Damon Linker: George Bush's other legacy
[Damon Linker, author of The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege, is a senior writing fellow in the Center for Critical Writing at the University of Pennsylvania.]
With George Bush set to leave office in just over six months, critical evaluations of his presidency have begun. A particularly scathing indictment was delivered this week by scholar Andrew Bacevich, in an op-ed for the Boston Globe. In Bacevich's view, the Bush administration's most pernicious legacy will follow from its bellicose foreign policy - and in particular from its decision to fight militant Islamic groups like al-Qaida by launching an enormously counter-productive "global war on terror". While Bacevich is certainly right to emphasise foreign policy in evaluating the Bush presidency, focusing on it exclusively is one-sided. As Barack Obama's surprising speech on Tuesday in Zanesville, Ohio powerfully suggests, Bush's greatest (and most malign) accomplishment may turn out to be his effort to inject a potent form of Christian piety into the political life of the nation.
Bucking those in his own party who were deeply troubled by Bush's attempt to direct billions of federal grants to churches, synagogues and mosques, Obama warmly embraced the idea in his Ohio speech and even promised to expand it as president. If Obama's proposal persuades a significant number of evangelical Protestants to abandon their exclusive support for the Republican party and vote instead to elect a Democratic president, it will have done some good by diminishing some of the recent polarisation of the American electorate along a religious and cultural lines. Yet Obama's very attempt to win evangelical votes demonstrates the extent to which Bush and his political adviser Karl Rove have succeeded in transforming the electoral landscape of the nation by encouraging and rewarding political activism among intensely religious Christians. Thanks to the efforts of Bush and Rove, the Democratic nominee for president now views it, perhaps rightly, as politically necessary to make a dramatic display of his fealty to faith.
Obama should proceed cautiously in his efforts to woo religious voters, however, taking heed of the ambiguous lessons of Bush's efforts at religious outreach. Indeed, the steeply declining fortunes of the Bush administration in its second term illustrate the considerable risk of aligning oneself too closely with intensely pious members of the electorate. While the biggest factors in explaining Bush's record-low approval ratings are the seemingly endless Iraq war and the lacklustre American economy, Bush's slide in the polls began in March 2005, with the decision of the president and the Republican Congress to reward religious voters for their support by intervening in the wrenching right-to-die case of Terri Schiavo - an act that disgusted all but the most extreme opponents of euthanasia. Likewise, Bush's nomination of the evangelical Harriet Miers to the US supreme court blew up in his face, as nearly every other faction of the conservative movement openly and adamantly rejected her as an intellectually unworthy nominee. Getting too close to evangelicals can be political poison, it seems, even for a conservative Republican...
Read entire article at Guardian (UK)
With George Bush set to leave office in just over six months, critical evaluations of his presidency have begun. A particularly scathing indictment was delivered this week by scholar Andrew Bacevich, in an op-ed for the Boston Globe. In Bacevich's view, the Bush administration's most pernicious legacy will follow from its bellicose foreign policy - and in particular from its decision to fight militant Islamic groups like al-Qaida by launching an enormously counter-productive "global war on terror". While Bacevich is certainly right to emphasise foreign policy in evaluating the Bush presidency, focusing on it exclusively is one-sided. As Barack Obama's surprising speech on Tuesday in Zanesville, Ohio powerfully suggests, Bush's greatest (and most malign) accomplishment may turn out to be his effort to inject a potent form of Christian piety into the political life of the nation.
Bucking those in his own party who were deeply troubled by Bush's attempt to direct billions of federal grants to churches, synagogues and mosques, Obama warmly embraced the idea in his Ohio speech and even promised to expand it as president. If Obama's proposal persuades a significant number of evangelical Protestants to abandon their exclusive support for the Republican party and vote instead to elect a Democratic president, it will have done some good by diminishing some of the recent polarisation of the American electorate along a religious and cultural lines. Yet Obama's very attempt to win evangelical votes demonstrates the extent to which Bush and his political adviser Karl Rove have succeeded in transforming the electoral landscape of the nation by encouraging and rewarding political activism among intensely religious Christians. Thanks to the efforts of Bush and Rove, the Democratic nominee for president now views it, perhaps rightly, as politically necessary to make a dramatic display of his fealty to faith.
Obama should proceed cautiously in his efforts to woo religious voters, however, taking heed of the ambiguous lessons of Bush's efforts at religious outreach. Indeed, the steeply declining fortunes of the Bush administration in its second term illustrate the considerable risk of aligning oneself too closely with intensely pious members of the electorate. While the biggest factors in explaining Bush's record-low approval ratings are the seemingly endless Iraq war and the lacklustre American economy, Bush's slide in the polls began in March 2005, with the decision of the president and the Republican Congress to reward religious voters for their support by intervening in the wrenching right-to-die case of Terri Schiavo - an act that disgusted all but the most extreme opponents of euthanasia. Likewise, Bush's nomination of the evangelical Harriet Miers to the US supreme court blew up in his face, as nearly every other faction of the conservative movement openly and adamantly rejected her as an intellectually unworthy nominee. Getting too close to evangelicals can be political poison, it seems, even for a conservative Republican...