Faith Talk
Faith Talk The nation's liberty, George Washington pointed out more than two hundred years ago, cannot be maintained without morality, and morality, in turn, largely rests on religion. But over the...
...And he was never as bold as he appeared on holding President Clinton responsible or accountable for his actions—a terribly weighty matter to which he, of course, no longer ever alludes...
...So Ickes threatened to destroy his career if he refused...
...David Tell, for the Editors...
...Al Gore is a man who sees nothing wrong—something, instead, to be almost admired—in his willingness to breach the limits of traditional honor so as to achieve his party's legislative goals...
...He has unsheathed the terrible sword of "personal destruction," which is, after all "what's wrong with our politics...
...And just a few days later, the clucking reached its current, near-deafening pitch...
...Fabiani's conclusion in sharper relief: The boss and his henchmen may be fully "despicable," but if their agenda is the right one, then it renders that purely "personal" ugliness trivial—and anyone who shares the agenda can, even should, deny the truth of his leader's character...
...But that small margin is important...
...Even then, in other words, Gore's defense of Clinton's honesty was craven and weird...
...George W. Bush is justified in reminding the country about the temple and justified in doing so now rather than later...
...And further his career...
...If this is what victory looks like, then the return of religion to public life seems better than the absence only by the smallest of margins...
...Last week's Bush ad cites Gore's temple visit as an instance of hypocrisy, an event that puts paid to the vice president's call for campaign finance reform...
...It looks like victory when the Democrats, seeking a vice-presidential candidate to help them distance themselves from the dishonor of President Clinton, light on an observant Jew as the most obvious exemplar of morality...
...It is ridiculous, this complaint...
...Fabiani thought this coercion "despicable...
...Still, the Republicans have resources with which to respond, and the passive silence of George W. Bush since the Democratic convention is astonishing...
...His ludicrously exaggerated support for Clinton during the Lewinsky scandal...
...Why, naturally enough, he is a senior aide on the presidential campaign of Albert Gore Jr...
...The better to forestall a victory by the opposing team, you see...
...Because last Wednesday, during an interview with CNN, Bush reiterated his pledge to avoid "personally attacking" his opponent...
...Now it seems the resistance has succeeded...
...And Gore had to make those fund-raising phone calls from his White House office...
...Of course, there has been resistance...
...We have not grown confused about this by accident...
...His Mario Cuomo-esque position on partial-birth abortion—personally opposed, but publicly in favor—remains a throwback to the most naked days of the naked public square...
...It looks like victory when the Anti-Defamation League, an organization founded to fight discrimination against Jews, is forced to the confusion of censuring that candidate because he's been speaking aloud about his Judaism...
...The kiboshed ad was built around a clip from an interview with Gore on NBC's Meet the Press...
...The next president will likely have several appointments to the Supreme Court, and will name hundreds of judges to the lower federal courts...
...No, we are not here referring to the "mean-spiritedness" of Washington's "tone...
...So the Democratic party had to finance an expensive national advertising effort during the 1996 campaign...
...The Democrats are "going to take back God this time," a campaign official claimed earlier this year—and, by God, they have...
...The task now is to ensure that it is change for the better...
...Indeed, Lieberman's religious discourse stretched sufficiently in Detroit last week to compare President Clinton to Moses: "You might say the Red Sea finally parted, and more Americans than ever before walked through behind President Bill Clinton...
...The better to win...
...It looks like victory when both the Republican and Democratic presidential nominees speak openly of their Christian faith, and the Democratic vice-presidential nominee stands in a church pulpit, as Senator Lieberman did on Sunday, August 27, to call upon the American people to "renew the dedication of our nation and ourselves to God and God's purpose...
...The country is likely to react this way because it has become deeply confused about a principle that, just eight short years ago, was still universally considered indispensable to the very idea of American constitutionalism...
...Asked last spring to name the political philosopher who most influenced him, George W. Bush answered "Jesus...
...But over the last four decades, the forces of secularism—with considerable aid from America's judges—have won innumerable battles in the war to banish religion from the nation's public life...
...This is Gore's true "character...
...After all, at the moment the most obvious victor is Al Gore...
...Consider an unusually self-conscious but otherwise typical student...
...We forgot that the public display of religion is not the wrapping of the mantle of private religion—the public glow of personal sanctity—around a partisan position that a politician would hold even if he weren't religious...
...We have been taught our confusion, on purpose, by the Clinton-Gore administration...
