Monthly Archives: December 2007

Don’t Blame the Boomers

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Jill at Brilliant at Breakfast has words for the young folks who blame America’s problems on Boomers.

Last month I had an extended and rather heated exchange with one of our commenters who made a host of sweeping generalizations about baby boomers, few if any of which were true. I’ve had conversations with some of my Gen-X friends on this as well, with many of them similarly blaming the baby boomers for their own plight. I’ve even seen Gen-Xers trying to claim Keith Olbermann as one of their own, even though he was born in 1959 and therefore is indisputably a baby boomer. I hate to tell them this, but no less a Gen-X icon than old Lloyd Dobler himself, John Cusack, only escaped the dread Baby Boomer label by a mere six months.

I’m seeing a lot of this lately; blaming the baby boomers for everything that’s gone wrong in this country, hand-in-hand with the idea that Gen-X, Gen-Y, and the Millenials are somehow either a) hapless victims of the evil boomers (largely the province of Gen-Xers who are now reaching an age when the refusal to “sell out” is starting to have the nasty consequences of no savings and no health insurance); b) greedy, evil people who have sucked up all the resources and left nothing for anyone else; or c) an entire generation of hippies who had all the sex and all the drugs and all the fun and then became Republicans and tried to deny anyone else the fun they had.

I’ve seen a lot of this, too, and while I don’t think all Gen-Xers, etc., are guilty (that would be generalizing), enough of ’em are guilty, and it annoys the bleep out of me.

Jill is right when she says,

There’s this notion Chris and others put forward that the 80-hour workweek is somehow the invention of sellout baby boomers out of pure greed for bigger houses and ever-more electronic gewgaws and STUFF. But the fact of the matter is that at least for people born my year and later, especially those of us on a white-collar track, the defined benefit pensions and job security that our parents enjoyed was already largely gone by the time we emerged from college into a recession caused by the second oil shock in a decade.

This was my experience, also, and I’m older than Jill. By the time I was out of college the kind of job security my parents had enjoyed was already evaporating. I agree that younger people today are getting a raw deal generally compared to us Boomers, but we Boomers got a rawer deal than our parents did after World War II. And I believe the forces causing this creeping rawness were put into place while most of us Boomers were still babies.

I have in my hands a book titled Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945-1960 by Elizabeth Fones-Wolf. Dr. Fones-Wolf documents that during the very years the Boomers were birthed, a cabal of wealthy corporate leaders used their resources to undermine the popularity of New Deal progressivism and unions. They succeeded, and this success ushered in the era in which corporations could demand that workers pretty much turn over their lives to the Company. Before most Boomers were even in high school most of the damage had been done, and by the time we entered the workforce the rules had already been changed, although we didn’t realize it right away.

Our parents were certain that the road to success lay in staying with one employer for years and years and years, accumulating pensions and vacation time, and for the most part that worked for them. But most of us Boomers learned, slowly and painfully, that this life plan was no longer possible. Certainly some among us bought the corporate bullshit and played the games, but most of us have just been trying to survive. And now making a living is even more precarious. This concerns me deeply. I want to reverse this pernicious trend and help younger people achieve a better quality of life.

However, my dears, if you are going to blame me for your problems … go bleep yourselves.

I’ve pointed out many times that the archetypal rightie-bot is a Gen-Xer whose earliest political memories are of the Carter Administration. You see this over and over again. I’m not saying all Gen-Xers are rightie-bots, but I do think a disproportionate number of the loyal soldiers of the Right are Gen-Xers. I expect someday the Millenials will turn around and slam Gen-Xers for causing their problems, so be prepared.

Every generation has its idiots. My generation is as diverse as any. The activists among us did get some things wrong, such as putting too much faith in single-issue and “identity” politics. We also thought Ralph Nader was our hero … oh, wait; that’s a cross-generational mistake. Sorry.

The truth is that we Boomers were brought up in the 1950s to be idealistic and patriotic. I’ve written about this before, here and here. We faced an entirely different culture with entirely different challenges than younger people do today. No doubt some of what we did makes no sense outside that context — you had to be there — but if you’d been brought up in the 1950s, you’d have felt drawn to beads and patchouli oil, too. Trust me.

