Bush gets fundamental

When even the United States constitution becomes a weapon in George Bush’s re-election campaign, you know the Republicans are running scared – and running back home to their core voters.

With the President’s popularity dragging along in the doldrums, Team Bush has decided to start playing its down-and-dirty cards. It no longer counts on a frictionless sweep to victory, as personified by pictures of the man in the flight suit distributing tax-cut bounty to grateful masses. Suffering from conservative doubts over stupendous deficits and what the hard-core Right sees as an overly illegal-Hispanic-friendly immigration program , they’ve had to revert to Plan B: early mobilization of a bristling front in the culture war.

So it came to pass that on 24 February, Bush declared his support for a constitutional amendment “protecting the institution of marriage.” Several times denouncing “activist” judges and local officials in San Francisco and New Mexico who in recent days have married more than 3,000 same-sex couples to great showers of publicity, Bush deployed his favorite F-word as he rose to the defense of “the most fundamental institution of civilization.”

He delivered his pitch stiffly – or was he trying to signal to his less-than-rabid supporters that he had been dragooned into playing the role of Karl Rove’s half-willing pawn? His inner voice doesn’t matter: the sharpest political reporters in the land instantly diagnosed his gesture as (in the words of a Washington Post headline) “A Move to Satisfy Conservative Base.” The Post’s Dana Milbank wrote that “the compassionate conservative of 2000 has shown he is willing, if necessary, to rekindle the culture wars in 2004.”

Milbank observed that this move was right out of his father’s 1988 playbook: Bush “is turning with some reluctance to a technique his father, George H. W. Bush, used in 1988, when issues such as the Pledge of Allegiance, flag desecration, Willie Horton and the American Civil Liberties Union competed with the usual national security and economic concerns. Such social issues – abortion, prayer, patriotism, homosexuality and popular culture – often work to the GOP’s advantage by mobilizing the partisans.”

In 2000, Bush considered it reasonable to leave the question of gay marriage to the fifty states of the union. In 2004, the culture czar has chosen to trump the rights of his nation’s states. The ghost of his father’s defeat at the hands of Bill Clinton in 1992 perennially haunts George II. Then, grumpy conservatives failed to come to the rescue. This time, Bush plans to satisfy his conservative base.

But how well is he doing? Not so well judging by the reaction of the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives this week. An amendment to the constitution is not only hard to achieve (two-thirds of each house of Congress must first vote yes, followed by three-quarters of state legislatures), it treads close to blasphemy. In Washington, the office-holding Right must wonder whether it’s now taking on more trouble than it needs. For although gay marriage is surely unpopular among a majority of people nationwide, a constitutional amendment that removes each state’s responsibility to decide the issue is deeply divisive, including among independents and Democrats. (A lot depends on how the question is asked – but in one wording, there’s an even split between a constitutional amendment and the proposition that each state should “make its own laws on homosexual marriage.”)

Josh Marshall – a blogger who knows Congress and whose acumen is worth checking out throughout what promises to be a wild, mad year – doubts that Republicans outside the South and the Mountain States are eager to inflame what is, locally, a bloody divide. According to one count, thirty-four senators are already on the record opposing such an amendment, so it’s really dead in the water (though useful, of course, as a base-rousing clarion call).

The significance of Bush’s move lies in more than its cynical political calculation – it is that the current United States President is ready to suborn the constitution itself to the interests of his remaining in power. This makes 24 February the most revealing date in the election year so far.

As “Bush Keeps Faith With His Base” (the New York Times’ headline), he risks a fierce countermobilization comparable to what his party inspired in 1992 when Pat Buchanan was permitted to address their Houston convention in prime television time invoking “a cultural war…for the soul of America.”

No doubt Bush will come up with some candy to offer swing voters who might be offended by his base-thrilling initiative. But this will not change one (yes) fundamental: The Republicans are indeed running scared. Ralph Nader’s announcement this week that he will respond to a nonexistent call and offer himself to an America deeply soured on him was worth only two days of media bedazzlement. Jobs are not materializing, Iraq festers, and Bush is coming to be known as a liar. Instead of coasting on his purported achievements, Bush has “gone negative” early.

This will excite many Republican fundraisers, if not the corporate chiefs whose reliance on Bush rests on firm material foundations. Howard Dean may have accumulated 600,000 email addresses, but the Republicans are said to have a stockpile of 6 million. The Bush-Cheney headquarters are already pushing voter registration, targeting “3 million voters who support President Bush’s bold vision for America,” in the words of a fundraising mailing from Republican National Committee chairman Marc Racicot. Many of these are Christian fundamentalists who wavered on Bush in 2000, partly, Republican strategists think, because of the last-minute revelation that he’d been arrested for drunk driving.

Many Democrats hoped that the issue of gay marriage (or even civil unions) could be back-burnered in this year’s election. It was one of their gravest worries about Howard Dean, who had signed a civil union bill as Vermont governor, that his candidacy would force the issue open, like it or not. Now the courts have forced the issue, and the gay throngs lining up for marriage licenses, urged on by the civil disobedience of San Francisco’s (relatively conservative) mayor, have thrown off the calmest prognostications.

Matt Drudge’s anti-Kerry smear, my subject in last week’s column, was a warning shot. There’s no doubt more slime to come. Watch for Republicans to rush to Ralph Nader’s aid, helping him get on the ballot in various states where, enfeebled as he is, he might make a difference on 2 November.

And – to raise a nasty subject I will revisit in coming weeks – watch for underhanded efforts to rouse riotous demonstrations at the Republican convention in New York City, the better to lend the president more of a wartime luster in time for an autumn showdown.