If the Bush White House hoped the unveiling of a new $1.5 billion marriage initiative would help the president “solidify his conservative base,” as the New York Times reported yesterday, it looks like Rove & Co. will have to go back to the drawing board.
The left obviously isn’t crazy about Bush’s marriage plan. Not only are there practical and constitutional issues, which I talked about yesterday, but most progressives believe spending $1.5 billion on expanding job opportunities and access to health care would do a whole lot more to strengthen American families than some expensive federal counseling program.
The right, however, was supposed to love this idea. In a solid follow-up piece in today’s New York Times, conservatives are ranting that the marriage initiative isn’t enough to keep them satisfied.
“This is like lobbing a snowball at a forest fire,” said Sandy Rios, president of Concerned Women of America, a large religious right group. “This administration is dancing dangerously around the issue of homosexual marriage.”
It’s fascinating, really. Far-right activists, who claim to believe that strong marriages are the backbone of American society, are far more concerned with a constitutional amendment keeping gay people from getting married than they are with supporting Bush’s program. The White House seems to think the administration was throwing the religious right a bone. Apparently, the religious right is throwing it back and asking for more.
“The conservative Christians’ insistence on an amendment to prohibit same-sex marriage may put President Bush in a political bind as he starts his re-election campaign, caught between wooing potential swing voters and turning out his core evangelical supporters,” the Times explained. “Some conservative strategists warn that pushing to amend the Constitution to prohibit same-sex unions could turn off some potential Republican voters like suburban women, who might find excessive talk about the perils of same-sex marriage as intolerant, mean-spirited or weirdly obsessive.”
Gary Bauer, who ran on an amusing if not entirely successful presidential campaign in 2000, said, “If the White House puts [the constitutional amendment issue] on the back burner or doesn’t put political capital into it, that would deeply demoralize a large block of voters that they are expecting to turn out in November.”
Bush has not helped his case with these people. Last month, Bush said he believed a marriage was “between a man and a women” and that he would support a constitutional amendment “if necessary.” But he also said that “whatever legal arrangements people want to make, they’re allowed to make, so long as it’s embraced by the state, or does start at the state level,” and he emphasized the need for tolerance.
These remarks, apparently, were like a red flag to a bull for the religious right.
Concerned Women of America’s Rios said Bush had implicitly endorsed gay unions. “It is the same as saying the federal government doesn’t want to weigh in on slavery, but if the states want to call it chattel that is O.K.,” she said.
Putting aside, for a moment, that this lunatic equates stable gay relationships with slavery, I’m afraid comments like these create an environment that may break for Bush, not against him. I know that may seem backwards, but bear with me.
The religious right would have us believe that evangelical support for Bush on Election Day is dependent on the president championing a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. I think that’s total nonsense. Fundamentalist Christians not only worship Bush (almost literally), they know full well that they’ve never had it so good.
Bush is the best friend the religious right has ever had in the White House. They not only agree on every issue, but Bush is stacking his administration and the federal courts with ultra conservatives, many of which are former staffers at religious right groups. Does anyone sincerely believe evangelicals will stay home in November because Bush didn’t fight hard enough for a constitutional amendment? I don’t. It’s an empty threat.
In fact, I’m concerned about the opposite. Americans may be split on support for legal gay relationships, but very few people support and connect with religious right activists. People like Rios and Bauer, and their better known colleagues like Falwell and Robertson, are generally seen as extremist and intolerant nuts.
And that’s what worries me about this. These activists are so far out there, they make Bush look moderate — which is the exact opposite of what Dems need. The Bush White House knows the far right has no where else to go, so the president can distance himself from the lunatic-fringe of his party to appear like the sensible alternative.
The ideal, as far as I’m concerned, is that the Bush campaign is so worried about keeping the far right happy, that they’ll continue to throw more bones their way, demonstrating to centrist swing voters that Bush really is in league with conservative fringe elements of the GOP.
In other words, I believe the more we hear about the far right’s frustration with Bush, ironically, the worse it is for Democrats.