Delirium by Nancy Cohen

Author:Nancy Cohen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Counterpoint Press
Published: 2012-01-12T16:00:00+00:00

IN THE TWO years leading up to the 2000 presidential election, Bush had marketed himself as a pragmatic moderate and publicly flaunted his independence from the Right. The Republican establishment had boasted that candidate Bush was their man to defang the party’s right wing. The leaders of the sexual counterrevolution had bewailed their impotence, flamboyantly denounced Bush, bemoaned the GOP’s betrayal of cultural conservatism, and yet confided that they were beat and had nowhere else to go.

On Election Day, the sexual counterrevolutionaries provided Bush with 40 percent of his total vote, an indispensable bloc in a tied election. Among all who identified themselves as conservative Christians, 89 percent voted for Bush. Bush won 75 percent of all evangelicals, and the evangelicals who voted for Bush were overwhelmingly fundamentalists, highly observant, and traditionalists on sex and family matters. In every one of the twelve states lost by Gore and won by Clinton-Gore in 1992 or 1996, the Christian Right held significant influence in the state Republican parties. In all but one of the six states outside the South that switched, Bush’s popular vote margin was under 5 percent. The one exception, Colorado, was home to Dobson’s Focus on the Family and its affiliated megachurches.

Given the very public two-year-long feud between the Christian Right and Bush, what accounted for such ardor? Fourteen days into the recount, Newsweek revealed the Bush campaign’s well-kept secret. Grover Norquist, who during the New Hampshire primary had denied that he supported Bush, told the reporters, “Bush went to every piece of [my] coalition and said, ‘I know you want to be left alone on guns. Deal.’ ‘I know you want to be left alone on taxes. Deal.’ ‘Property rights? Deal.’ ‘Home schooling? Deal.’” Norquist himself began parsing voter lists with Rove in early 1999. “Went to everyone and got ’em signed up or neutralized, including me, two years before the election.”

The public message broadcast by the charming Texas governor had been moderation, but as Norquist revealed, the Bush campaign was also engaged in a parallel campaign, a narrowcast courtship of the sexual counterrevolutionaries, in language sufficiently encoded so as to escape detection by most observers. Four out of five evangelicals who voted for Bush received political communication from their pastor, the Christian Coalition, or another religious source. Three out of four evangelicals who voted for Bush identified closely with the Christian Right. Stealth had worked nicely for Bush and Rove in 1994, as well as for other candidates of the sexual counterrevolution over the years. No one should have been surprised they would once again pull out the winning playbook.

The American press bears significant responsibility for the voters’ failure to recognize Bush’s conservatism. When journalists and commentators did specifically investigate Bush’s extensive ties to the Christian Right, they frequently misread the terms of the relationship. Shortly before Bush selected Cheney as his running mate, for example, Harold Meyerson of The American Prospect said a Bush campaign staffer had told him that Bush would pick Tom Ridge, a pro-choice Republican, as his running mate, and the Christian Right was going along with it.

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