RockThrower

Be Afraid – Be Very Afraid

Scare Tactics

“There is only one course of action against them: to defeat them abroad before they attack us at home.”

“We either deal with terrorism and this extremism abroad, or we deal with it when it comes to us.” (Quoting Army Lt General John Vines)

"We fight today because terrorists want to attack our country and kill our citizens.”

President George W. Bush, Speech on Iraq, June 28, 2005

At least he didn’t raise the color code to orange. Strange how that hasn’t happened since the election ended.

But there shouldn’t be any doubt about the intent of last night’s speech -- to scare the American people into supporting the war in Iraq.

The strategy is pretty much standard fare for the Bush administration. When you start to fall behind in the polls – scare em. Meanwhile have your henchmen attack your opponents as liberal wimps and cowards, unwilling and unable to protect the American people, ala Karl Rove’s comments last week in New York. (PS- if there is anybody out there that still thinks Rove’s comments were an off the cuff mistake, call me, I have a bridge I want to sell you.)

Never mind that there was no connection between 9-11 and Iraq, never mind that there were no weapons of mass destruction for Saddam to give to terrorists. That didn’t keep the President from trying to tie his mess in Iraq to the holy grail of 9-11 and using the tragic deaths of 3,000 Americans on that day to try and scare us into supporting a poorly planned and implemented military action that has turned Iraq into a recruiting poster for terrorism and made America less safe.

But I’m not so sure that the American people are going to buy this swill this time. He may have gone to the 9-11 club one time to many. My sense is that the American people were already plenty worried, what they wanted to hear was how Bush is going to get us out of this Neocon nightmare.

Howard Dean Is Right

Let me see -- George W. Bush lies about the reasons for going to war in Iraq. Howard Dean called Republicans “mostly White Christians.” O.K., I agree, Democrats should attack Howard Dean.

Get a grip! Haven’t Democrats paid any attention to what has happened since George W. Bush got elected? The day doesn’t go by when the Bush administration doesn’t tell some whopper or launch a smear attack on those who dare to challenge their policies. And I don’t hear much in the way of complaints about it from the Republican Leadership. Even worse, I don’t hear much about it from Democrats.

But Democratic leaders, apparently afraid of offending the sensibilities of some fat cat patron or potential crossover voter say they are outraged by the comments of their recently elected party chair.

At least Howard Dean is not lying – the Republicans are a party of mostly white Christians. In his new book The Great Divide: Retro vs. Metro America, John Sperling reports that Republican Party lawmakers in state legislatures are ninety nine percent White and that as of 2004 the Republicans had no minority representation in legislatures in 25 states. Things aren’t much different at the Congressional level where Whites hold ninety-nine percent of Republican-held seats in the House and Senate. And Voters? According to the 2004 exit polls, 87 percent of Bush voters were white and 89 percent were Christian.

As for religion, according to a recent report from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 78 percent of Republicans profess a strong belief in God, say they believe in Judgment Day and affirm the importance of prayer. Among Republicans who call themselves conservatives, eighty-one percent express similar beliefs.

Dean’s purpose though is not to blame Republicans for being white and Christian. As Dean said, he is a white Christian. It is to point out that the Republican party is owned lock, stock and barrel by radically conservative Christians intent on breaking down the wall separating church and state and making their religious views part of the law of the land.

Dean is right to challenge them. Democrats need to tap into the growing unease of an American electorate increasingly concerned about the possibility of living under biblical law with Pat Robertson as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. According to a recent survey by ABC News, 40 percent of Americans say that religious conservatives have too much influence over the Republican Party. Americans were intensely opposed to the intervention of the Republican Congress and President Bush into the Terry Schiavo matter. And a new poll by Ipsos/Associated Press finds sixty one percent of Americans disapprove of religious leaders trying to influence government decisions. As political reporter Peter Urban recently wrote in the Connecticut Post, “Americans seem to grow increasingly uncomfortable with an agenda shaped by evangelical Christians.”

Dean’s comments speak to the Democratic Party’s base of liberal voters concerned about the intrusion of religion into government policy. They are also aimed at newer, younger voters (those born after 1980) commonly referred to as Generation Y voters. A new survey by the research firm of Greenberg, Quinlan, Rosner reports that Generation Y voters are one of the fastest growing voter groups, increasing by 84 percent (from 20 million to 37 million adults), between 1990 and 2001. These voters are significantly more diverse, more secular and much less likely to define themselves as Christian. They are also very liberal on social issues and lean strongly Democratic. Capturing those voters is essential to any plans for Democrats to retake Congress and elect one of their own as President.