Recently Andrew Sullivan wrote an article for The Atlantic that extolled Barack Obama as the post-Boomer candidate (in truth, Obama was born in the waning years of the Boom) and blamed the Boomers for America’s culture wars and “a cultural climate that stultifies our politics and corrupts our discourse.” This is, IMO, one of the biggest piles of steaming crap Andy has ever produced, and that’s saying something. The rifts in our culture pre-date the Boom, and what has corrupted our discourse more than anything else is the emergence of the extreme Right via the Goldwater/Reagan wing of the Republican Party. (See pseudo conservatism.)

Must of the griping against Boomers is the result of rightie propaganda about the 1960s and the counterculture and Boomers generally, and like most rightie propaganda the Narrative has little to do with what actually happened. It’s disheartening to see so many allegedly progressive people fall for it. So if you’ve fallen for it, wise up.

Update: See also Richard Blair at All Spin Zone.

Straw Dogs

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In today’s New York Times, Paul Krugman explains the Bush mortgage bailout plan, announced last week by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.

The plan is, as a Times editorial put it yesterday, “too little, too late and too voluntary.” But from the administration’s point of view these failings aren’t bugs, they’re features.

In fact, there’s a growing consensus among financial observers that the Paulson plan isn’t mainly intended to achieve real results. The point is, instead, to create the appearance of action, thereby undercutting political support for actual attempts to help families in trouble.

In particular, the Paulson plan is probably an attempt to take the wind out of Barney Frank’s sails. Mr. Frank, the Democratic chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, has sponsored legislation that would give judges in bankruptcy cases the ability to rewrite mortgage loan terms. But “Bankers Hope Bush Subprime Plan Will Scuttle House Bill,” as a headline in CongressDaily put it.

As Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard bankruptcy expert, puts it, “The administration’s subprime mortgage plan is the bank lobby’s dream.” Given the Bush record, that should come as no surprise.

The plan has so many conditions that Barclays Capital estimated only about 12 percent of all subprime borrowers, or 240,000 homeowners, would qualify for relief. For example, people already delinquent on their payments, or anyone the mortgage lender decides ought to be able to pay the subprime mortgage, are excluded.

Krugman says there are three problems with the plan. First, banks and other financial institutions will take huge losses. Second, hundreds of thousands, probably millions, of American will lose their homes. And third, there is injustice, since many of the people stuck with subprime loans were victims of predatory sales practices.

Free-market culties tsk-tsk any mortgage relief program as short-sighted. Robert Murphy wrote at Townhall:

Lenders will learn the lesson that their contracts aren’t safe; contrary to popular belief, the government will not serve to enforce the law. (Or rather, the “law” can change on a dime, depending on the public’s mood.) Lenders won’t simply shrug their shoulders, say “aww shucks,” and continue with business as usual.

No, lenders will rationally respond to the new environment, by being much pickier in giving new loans. After all, it becomes much riskier to grant a mortgage to a young couple with little job experience, if the government will shield them from the consequences of default on the loan. Many people say that “the American dream” involves homeownership, yet this will be harder to achieve if the government introduces yet another uncertainty for lenders.

Another cultie named Peter Schiff thinks the problems lies with borrowers who simply aren’t taking big enough risks:

Lost in current discussion is the fact that few subprime borrowers have any skin in the game in the first place. Having put nothing down or having extracted equity in previous refinances, most subprime borrowers will lose nothing if their homes go into foreclosure. In some cases the teaser rates were so low that borrowers actually paid less than what they might otherwise have paid in rent. In fact, those who have already extracted equity have received huge windfalls from their homes and will leave their lenders holding the bag.

Talk about lucky duckies! However, according to Krugman,

Relief is restricted to borrowers whose mortgage debt is at least 97 percent of the house’s value — which means that in many, perhaps most, cases those who get debt relief will be borrowers who owe more than their house is worth. These people would be nearly as well off in financial terms if they simply walked away.

So, no equity “windfalls.” But let’s go back to Murphy, who explains the beauty of the capitalist system:

The reason borrowers agree to adjustable rates (which have the possibility of skyrocketing) and to pledging their home or other assets as collateral, is that this allows them to receive concessions from the bank—in particular, it allows them to borrow a great deal more money than would otherwise be possible. Very few people would persuade a bank to lend them money to buy a house, if the bank didn’t ultimately have the right to take ownership of the house in the event that the borrower couldn’t make the mortgage payments. Yes, borrowers would prefer that they get a $300,000 mortgage with no strings attached, but lenders wouldn’t be too happy with this arrangement. The beauty of a capitalist system is that property owners must compromise to reach mutually beneficial arrangements, since private transactions are voluntary.

