Politics/Hate Trick
Norquist, Grover G.
Hate Trick by Grover G. Norquist / n the 1930s, traditional Catholics, evangelical Protestants, and Orthodox Jews were valued members of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal Coalition. Today, they are the...
...Another 300,000 flyers were distributed in Philadelphia in May in a similar joint effort between the archdiocese and the Christian Coalition...
...There are growing signs, however, that it is Republicans who are being energized by this year's more-volatile-than-usual politics...
...Charlie Stenholm said: "I am not associated with bashing the Christian Coalition...
...Republicans are vulnerable to Fazio's strategy only when they go on the defensive...
...Democrats point to the defeat of home-schooling leader Mike Farris in Virginia's race for lieutenant governor last year against Don Beyer...
...I vote with them more than I disagree with them...
...It even takes literally columnist Robert Novak's saying of Weyrich, "I'm supposed to be the Prince of Darkness, but Paul's the only other person who's so tough he gets hate mail from Mother Teresa"—comments Novak delivered at a roast honoring Weyrich on April Fool's Day, 1991...
...Riordan ran strongly with Orthodox Jews and Catholics, and won 54 to 46 percent...
...The 1994 Texas Republican convention that elected Reaganite Tom Pauken state party chairman drew 6,004 delegates, a historic high for the state...
...News & World Report and author of The Almanac of American Politics, points out that the Democrats' share of the two-party vote in the California primary fell from 57 percent to 53 percent from 1990 to 1994...
...But unlike George Allen, who won 75.5 percent of the evangelical vote, Farris took only 60.9 percent, suggesting his loss is better explained by his being a first-time candidate running against a popular and better-funded incumbent...
...Democrats now hope to neutralize the religious right by demonizing it, betting that fears of intolerance will boost the turnout among their liberal base for the November election...
...Once known as "Rockefeller" Republicans, they used to argue that the party must broaden its appeal—by moving left...
...Prepaid $8.00 per copy plus $1.50 postage...
...If anyone was cut out for the task it was Carville, but early Clinton policies so offended grassroots Christians that one-on-one courting of Grover G. Norquist is the president of Americans for Tax Reform...
...J ames Carville had bragged that the White House would bring evangelical Christians back into the Democratic fold with an unprecedented number of presidential visits and White House invitations...
...Last May, GOP candidate Mark Neuman was poised to defeat Peter Barca in a Wisconsin congressional race to replace Les Aspin...
...Instead, they now see the local caucuses swell in number and activism with new members who are solidifying the conservative nature of the modern GOP...
...and "card carrying members of the flat earth society" by Democratic consultant Mark Wellman...
...the "unchristian religious right" by Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders...
...The ecumenical alliances such groups can form may be even broader than that, for strong bonds have developed between traditional Catholics, Orthodox Jews, and evangelicals...
...The Democrats' strategy is fraught with danger...
...Daphne Merkin, author of Enchantment Available from Partisan Review, 236 Bay State Road, Boston, MA 02215...
...Self–identified church-going evangelicals, Protestants, and Catholics represent 39 percent of all registered voters...
...Glenn C. Loury, author of One by One from the Inside Out: Race and Responsibility "The democratization of art and culture for political purposes will only make us dumber than we are, and dumbocracy in America is presently at its height...
...But he called his Sunday church-going "a far cry from being a religious fanatic," and distanced himself from an independent pro-life mailing on his behalf, saying, "That's not what I'm running on...
...Evangelicals cast 38 percent of the votes, double their 1992 turnout, to sweep Republican George Allen into office, 58 to 41...
...Republicans have driyen home the irony of Fazio's role as a champion of "tolerance," given his own abstention from a congressional vote condemning the anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic outpourings of Louis Farrakhan's aide Khalid Muhammad...
...In Georgia, by contrast, moderate pro-choice Senate candidate Paul Coverdell owed his narrow victory to the support of the Christians and pro-lifers he had courted...
...The Democrats are panicking, not just in the face of this fall's elections, but in the realization that Reagan Democrats are becoming Republicans for the long haul...
...A sure sign the offensive against the religious right is backfiring is the number of Democrats who've stepped forward to disavow it, including two sitting members of Congress...
...62 The American Spectator September 1994 Post-election polls showed that only 15 percent of Virginians thought Terry had done "the right thing" in linking Allen to Robertson...
...Republicans have helped themselves with a unified, forceful response to Fazio's attacks...