What Howard Dean is doing is trying to reframe the debate, to define the Republican Party for what is has become, a party dominated by extreme elements of the Christian Right where the likes of Pat Robertson and James Dobson hold great sway over judicial nominations and have the ability to push Congress into matters such as the Terri Schiavo debacle. His comments may make some Democrats a little uncomfortable, but my guess is that there are more than a few Republicans increasingly uneasy with the picture Howard Dean is painting.

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Strange Bedfellows

Can the fight against poverty bring Evangelicals and Democrats together?

I am a secular, heathen, Pagan Democrat with no family values. Or at least that is how I imagine Pat Robertson and his followers would describe me. While I am not a fan of abortion (who is?), I am fervently pro choice and believe strongly that the government should stay out of my bedroom, at least until I get my underwear picked up. Personally, I believe that efforts to break down the wall separating church and state are more of a threat to the United States than foreign terrorism. I don’t exactly fit the profile of a “born again” Christian.

But now that my bonafides have been established, I must admit to having an odd moment last week, an epiphany if you will. No, I didn’t see God or have any visions, (although I did have a really hot dream involving two blondes, a slip and slide and a tub of orange Jell-O the other night). The moment was actually a little stranger than that – for the first time ever, I agreed with something written by David Brooks, the conservative columnist at the New York Times.

In his column last week, Brooks argues evangelical Christians and liberals have “a natural alliance” in the war against poverty. He writes that “they are the only two groups really hyped up about these problems,” and outlines examples of where religious conservatives and social liberals are coming together to battle poverty here and abroad. While I never thought these words would leave my lips, Brooks is absolutely right. Moreover, while he may be a bit chagrined to hear this, he may have shown Democrats how to make gains with Evangelical voters in the red state south, an effort many believe is essential for Democrats to win the presidency and regain power in Congress.

Politics is the art of putting strange bedfellows together, and I don’t mean that couple in a bar in West Hollywood. As leader of the Senate, Lyndon Johnson made his career by helping those Senators with apparently nothing in common, to find their one shared interest, no matter how small, and get them to work together to pass legislation no one else gave a prayer. Liberal Democrats and religious conservatives probably aren’t going to agree on gay marriage. Personally, I think we should force gays to marry, buy houses in the suburbs, slap them with high property taxes and make them adopt some of those popsicles in a Petri dish that President Bush insists are children. Jerry Falwell probably isn’t going to agree with that. But both evangelicals and liberals are increasingly concerned about what is happening to the poor in this country and across the globe. Maybe we could agree to disagree about some of the wedge issues that Karl Rove and some of the Demagogues on both the right and left say are so important, and actually work together to do something about poverty.

There is certainly nothing moral, or for that matter particularly Christian about the economic policies of the Bush Administration. Under President Bush, real wages have fallen, the lives of the working poor have been made more difficult, and today more Americans live in poverty. That’s not exactly a path to sainthood. The tens of thousands of men and women who have lost good manufacturing jobs in Ohio and elsewhere, and the millions of other American barely eking out a living, have absolutely no business supporting the economic policies of the Bush administration. Democrats should not continue to let Republicans use the franchise of moral values to convince those voters to support policies that are not in their interest.

One way for Democrats to do that is to forge a new coalition uniting liberals and religious conservatives in the battle against poverty. Catholics and Evangelicals have a long-standing commitment to helping the poor and unfortunate and there is some evidence that they intend to use their political clout to do so. A recent report by the National Association of Evangelicals, an organization with more than 30 million members, calls on conservative Christians to move beyond their usual issues, such as abortion and homosexual rights, and involve themselves in such matters as poverty, justice and human rights. And Democrats, building on the ideas established by Franklin Roosevelt, have long stood for efforts to reduce poverty and to help the workingman. Theirs is an emerging common interest. Maybe they can find a way to put aside the battles over the “culture of life” and come together to do battle to improve the lives of Americans.

One Democrat thought to be a contender for his party's presidential nomination is already making the fight against poverty a campaign theme. In a early start to the 2008 presidential election, speaking in New Hampshire earlier this year, former Senator and presidential candidate John Edwards called poverty “one of the great moral issues of our time" and pledged to fight it saying, "If we can put a man on the moon, conquer polio, and put libraries of information on a chip, then we can end poverty for those who want to work for a better life.” As the newly hired director of the recently established Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina, Edwards is positioned to lead a national conversation about poverty and what to do about it.

My guess is that other Democrats will soon follow. They should write a thank you note to David Brooks.