He acknowledges that there are some “shysters and shady characters” in the home loan biz, but for the most part “the politicians want to grant a mulligan to hundreds of thousands who bought homes they couldn’t afford.”

But Krugman wrote,

The Wall Street Journal found that more than 55 percent of subprime loans made at the height of the housing bubble “went to people with credit scores high enough to often qualify for conventional loans with far better terms.”

And at Newsweek, Daniel McGinn wrote of a borrower who didn’t know a $300 property tax bill would be added to her monthly mortgage bill. I suspect this happens a lot, especially to first-time buyers. In my own home-buying experiences I learned you sometimes have to threaten the mortgage broker with bodily injury — or close to it, anyway — to get a straight answer to the question “what will be my total monthly payment?” In my book, a transaction is not “voluntary” if one of the two parties is withholding information from the other to maintain an advantage.

McGinn has more sympathy for the borrowers than Schiff and Murphy:

My own view is more sympathetic, for two reasons. The first, frankly, is self-interest. As a homeowner I’m concerned about the value of my own home. Studies show that anytime a house is foreclosed, the value of nearby properties tends to drop. Last month I spotted a “public auction” sign in front of a house two blocks from mine. I hope it’s not the first of many. My own mortgage is a conservative, fixed-rate loan, so I won’t directly benefit from the subprime bailout—but if it keeps some of my neighbors from losing their homes, I’ll benefit because it will help my house retain more of its value. (I will, of course, also be happy to avoid watching neighbors traumatized by foreclosure, but in this column I’m weighing the pros and cons economically, not emotionally.)

The other reason for my sympathy is that I’m aware of how hideously complicated mortgages have become over the last two decades. I have absurdly well-educated friends who don’t really understand how mortgages work. Even though I write about this stuff for a living, at times I’ve agonized over whether to pay points or whether my mortgage broker’s fees are legit.

But the Bushie plan offers little for most subprime borrowers, but at the same time does little to reduce investor losses. So what’s the point? I think Krugman called it exactly — it was created to undercut any attempt by Congress to actually help people holding subprime mortgages in danger of foreclosure. Free market culties like Schiff and Murphy may not like it, but in this case government is being used to prop up “free markets.”

In ancient times the Chinese made dogs and other animals of straw to be offered in sacrifice. Before the ritual a straw dog would be wrapped in embroidered cloth and handled with great care, but once the offering was made the straw dog was trampled and burned. “Straw dog” became a metaphor for something utterly expendable. “Free market,” unregulated capitalism makes straw dogs of us all.

Crazy v. Silly

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You’ll get a kick out of this Guardian post by Charles Pierce. Just a snip:

Within the struggling Republican party, there is the Angry party and the Crazy party. Sometimes – in fact, often – those two overlap. This year, those two elements between them have produced in the current Republican field the single biggest public fruitcake in the history of electoral government. At the start, it looked like Romney might accede to the leadership of that wing of the modern GOP that occasionally can be referred to as “not insane”. (In 2000, John McCain was the unquestioned leader of this faction, and he’s spent the last seven years denying it, which is how the post became vacant.)

Romney had the money and he had the record to disenthrall his party from the influence of the extremists that have taken it over the cliff and onto the rocks below. In this, he was powerfully equipped to do his party and his country a great service. Instead, against all odds, he’s spent two years carving out yet another political subset. To borrow a famous bit from the Monty Python crew, Mitt Romney seems bound and determined to fashion himself into the leader of the Silly party. …

… Romney was a decent Republican governor for Massachusetts in that he largely let things happen and stayed out of the way. He signed on to a healthcare reform bill that was driven by the Democratic state legislature and, for all his bloviating about it elsewhere, Romney pretty much let gay marriage slide safely into the mainstream. In fact, he largely gave up on the job a full two years before leaving it.

This person is almost unrecognisable on the presidential campaign stage. He has adopted weird, angry positions completely dissonant with his personality as a smooth handler of other people’s money. One minute, he’s Torquemada, babbling about doubling Guantánamo and lecturing McCain, of all people, about the efficacy of torture. The next, he’s running a television spot about immigration in which he makes Tom Tancredo sound like Emma Lazarus. (Subsequently, on that same matter, Romney has accomplished the not-inconsiderable feat of making Rudy Giuliani look reasonable on an issue of public policy.) At some point, Romney should be forced to make a speech while his consultants stand next to him, drinking glasses of water.

