Wedged In

I keep reading in the mainstream press about the terrible rift between the DLC and the left and how Democratic candidates are going to have to thread the needle in 06 and 08 to deal with it. We are all told how desperately the party needs to stop being a collection of issues and come together around some big ideas that we can all endorse and win mainstream support with.

This is all true. Democrats squabbling amongst themselves is an old story and it is certainly the case that the grassroots (which I think are erroneously referred to and perceived as far left) are more restive than I’ve seen them in years. We will undoubtedly have some arguments over the next couple of years about the direction of the party and what it’s going to take to win.

It’s interesting to me however, that there is another similar story building about which the mainstream media seem to be mostly oblivious. Indeed, many Democrats seem oblivious as well, certainly those of the Washington persuasion.

Yesterday, the president of the United States once again declared himself in favor of teaching the religiously based propaganda campaign called “intelligent design” as science. He’s done this before, back in the day, coming out in favor of teaching creationism. (It’s actually quite amazing coming from the son of the president who once called the religious right “the extra-chromosome set.”) This is, and has been for some time, the sort of pander that nobody really took all that seriously. After all, the religious right was quite a docile community that could be manipulated for votes without ever having to deliver. But that may be changing. We are beginning to see some big tensions building around the radical religious right and its symbiotic relationship with the Republican Party.

After last night’s squeaker in Ohio, people are sure to be wondering what the salient issues were that made this race so unexpectedly close. Certainly we had an attractive candidate and a Republican party in disarray. The war was an issue and it’s becoming more and more unpopular. But one of the things that struck me strongly in watching Jean Schmidt was just how extreme she was. She’s definitely a member of the extra-chromosome set. Her shrill views on abortion we’ve become used to, but what about this stuff about living wills and stem cell research? (And what in God’s name was a woman from Ohio going on about the minutemen for?)She represents the far right of the GOP and it looks to me from the election results that her extremist agenda may be coming up against resistence in her own party.

There’s a reason why Bill Frist just did a Sistah Soljah on stem cell research. And I think that the reason is examined in some detail in this very interesting article in USA Today:

CANTON, Ohio — Pastor Russell Johnson paces across the broad stage as he decries the “secular jihadists” who have “hijacked” America, accuses the public schools of neglecting to teach that Hitler was “an avid evolutionist” and links abortion to children who murder their parents.

“It’s time for the church to get a spinal column” and push the “seculars and the jihadists … into the dust bin of history,” the guest preacher tells a congregation that fills the sanctuary at First Christian Church of Canton.

That is his mission. Johnson leads the Ohio Restoration Project, an emergent network of nearly 1,000 “Patriot Pastors” from conservative churches across the state. Each has pledged to register 300 “values voters,” adding hundreds of thousands of like-minded citizens to the electorate who “would be salt and light for America.”

And, perhaps, help elect a fellow Christian conservative, Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, as governor next year. That has alarmed some establishment Republicans who back rival contenders and warn that an assertive Christian right campaign could repel moderate voters the party needs.

Evangelical Christian leaders nationwide have been emboldened by their role in re-electing President Bush and galvanized by their success in campaigning for constitutional amendments to ban same-sex marriage, passed in 18 states so far.

Now some are organizing to build on last year’s successes. They want to solidify their role in setting the political agenda and electing sympathetic public officials.

The Ohio effort isn’t unique. Johnson’s project — which he says has signed up more than 900 pastors in Ohio during its first 10 weeks in operation — has helped spawn the Texas Restoration Project in Bush’s home state. The fledging Pennsylvania Pastors’ Network has signed up 81 conservative clergy so far. Similar efforts are beginning to percolate elsewhere.

“It’s maturing as a movement within the evangelical Christian community,” says Colin Hanna of Let Freedom Ring, a Pennsylvania-based group that teaches pastors how to be involved in politics.

John Green, a political scientist at the University of Akron, calls the networks a new chapter in an effort to organize conservative clergy that began with the Moral Majority a quarter-century ago, then faltered.

“This generation of evangelical pastors is much more open to this type of activity,” says Green, who studies Ohio politics and religious conservatives. “There isn’t the kind of hostility to involvement in public affairs you would have found among evangelicals 25 years ago.”

[…]

But the unyielding focus by many conservative Christian activists on such issues as abortion and gay marriage worries Republican loyalists who have other priorities. Economic conservatives want to lower taxes, for instance; small-government conservatives want to limit the intrusion of government on daily life. For many voters, jobs and education are top concerns.

“This is a 50-50 state,” almost evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, state Auditor Betty Montgomery says. She and Ohio Attorney General Jim Petro are the other Republicans now in the gubernatorial race. “We are a crossroads state and very diverse. We’ve never really elected anyone too far to the right or too far to the left, too liberal or too conservative, and that could make it difficult for Ken to win in the fall.”

