sign it into law.

Behind every goal I have talked about tonight is a great hope for our country.

A hundred years from now, this must not be remembered as an age rich in possessions and poor in ideals.

Instead, we must usher in an era of responsibility.

My generation tested limits -- and our country, in some ways, is better for it.

Women are now treated more equally. Racial progress has been steady, if still too slow. We are learning to protect the natural world around us. We will continue this progress, and we will not turn back.

At times, we lost our way. But we are coming home.

So many of us held our first child, and saw a better self reflected in her eyes.

And in that family love, many have found the sign and symbol of an even greater love, and have been touched by faith.

We have discovered that who we are is more important than what we have. And we know we must renew our values to restore our country.

This is the vision of America's founders.

They never saw our nation's greatness in rising wealth or advancing armies, but in small, unnumbered acts of caring and courage and self-denial.

Their highest hope, as Robert Frost described it, was "to occupy the land with character."

And that, 13 generations later, is still our goal ... to occupy the land with character.

He's won two unwinnable elections on that platform now.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 15, 2004 7:28 AM