I do believe that what’s left of the Old Guard pre-Goldwater/Reagan GOP look to Romney to stop the insanity. However, to get the nomination Romney has to prove his angry/crazy creds to the base.

Frank Rich calls Romney “a glib salesman who seems a dead ringer for Don Draper, a Madison Avenue ad man of no known core convictions who works on the Nixon campaign in the TV series, ‘Mad Men.'” Pretty much my impression. The Old Guard may look to Romney to bring on the Return of Normalcy. But I don’t see much in the way of passion for Romney among the grassroots.

And then there’s Huckabee. Rich thinks Huckabee may be the Republican Barack Obama.

Both men have a history of speaking across party and racial lines. Both men possess that rarest of commodities in American public life: wit. Most important, both men aspire (not always successfully) to avoid the hyper-partisanship of the Clinton-Bush era.

Though their views on issues are often antithetical, Mr. Huckabee and Mr. Obama may be united in catching the wave of an emerging zeitgeist that is larger than either party’s ideology. An exhausted and disillusioned public may be ready for a replay of the New Frontier pitch of 1960. …

… The real reason for Mr. Huckabee’s ascendance may be that his message is simply more uplifting — and, in the ethical rather than theological sense, more Christian — than that of rivals whose main calling cards of fear, torture and nativism have become more strident with every debate. The fresh-faced politics of joy may be trumping the five-o’clock-shadow of Nixonian gloom and paranoia favored by the entire G.O.P. field with the sometime exception of John McCain.

Before we get all soft and gooey about what a swell guy Huckabee is, note that as recently as 1992 he was calling for AIDS patients to be quarantined and said that hollywood celebrities fund aids research from their own pockets, rather than federal health agencies.

Seems to me that over the past year or so Republican voters have fallen in and out of love with a succession of candidates — first Giuliani, then Thompson, now Huckabee. But the War and Profits factions in the GOP hate Huckabee and will do their best to undermine him, which makes the odds he will be the nominee very long, indeed.

Spoilsports

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This Wall Street Journal editorial is hysterical — starting with the title —

Iran Curveball
This latest intelligence fiasco is Mr. Bush’s fault.

President Bush has been scrambling to rescue his Iran policy after this week’s intelligence switcheroo, but the fact that the White House has had to spin so furiously is a sign of how badly it has bungled this episode.

At this point I was wondering if I were really reading the Wall Street Journal. Since when had the WSJ editorial page actually owned up to reality? But the next sentence put my mind at ease.

In sum, Mr. Bush and his staff have allowed the intelligence bureaucracy to frame a new judgment in a way that has undermined four years of U.S. effort to stop Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Yep; this is the WSJ editorial page we know and love to snark at.

This kind of national security mismanagement has bedeviled the Bush Presidency. Recall the internal disputes over post-invasion Iraq, the smearing of Ahmad Chalabi by the State Department and CIA, hanging Scooter Libby out to dry after bungling the response to Joseph Wilson’s bogus accusations, and so on. Mr. Bush has too often failed to settle internal disputes and enforce the results.

It’s sad, really. The Warmongering Right really did get away with creating its own reality, for a while. With the help of compulsive pleasers like George Tenet they created a world in which no one told them anything they didn’t want to hear. Now they want to believe the intelligence agencies deceived the Bush Administration with false intelligence on Iraq, but the truth is that the Bush Administration made it clear that the only products they would accept from Intelligence were those that confirmed their beliefs. Intelligence complied, and gave the Bushies what they wanted, and then took the blame when it all turned out wrong.

Oddly, after this some of them decided the Bushies’ games were no fun, and they would not play them any more.

Today the righties are taking comfort in a Rasmussen Poll that says only 18 percent of American voters believe Iran has stopped its nuclear weapons programs. The Dream (of bombing “the daylights out of Iran’s nuclear facilities and terrorism-supporting infrastructure“) is not dead! The American People are still with them!

Maybe not. A USA Today/Gallup Poll taken November 2-4 says that only 18 percent of Americans support military action against Iran. I assume we’re not looking at the same 18 percent.

