How divisive was the Bush campaign’s strategy? Even Arthur Finkelstein is disappointed.
Arthur Finkelstein, a Republican consultant known for hard-edged campaigns that helped conservatives in the United States and Israel, has said in an interview published in Israel that President Bush’s campaign strategy to court evangelical Christians had divided the country as never before, to the possible detriment of the Republican Party.
“From now on, anyone who belongs to the Republican Party will automatically find himself in the same group as the opponents of abortion, and anyone who supports abortion will automatically be labeled a Democrat,” Mr. Finkelstein told Maariv, a daily, in an interview published on Friday. “The political center has disappeared, and the Republican Party has become the party of the Christian right more so than in any other period in modern history.”
I agree with all of this, of course, but I never worked for Jesse Helms. Finkelstein did.
While this is an interesting observation for the reclusive GOP consultant to make, it also points to the direction the party will be taking four years from now.
“Bush’s strategy secures the power of the American Christian right not only for this term,” Mr. Finkelstein said in the interview. “In fact, it secures its ability to choose the next Republican president.”
And that’s why moderates have never had less power with Republicans than they do now.
Several major ’08 hopefuls — Pataki, Giuliani, McCain — are persona non grata with the religious right. They were probably long shots considering the ideology of Republican primary voters anyway, but Finkelstein’s beef, which is accurate, is that Bush has made it practically impossible to run a moderate presidential campaign as a Republican.
Mr. Finkelstein told Mr. Gaon that he was troubled by the strategy of dividing the country by “values of religion and culture.”
“Bush courted the evangelical vote,” he said, “and turned these elections, in fact, into a referendum on the religious and cultural nature of America. This is my problem.”
He’s not the only one, but he’s part of an incredibly small minority in the GOP. Any brave Republicans out there willing to join him? I doubt it. I keep thinking back to a flare-up during the Republican convention over the summer.
“Our constituents are ready to walk,” said Ann Stone, founder and chairwoman of Republicans for Choice, a political action committee with 150,000 members which has joined forces with the Log Cabin Republicans. “Our message to the president is: ‘Stay out of the bedroom.'”
That was in August. Bush ignored them. Who’s ready to walk now?