...Robert Brustein, author of Dumbocracy in America "Political correctness is a form of specious moral one-upmanship, an unholy stew composed of some leftovers from the egalitarian sixties mixed together with an expedient, yuppie-style approach to age-old questions of probity...
...In fact, Farris won more votes than any of the state's losing Democratic candidates...
...Republicans picked up six additional seats in the House of Delegates...
...This is not the portrait of a nation of individuals hostile to religion and fearful of too much religion in public life...
...For additional information: Phone 617/353-4260, Fax 617/353-7444...
...The Democrats could have asked for better messengers...
...All forty-four Senate Republicans signed a letter asking President Clinton to disavow his party's attacks on religious Americans...
...The Christian Coalitionitself has 1.2 million dues-paying members, and 18-20 percent of Americans identify themselves as members or supporters of it...
...The Coalition has long worked with Toward Tradition, a Jewish organization led by Rabbi Daniel Lapin...
...Scotty Baesler announced-he would take no money from Fazio's committee, and called for Joycelyn Elders's resignation...
...78 percent said she should have focussed on other issues...
...The most dramatic sign of the shift are religious/political organizations such as Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition...
...William Phillips, Editor of Partisan Review "Though PC is often seen as a threat to free speech . . . the more subtle threat is the voluntary limitation on speech which a climate of social conformity encourages...
...Political correctness . . . has the effect of obscuring some of the fundamental causes of the educational crisis in America...
...News poll last March found that 65 percent of Americans think religion is losing its influence in America, while 62 percent say that religion is increasing its influence in their own lives...
...evangelical leaders proved futile and was abandoned...
...A stacking religious conservatives is not a new strategy, and in the past two years it has not been a successful one...
...Congenital Republicans are themselves made uncomfortable by a more crowded party, and its many new and unfamiliar faces...
...The American Spectator September 1994 63...
...With material supplied by the likes of People for the American Way, the ADL's 179-page "book" turned out to be a cut-and-paste collection of attacks on the Christian Coalition, Phyllis Schley, Paul Weyrich, and others...
...Texas Rep...
...The Christian Coalition worked directly with John Cardinal O'Connor of New York in distributing 2 million voter guides for the fall 1993 school board elections: 56 of 80 pro-family candidates won...
...A Special Issue of Partisan Review With contributions from: Robert Alter, Brigitte Berger, Robert Brustein, Andrew Delbanco, Morris Dickstein, Eugene Goodheart, Susan Haack, Roger Kimball, Hilton Kramer, Leonard Kriegel, Edith Kurzweil, Mary Lefkowitz, David Lehman, Mark Lilla, Glenn C. Loury, Heather Mac Donald, Steven Marcus, Jerry L. Martin, Daphne Merkin, Mark Mirsky, William Phillips, Ronald Radosh, Diane Ravitch, John Searle, David Sidorsky, Fred Siegel, and Alan Wolfe...
...Religious conservatives, who only twenty years ago were central to Democratic domination in Virginia, today form the bulwark of a Virginia Republican Party whose convention this spring—attended by a record 14,400 voting delegates—put Oliver North on the senatorial ballot...
...Last summer, Mary Sue Terry enjoyed a 29-point lead in Virginia's gubernatorial race, when Democrats began to denounce Republican candidates as puppets of Pat Robertson...
...CI Order We Won't Be Offended...
...Today, they are the target of a coordinated campaign of vilification that has seen them denounced as the "fire breathing Christian radical right" by Vic Fazio, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee...
...Michael Barone, a columnist at U.S...
...Kentucky Rep...
...In the 1993 Los Angeles mayor's race, Democrat Michael Woo ran television commercials attacking Richard Riordan as a pawn of Pat Robertson...
...In Arkansas, Mike Huckabee, a minister and the former president of the Arkansas Baptist Convention, survived an attack on his religious background to become lieutenant governor—the first statewide Republican victory in twelve years...
...Party chairman Haley Barbour and National Republican Congressional Committee chairman Bill Paxon have been unapologetic in defending these new Republican activists and urging candidates to counterattack...
...Clinton supporters hope attacks on the religious right will distract voters and the press from a lengthening menu of domestic scandals and foreign policy bungling, and divide the GOP by heightening longtime liberal Republican fears about these newcomers to the Republican coalition...
...A U.S...
...Pro-life and evangelical voters were not impressed, and Neuman lost by 675 votes...
...Even a report by the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith did more harm than good, leading conservative Jewish leaders, columnists, and organizations to rally to the defense of conservative Christians in politics...
Vol. 27 • September 1994 • No. 9