The Wall Street Journal remains gloomy:

We reported earlier this week that the authors of this Iran NIE include former State Department officials who have a history of hostility to Mr. Bush’s foreign policy. But the ultimate responsibility for this fiasco lies with Mr. Bush. Too often he has appointed, or tolerated, officials who oppose his agenda, and failed to discipline them even when they have worked against his policies. Instead of being candid this week about the problems with the NIE, Mr. Bush and his National Security Adviser, Stephen Hadley, tried to spin it as a victory for their policy. They simply weren’t believable.

It’s a sign of the Bush Administration’s flagging authority that even many of its natural allies wondered this week if the NIE was really an attempt to back down from its own Iran policy. We only wish it were that competent.

Clearly, the Washington bureaucracy is running short of toadies willing to sell out their country for the sake of an unpopular Administration that will be gone in 13 months. How odd.

See also Ewen MacAskill, “Intelligence expert who rewrote book on Iran” in today’s Guardian.

Faithiness

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David Brooks has a column in today’s New York Times titled “Faith vs. the Faithless,” about Mitt Romney’s religion speech. I plunged into it with the same enthusiasm I have for dumpster diving in really bad neighborhoods. But I was pleasantly surprised that Brooks actually had a glimmer of insight.

When this country was founded, James Madison envisioned a noisy public square with different religious denominations arguing, competing and balancing each other’s passions. But now the landscape of religious life has changed. Now its most prominent feature is the supposed war between the faithful and the faithless. Mitt Romney didn’t start this war, but
speeches like his both exploit and solidify this divide in people’s minds. The supposed war between the faithful and the faithless has exacted casualties.

The first casualty is the national community. Romney described a community yesterday. Observant Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, Jews and Muslims are inside that community. The nonobservant are not. There was not even a perfunctory sentence showing respect for the nonreligious.

I’ve read the speech. It not only disses the nonreligious (about which the Rude Pundit gets really rude); it also leaves out anyone who isn’t a monotheist. I guess Mitt isn’t worried about losing the Buddhist vote.

As for the alleged war on religion, Joe Conason rightly points out that it’s mostly been the religious fighting it:

Phonies like Huckabee and Romney complain constantly about the supposed religious intolerance of secular liberals. But the truth is that liberals — including agnostics and atheists — have long been far more tolerant of religious believers in office than the other way around. They helped elect a Southern Baptist named Jimmy Carter to the presidency in 1976, and today they support a Mormon named Harry Reid who is the Senate majority leader — which makes him the highest-ranking Mormon officeholder in American history. Nobody in the Democratic Party has displayed the slightest prejudice about Reid’s religion.

And an editorial in today’s New York Times gets to the bottom of why Romney had to make the speech in the first place:

Even by the low standards of this campaign, it was a distressing moment and just what the nation’s founders wanted to head off with the immortal words of the First Amendment: A presidential candidate cowed into defending his way of worshiping God by a powerful minority determined to impose its religious tenets as a test for holding public office. …

…Mr. Romney was not there to defend freedom of religion, or to champion the indisputable notion that belief in God and religious observance are longstanding parts of American life. He was trying to persuade Christian fundamentalists in the Republican Party, who do want to impose their faith on the Oval Office, that he is sufficiently Christian for them to support his bid for the Republican nomination. No matter how dignified he looked, and how many times he quoted the founding fathers, he could not disguise that sad fact.

And to do that, Romney evoked the common enemy of all God Nazis — secularists. As Steve M. says —

His basic message was “Well, yeah, I’m a Mormon, but LOOK — OVER THERE! IT’S A DIRTY FILTHY ATHEIST!”

But let’s go on to David Brooks’s next paragraph, which is astonishing, coming from David Brooks:

The second casualty of the faith war is theology itself. In rallying the armies of faith against their supposed enemies, Romney waved away any theological distinctions among them with the brush of his hand. In this calculus, the faithful become a tribe, marked by ethnic pride, a shared sense of victimization and all the other markers of identity politics.

The difference between a tribe and a mere interest group is that tribes are something people incorporate into their identities. The group becomes an extension of the self under the guardianship of ego. But the trick with religion-as-tribe is that one can be a fierce and devoted member of the tribe without being particularly religious, and vice versa. If we could travel through religious history we could dredge up busloads of great theologians and spiritual teachers who would tell us that ego attachment is death to sincere religious devotion.