...Among Clinton's critics have been some Republicans...
...Since 1993, Al Gore has loyally served a president who felt positively entitled to break the established rules...
...No problem even with the fact that the Meet the Press interview in question took place in 1994, by which time Bill Clinton had already unrolled the first few hundred in his record string of presidential lies...
...because he changed my heart...
...and entitled, worst, to twist the entire executive branch into a private legal defense committee—all purely by dint of his politics...
...But, he later explained to Woodward, he chose to succumb anyway—because he was persuaded by Ickes's argument that "the president needs to be reelected" so as to effect the policies Fabiani believed correct...
...And yet, hypocrisy is merely a garden-variety political sin...
...From the Democratic party's point of view, Joe Lieberman's fight with the Anti-Defamation League could not have been better timed...
...All of which backing and forthing immediately set Washington tongues a-clucking about "disarray" in Austin, Texas...
...So—Bush ought to be asking—is Gore going to select judges who will permit the religious "reawakening" and "rededication" for which his running mate now calls...
...More justified, for that matter, than perhaps he realizes...
...But how can they not respond sympathetically when they observe a believer in God attacked for mentioning his belief...
...Clinton capo Harold Ickes offered it to him...
...something worse than that lately plagues us...
...How much graver the sins at issue here: broken laws and lies and, underneath, an outright corruption of our government and politics...
...Who was Mark Fabiani, in those days, but a perfect doppelganger for the American majority that sustained Bill Clinton in office during his impeachment trial—despite that majority's clear understanding, consistently expressed in the polls, that the president was guilty of every felony charged against him...
...Bottum and William Kr-istol Bush Goes "Negative" At the end of last week, by general consensus here in the capital, the presidential campaign turned "nega-tive"—and it was George W. Bush who did the deed...
...Do you doubt the lesson is real and explicit...
...But be that as it may: For using a six-year-old Gore quotation to make this point, Bush would surely have been whacked hard by a chorus of Democrats and media types, and it wasn't worth such grief, so he wisely killed the ad...
...Their charge about the Texas health care system concerns Medicaid, a substantive and therefore legitimate "issue," they huffily explain, whereas Bush's mention of the Hsi Lai Temple is a "personal" and therefore off-limits assault on Al Gore's character...
...Thinkers from Richard John Neuhaus in The Naked Public Squ^^e to Stephen Carter in The Culture of Disbelief have fought back, waging an unfashionable fight on behalf of public religion in America—not so much for the sake of religion, as for the sake of America...
...Change has come...
...Tut, tut, tut...
...We're not sure what this is, except perhaps a new political idiom—call it "faith talk"—that seeks to dress up political partisanship in the language of personal religious emotion...
...The awkward way Bush crossed this line and the reaction to his move are eloquent testimony to a central weakness of current American politics...
...For shame...
...That impression would be fair, of course, at least where the president's really important, i.e...
...Clinton, one remembers, ran as a new sort of Democratic moderate, but his administration quickly silted up with all the old, familiar leftists—because the Democrats don't actually have anyone, except Lieberman, who is willing to run the risk of alienating important Democratic constituencies...
...entitled to lie about the matter whenever he was caught...
...First came word, two weekends ago, that Bush had ordered the last-minute cancellation of a television ad about Vice President Gore...
...No problem there, we'd say...
...For that matter, they don't really have Joe Lieberman...
...In other words, the Lieberman nomination has allowed Gore to accomplish a pair of nicely judged triangulations: appearing to censure the behavior of the president with whom Gore would otherwise be indelibly associated, and appearing to distance himself from the secularist radicals in his own party...
...And who is Mark Fabiani these days...
...Almost unprompted, Vice President Gore explained that he solves policy questions by asking himself, "What would Jesus do...
...The radical secularists have been routed...
...The vice president, the gist of this commercial was to have been, is a man who will say just about anything to protect his political interests...
...Bush has broken his word...
...Strongly religious people have tended to vote Republican in recent years, precisely because they have seen the Democratic party as captive to a radically secularist ideology...
...Much of this is not religion, but religiosity...
...President Clinton—ah, well, President Clinton remains the master: the creator of an extraordinary circle in which actual sins become the occasion for a public display of private religious feeling that apparently abolishes any need to pay a penalty for those sins...
...A handful of cases in recent years have, by a series of close votes in the Supreme Court, slightly reversed the trend...
...not piety, but pietism...
...Including some illegal ones—like those generated by Gore's visit to the Hsi Lai Temple...
