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Friday, Jul 3, 2009
The president finally caves to the Christian right and backs a constitutional amendment, the better to beat up John Kerry. But will his newly emboldened right-wing allies go too far?
Feb 26, 2004 | On the first day of his reelection campaign, George W. Bush attacked Sen. John Kerry as an equivocating wimp from Massachusetts. On the second day, the president announced his support for a constitutional amendment that would prevent "judges in Boston" from forcing gay marriage on Americans everywhere.
With Super Tuesday still a few days away, the Bush-Kerry race has officially begun. And if Bush and White House strategist Karl Rove and their allies on the religious right have their way, gay marriage will be the ugly centerpiece of the coming campaign.
When the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled earlier this month that gay couples must be given the right to marry, it handed Bush's supporters a powerful weapon to use in the 2004 race. While Americans are broadly supportive of gay rights, gay marriage is widely unpopular, particularly with blue-collar whites and African-Americans whose support the Democrats will need in November. The Massachusetts decision gave Bush and Rove a wedge to drive between those voters and the Democratic presidential nominee -- especially if it's Kerry, who will surely suffer from guilt by geographic association even though he opposes both gay marriage and the decision reached by his home state's highest court.
"The Massachusetts decision, the fact that Kerry's from Massachusetts, the fact that the Democratic convention is in Massachusetts -- it's just too juicy for the Republicans to resist," warns Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg. "They'll make it an issue no matter what Kerry says."
They're making it an issue already. Leaders of the Christian right have been meeting for months to plot strategy on the gay marriage issue, and they appear to have coalesced around a two-part plan. First, they'll join with the White House in pushing for a federal constitutional amendment that prohibits gay marriage anywhere in the United States.
Next they'll jam moderate and liberal politicians with a no-win choice: support the constitutional amendment or stand accused of supporting gay marriage. "Here's the thing we need to do," says Glenn Stanton, director of social research and cultural affairs for James Dobson's Focus on the Family. "Never, never let any politician find safe haven not to address this directly."
It may be a good strategy for the religious right, but it's a risky one for the White House. If Bush and Rove play the gay card too hard in 2004 -- or if they find themselves linked too closely to militant Christians -- they risk exposing the president to charges of gay bashing and scratching off whatever remains of his "compassionate conservative" veneer.
There are other risks for the right. An increasingly noisy and empowered Christian conservative movement could turn on itself fighting over how far to push on gay marriage. While Bush said Tuesday that state legislatures should be free to define "legal arrangements other than marriage," some right-wing groups are demanding that any constitutional amendment expressly outlaw not just gay marriage but civil unions or any other legal benefits for sex-same couples as well. And the emboldened crusaders of the religious right could also, in turn, stir up the Democratic rank and file to defeat Bush and the triumph of cultural reaction his administration represents.
But if history teaches one thing about Bush and Rove and their allies on the right, it's that they're not afraid to use nasty political tactics on divisive social issues if they think it will help them win an election.
And history teaches one more thing: They're good at it.
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It's Texas, 1994, and Karl Rove is running George W. Bush's campaign against Gov. Ann Richards. Bush appears to be in for an uphill fight against a popular incumbent, but then the whispers and the rumors start. Maybe there's a lesbian working for Richards. Maybe she's using state funds to visit her lover. Maybe Richards herself is gay.
"There was a lot of whispering going on in the backwater," says Bill Cryer, a former newsman who worked as Richards' press secretary. "I don't think anybody ever really thought Ann Richards was gay, but somebody was trying to plant the seed."
Bush says nothing about the rumors, but he doesn't have to. The stories are everywhere, and one day a Bush surrogate -- a state senator serving as Bush's East Texas campaign chairman, a guy who just happens to have worked with Rove -- says just enough about the rumors to get the word into the press. Richards' appointments of "avowed homosexuals," he tells a reporter, might be a liability in her campaign for reelection.
Just like that, the allegation is on the record, the rumors become newspaper stories, and Bush becomes governor of Texas.
Six years later, it's South Carolina, and Bush is running for the Republican presidential nomination against Arizona Sen. John McCain. The rumors start again, and this time McCain is the target. Maybe he's mentally unstable; maybe he has "sired" an illegitimate black child; maybe his wife has a drug problem. "A day in the McCain campaign looked like a day at NORAD watching missiles coming across the screen," says Trey Walker, who served as McCain's national field director. "We had a thousand missiles coming in every day."
After McCain meets with a group of gay Republicans, somebody sends anonymous letters about the meeting to South Carolina legislators who had endorsed him. Somebody distributes a flier calling McCain the "fag candidate."
Bush wins South Carolina, then the Republican nomination, then the presidency.
Neither Bush nor Rove nor the Republican Party will talk about what happened in Texas or South Carolina, or how they plan to use the gay marriage issue as a political tool in 2004. The White House did not respond to requests for interviews for this story, nor did the Republican National Committee or a top official in Bush-Cheney '04. But if the Republicans are silent, Democrats say their past speaks volumes.
"Just look at what Bush did to McCain in South Carolina, and that was somebody who was in his own party, who was also, by the way, a Vietnam veteran and American hero," says George Shelton, a campaign strategist and former director of communications for the Democratic Governors' Association. Facing a Democrat, he said, "I don't think they're going to feel that they need to be any nicer."