Another aspect of religion-as-tribe in America is that, increasingly, sectarian distinctions are sluicing together into one vague and amorphous All-American Christianity. Understanding of doctrine becomes less important than loyalty to doctrine and identification with the tribe. Pastor Dan speaks of “faithiness” —

Romney’s appeal was thus not to faith but to “faithiness,” to steal from Stephen Colbert. He didn’t want to appeal to the specifics of belief, because those would have worked against him, but to the quality of being perceived as a person of faith. Brooks got that much right. It is a pernicious tactic, and one that is bound to be tried over and over again as candidate after candidate tries to proclaim themselves the leader of faith and the free world without alienating too many swing voters.

It is a pernicious tactic because, even as Romney paid homage to religious tolerance, the point of his speech was to ingratiate himself with the intolerant and thereby reinforce their intolerance.

There’s no question that there’s a huge block of voters who think they are entitled to demand religious tests for public office. We must never forget that separating political authority from religious revelation made modern liberal society possible. The same wall that separates church from state also separates us from sectarian tyranny.

There’s something else that struck me about the Romney speech. It’s becoming apparent that Mitt is the candidate Old Line GOP party insiders want to nominate. John Dickerson writes,

When Mitt Romney gave his speech on religion in American life Thursday in College Station, Texas, he brought everything but the presidential seal. Introduced by George Herbert Walker Bush, the last popular Republican president, he stood in front of a row of American flags and faced a bank of cameras worthy of a celebrity murder trial. Leading up to the address, his campaign had released pictures of his arduous speechwriting process, exactly as the White House does before the real president gives the State of the Union address.

Various tools like Peggy Noonan and Hugh Hewitt praised Romney’s speech as second only to the Sermon on the Mount. This is the GOP establishment speaking. They don’t like McCain; I suspect they’ve come to realize what a loose cannon Rudy Giuliani is; and Huckabee is bad for business. Mitt’s their guy. He’s starting to look like the GOP nominee to me.

(Holy) Oil and Water

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At the Corner, Rich Lowry is feeling estranged.

Remember how evangelicals had “matured”? Remember how the war on terror had replaced social issues? It shouldn’t be hard, since all those things were being said a couple of weeks ago (heck, still being said maybe even a few days ago). Part of what seems to be going on with the Huckabee surge is evangelicals sticking their thumbs in the eyes of the chattering class—we’re still here, we still matter, and we still care about our signature issues.

I don’t remember hearing that evangelicals had “matured.” Nor have I noticed that Rich Lowry had “matured.” I infer that “matured” means evangelicals were expected to put aside their social and religious views in favor of other issues.

Remember the lack of excitement in the Republican race, especially among dispirited social conservatives? Well, now there is some excitement, and it isn’t over free market economics or the war on terror, but a candidate who doesn’t speak compellingly about either of those things but instead about social issues. As a friend I was talking to a little earlier points out, the most important moment of the campaign so far came when a social conservative excited a social conservative audience—Huckabee with his “I come from you” speech at the “values summit.” This friend argues that the Huck surge makes it harder, not easier, for Rudy to win the nomination. Now that many evangelicals have a horse in this race, it would be very hard to tell them that not only will their guy not get the nomination, but they’ll have to settle for a pro-choicer. I don’t know about that, but Huck has certainly trashed about nine months-worth of conventional wisdom on the changing nature of social conservative voters.

Excuse me, but … whose conventional wisdom on the changing nature of social conservative voters? Especially if that “wisdom” is they will drop conservative Christian values in favor of the Republican Party’s interests? I recall no such “conventional wisdom.” Perhaps Lowry mistakes his own wishful thinking for “conventional wisdom.”

For years members of the right-wing “chattering class” believed they owned the copyright on Christianity. They’ve smugly lectured us lefties that we have a religion problem. The Narrative — never forget the Narrative — is that conservatives honor religion and liberals don’t. It says that conservatives march in the bright light of moral clarity to fight Evil wherever it exists, while liberals stumble about in a fog of relativism and play on Evil’s bowling team.

Of course, there’s the Narrative, and there’s the Reality. But let’s put that aside for now.

Evangelicals are not a monolith. Not all are fundamentalists, and even among fundamentalists there is a contingent more eager to kick-start Armageddon in the Middle East than to overturn Roe v. Wade. In America, nationalism, jingoism, and fundamentalism have been fused together for generations. But the Republican Party was not part of this fusion until relatively recent times. Fifty years ago a nationalistic fundamentalist whackjob was as likely to be a Democrat as anything else. Nor, do I believe, did viable contenders for a major party presidential nomination explicitly court the fundamentalist vote until the past quarter century or so.