Montgomery and Petro are proven vote-getters and known statewide; each received more votes than Blackwell in their respective contests in 2002. But Blackwell can claim a base among Christian conservatives — he’s featured in “Ohio for Jesus” radio spots and regularly speaks from pulpits across the state — while the other two divide the party’s more moderate ranks.

Some establishment Republicans want either Petro or Montgomery to drop out and allow a one-on-one contest against Blackwell. (Both insist they’re in the race for good.)

Neil Clark, a former chief operating officer for the Ohio Senate Republican Caucus and one of the best-connected lobbyists in Columbus, the state capital, says he and other moderate Republicans are worried about the state “going back to the Stone Ages of Salem.”

[…]

State Republican Chairman Bob Bennett, who is neutral in the primary, predicts “a very tough year” for whoever wins the gubernatorial nomination. Investigations into financial improprieties have engulfed the Taft administration and touched other officeholders.

He says the odds are against Republicans uniting behind any one candidate — and against having a primary that doesn’t leave scars. “They’ll be out to kill each other,” he predicts, “and they’ll have $10 to $15 million each to do it with.”

[…]

First, though, there is next year’s gubernatorial primary — no sure thing, and a test for the emerging network of Christian conservatives.

Petro, 56, has raised the most money and gotten the most endorsements from state legislators. His hometown of Cleveland gives him a stronghold in a Democratic part of the state. Sitting in an office suite lined with portraits of his predecessors, he says he has a “record of accomplishment” in state office that Blackwell can’t match.

But Petro’s positions on social issues have caused controversy. After being endorsed in 1998 by the National Abortion Rights Action League, he announced two years later that after reflection he had decided to oppose abortion except in cases of rape, incest or to save the life of the mother. While he opposes same-sex marriage, he also opposed the constitutional ban last year because he said as written it could have unintended consequences, including undercutting laws on domestic violence.

Montgomery, 57, has been the state’s top vote-getter in the past two elections; she was the first woman elected auditor in Ohio and, before that, attorney general. She backed the gay-marriage ban but is anathema to many conservative Christian leaders because she generally supports abortion rights.

The focus on that issue to the exclusion of all others exasperates her. “If you get somebody who is with you 100% of the time and can’t win an election, isn’t it better to have somebody who is with you 80% of the time and can win?” she asks, sitting in a conference room at her campaign headquarters. Boxes of campaign literature are stacked along the walls. She says she was raised “not to wear your religion on your sleeve.”

I think there is a good possibility that this is going to be played out all over the country in the next few years. This 50/50 electorate is not confined to Ohio. And despite the RNC’s attempts to demonize Move-On as the modern Weathermen, the face of radicalism today is not Democrats who were opposed to the war in Iraq — the Republicans themselves are trying to distance themselves as fast as they can from that debacle. (Perhaps the DLC could take notice and stop flogging the GWOT, too. It’s been officially decreed as last year’s color.) No, the face of radicalism is guys like this pastor who are insisting that abortion is like kids murdering their parents and saying that the “secular jihad” should be pushed into the dustbin of history. Moderate republicans are getting nervous about this crap at long last.

Unsurprisingly,Paul Weyrich is quoted in that article saying that “Ken Blackwell ‘believes God wanted him as secretary of State during 2004’ because as such he was responsible for voting operations in a critical state during a critical election.” Weyrich added: “It is difficult to disagree with that proposition.” Paul Weyrich obviously has a sense of humor. He, along with a a cadre of movement conservatives (that includes our boy Karl Rove) have been building an evangelical political machine for more than two decades. It’s the red state version of Tammany Hall. “God” placing Ken Blackwell in charge of counting the votes is one of his proudest achievements.

It is, therefore, in our best interest to separate these people from the rest of the Republican party. I certainly do not believe it’s impossible. They are beginning to be difficult to control and are pushing the party farther to the right than the country can accept.

The conventional wisdom yesterday was that Hackett needed a low turnout in order to get close in this very conservative district. The turnout was phenomenally high for a special election and Hackett did very well. I haven’t been able to find any breakdown of the electorate yesterday, but the campaign clearly managed to engage Democrats in larger numbers than expected (there are many fewer of them in the district), suppress turnout among Republicans or persuade a fair number of Republicans to vote for him. It was probably some combination of the three. Whatever it was, it’s clear that Jean Schmidt’s extreme politics and Paul Hackett’s “man of the people” approach was perceived very differently in 2005 than the Bush-Kerry race was in 2004. I’ll be curious to see whatever extrapolations people come up with.

Just to be clear, I am not suggesting that we become hostile to religion. Nor am I suggesting that we run as the libertine Girls-Gone-Wild party. But I do believe that the zeitgeist is changing. I think we need to help drive this wedge between the radical religious right and the moderate Republicans.

I like the way Hackett put it: “I don’t need Washington to tell me how to live my personal life, or how to pray to my God.”

Update:

Via Maha in the comments, I see that Fafnir has weighed in about “the democratic party an its terrible internal divisions an stuff.”

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