...We forgot that it is still less the Clintonian wrapping of the mantle of private religious faith around the politician himself...
...Nonetheless, and despite it all, the acknowledged role of religion in public life grows stronger, and it will not now be reversed...
...To wit: that a public man's willingness to bow before the law and answer for his actions, quickly, honestly, and always—thus, his readiness to accept custodial responsibility for orderly and transparent government—speaks as nothing else does to his character...
...That is to say, unsuspecting viewers might have got the impression that even now the veep cannot bring himself to admit that Clinton spoke a falsehood or two during his Lewinsky troubles...
...During which clip, asked whether President Clinton had uttered even a single untruth "in the last two years," Gore stammered out an embarrassed but nevertheless very stubborn denial...
...Won't Gore select judicial nominees who will uphold his views on abortion, affirmative action, vouchers, and a secular public square—all the standard Democratic litmus tests...
...perjurious, falsehoods are concerned...
...The secularization of public life has occurred not by the will of the American people, but by the will of the American judiciary...
...not righteousness, but self-righteousness...
...And in Chicago the next day, he declared any deviation from the Democrats' health care plan a violation of God's Law: "Isn't Medicare coverage of prescription drugs really about the values of the Fifth Commandment: Honor your father and mother...
...It is ridiculous that the cry of foul comes loudest from the Gore campaign and the Democratic National Committee, whose most recent "theme of the week" is the canard that George W. Bush has knowingly withheld necessary medical treatment from desperately ill poor children in Texas—and whose own television ads have been similarly savaging Bush for months on end...
...And therefore, that a public man's character is certainly an "issue" that begs for inspection...
...And his party had to vacuum up every available contribution it could find...
...There is a chilling passage in Bob Woodward's book Shadow which describes how Mark Fabiani, the White House's top Lewinsky-era scandal spinner, came to take that job...
...Almost nothing the Democrats do can really put at risk the votes of the secularists, and with Lieberman, they may have successfully weakened the Republicans' hold on the religious...
...Properly conceived, you might even say, character is the paramount issue...
...What could be more serious a campaign "issue" than that...
...Indeed, won't Gore be unlikely even to staff his own administration with religion-friendly types...
...Impeachment was simply a "partisan effort in Congress...
...Or this, a few years back: "The public needed to be informed as to why this pending Republican agenda was not good for the country...
...There were Republicans involved, Gore has blithely explained...
...Even before Senator Lieberman's vision of a Moses-like Bill Clinton, the recent revival of public religion had seen its share of strange moments...
...But the would-be ad nowhere identified the date of the NBC broadcast in question, and thus might have implied that Gore's weirdness was recent...
...As the price of ascending to the top of his party, Lieberman has retreated on affirmative action, on Hollywood, on school vouchers...
...It is further ridiculous that such a bogus distinction has already won widespread and automatic acceptance among Washington's professional commentariat...
...It looks like victory when the editorial page of the New York Times, in its attempt to persuade Senator Lieberman to abandon his religious rhetoric, is reduced to the dubious expedient of trying to correct George Washington on the meaning of America's founding...
...And finally, it is ridiculous—no, it is terribly depress-ing—that the general public, too, is likely to concede to Team Gore the cherished victim's role in this controversy, and cast the bulk of blame on Bush for the campaign's inevitable "descent" into the "mud...
...Now comes time to recognize the servant as his master's spawn: Gore is like this too...
...It is that, to be sure...
...Fabiani did not want it...
...And then, barely 24 hours later, it was revealed that Bush had already approved another ad, now on the air in 17 states—this one challenging Al Gore's credibility, most strikingly by reference to the vice president's notorious "community outreach" appearance at a Los Angeles Buddhist temple in 1996...
...And that fact alone, the president has over and over again insisted, is enough to disprove the criticism...
...The question is: What exactly has been won...
...In the long decades spent chasing religion from America's public life, a kind of amnesia settled in, and we forgot what public religion actually is...
...Indeed, the country's fetishistic revulsion over mean-spiritedness has actually helped incubate and disguise the real disease...
...How can that possibly allow the return of public religion that Lieberman desires...
...It is ridiculous that Gore's admirers pretend annoyance at the suggestion that such stuff might be beyond the pale...
...We forgot that the Bible is neither a public-policy position paper nor a mine for inconsequential rhetoric, but a faith-founding document that informs the practice of public life...
Vol. 5 • September 2000 • No. 48