This is not to say that religion hasn’t played a role in presidential politics; of course, it has. Before John Kennedy, both parties catered to anti-Catholic prejudice, for example. But I know of no other time in our history when one party claimed Christianity as its own exclusive property and used it to club the other party.

Since Reagan, and especially since Rove, the GOP has brandished the white evangelical vote to swing elections in its favor. As Thomas Frank explained so well in What’s the Matter With Kansas, the GOP manipulated white evangelical voters into undermining their own lives, jobs, futures, civil liberties, access to health care, pensions, education, etc., in order to strengthen a financial/corporate/political aristocracy headed by King George W. Bush.

This system worked just dandy as long as candidates could cater effectively to the Christian right while serving the interests of the corporate and military-industrial establishments. Unfortunately for the GOP, none of the current presidential candidates seems able to do that. Instead, the top three candidates appeal to separate slices of the Reagan Coalition pie. You’ve got Rudy Giuliani, who has become the great white hope of the neocons. You’ve got Mitt Romney, who has some support among moneyed interests. And you’ve got Mike Huckabee as the Christian candidate. Pat Robertson’s endorsement notwithstanding, Giuliani is simply not going to get the so-called “values” voters. Romney faces hot anti-Mormon prejudice. And apparently Huckabee doesn’t know “The Islamofascist Enemy” from spinach.

Lowry is perplexed that “values” voters care more about their hot-button sex-and-death issues more than they care about the Republican Party or the corporate status quo. His problem is not that white evangelicals have changed, but that they haven’t. However, by giving Christian conservatives so much clout, the Bush Administration has spooked the moneyed interests that have been its foundation since at least the 1920s.

Poor babies.

Today Romney is preparing to deliver a speech intended to defuse his Mormonism as an issue. Judging by the parts he has released, the speech is going to be a weightless rhetorical froth drizzled with lines like “Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom” and “Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.” Millennia of human history in which religion did just fine without freedom are cheerfully ignored.

Romney’s problem is that he has to simultaneously ask for religious tolerance while appealing to religious intolerance. Jeremy Lott compares the task ahead of Romney to the way John Kennedy defused the Catholic issue in 1960:

[Kennedy’s] speech has been remembered as a cry for religious toleration and an excoriation of religious bigotry. It contained those elements – “[I]f this election is decided on the basis that 40 million Americans lost their chance of being president on the day they were baptized, then it is the whole nation that will be the loser…” – but the thrust of it was Kennedy’s promise that he wouldn’t be a particularly Catholic president. …

… If Romney were to give even a watered-down version of that speech today, he would not be the nominee of the Republican party. Evangelical primary voters may distrust Mormonism, but they have a greater fear of secularism. In that, they’re not too different from the country as a whole – many Americans would rather have a Muslim as president than an atheist.

Lott suggests that Romney “drop the consultant-speak for a few moments to tell voters exactly what it is that he likes about his faith, and where they can go if they’re unwilling to accept that.” Don’t hold your breath waiting for that. Mitt Romney is to authenticity what oil is to water. (See also Andrew O’Hehir and Walter Shapiro.)

Mike Huckabee, meanwhile, has packaged himself as Jesus’ candidate. But Huckabee is being spun by the war-and-profits Right as bad for business and soft on Islamic terrorism. Righties are comparing him to Jimmy Carter — which, in Rightie World, is lower than pond scum.

Now Republican voters are plagued by epic indecision. And Rich Lowry is perplexed that Christian conservatives are less interested in his favored issues than in their own. He sees this as a sign of evangelical “immaturity.” One might infer that, all along, he thought abortion, school prayer, gay marriage, and other issues dear to Christian conservatives were kid’s issues, and that evangelicals were to be humored, not taken seriously. Who’s got a problem with religion, Rich?

Al Gore, Bali, and You

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Al Gore is going to the UN Climate Change Conference in Bali next week, and wants your help.

 

"…In front of representatives from the world’s countries, I will speak about the need for a visionary treaty to be completed, ratified and brought into effect everywhere in the world by 2010. I need you, your friends and family to sign this petition calling for a new, positive leadership role by our elected leaders. I will bring your signatures on stage with me as a clear demonstration of our resolve.

"This petition shows our commitment to solutions to the climate crisis. Please add your voice today and urge your friends to add theirs. The time for action is now. Only together can we make the change."