Will Religious Right Be at Bush’s Party?

Remember the postelection maps in newspapers and on television showing the Bush wins in red and the Gore wins in blue? They showed that the middle of the country went big for George W. Bush, while the coasts and isolated urban-islands went for Al Gore.

What the maps suggest, and exit polling confirms, is that rural and small-town America--where traditional values, morality and religious faith still survive as core elements of the culture--went heavily for Bush. In fact, Bush would not have “won” were it not for the votes of born-again church-goers.

The Texas governor beat the vice president by 7.1 million votes among these born-again voters. The born-again vote went comfortably for Bush by a 57% to 42% margin. Born-agains also voted in larger numbers than the non-born again segment of the population, 59% to 46%.

The impact of the religious vote also can be measured by church attendance. Here again, Bush won big time. The much-reviled Voter News Service exit polling showed that those who attend religious services more than once a week voted 63% to 37% for Bush, those attending weekly voted his way 57% to 40%.

Even so, Gore won a narrow 49% to 44% victory among Catholic voters. This is hardly surprising in view of the fact that Bush made little effort to speak to Catholics on the critical life issues, while Joe Lieberman massaged his moral musings at Notre Dame.

The other exception to this lop-sided religious result was the black vote, which went 92% to Gore, with even self-identified born-again black voters going for him.

So if anything is clear about this curious election, it is this: Bush owes his victory to born-again and religious conservatives. The question is: Will any of these religious folk be invited to the Bush party? Early indications are not encouraging.

Social and religious conservatives have been notably absent from the names being tossed around for key White House, Cabinet and administration appointments (although recently some conservative names have been floated, such as former Indiana Sen. Dan Coats for secretary of Defense and the soon-to-be former senator, John Ashcroft (R-Mo.), for attorney general).

This is hardly surprising. Born-again Christians may have swooned when Bush inelegantly proclaimed Christ as the most important political philosopher in his life. But judging by the tenor of his campaign--which flagrantly eschewed the values issues with the sole exception of routine stump rhetoric about “restoring honor and dignity to the presidency”--religious conservatives can expect little more than lip service to their issues from a Bush administration.

The first test will be whether Bush is prepared to undo any of Bill Clinton’s executive orders on abortion, gay rights and the family. It is instructive that Rep. J.C. Watts Jr. (R-Okla.), among others, is advising Bush to “reach out” to blacks, to demonstrate his commitment to compassionate conservatism, diversity and inclusiveness by bringing more African Americans into his administration--in addition to Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice. This is a curious thing, indeed, to reward a segment of the electorate that voted against you in historically high numbers and almost cost you the election.

Yet Bush and his advisors are specimens of that peculiar species of Republican who are forever acting guilty and apologetic and who take seriously their opponents’ demands that they continually prove their virtuousness by spurning their own party’s base while “reaching out” to opponents. Colin Powell’s scolding speech to the Republican convention on the GOP’s failings on race, racism and affirmative action could be Exhibit A for this brand of self-loathing Republicanism.

So far we have yet to hear any prominent Republican advise Bush of the need to “reach out” to all those church-going, born-again voters who actually delivered the presidency for him. The reasoning here is as clear as it is faulty: We already own those people, the Bushies say. We owned them from the day Dubya spoke at Bob Jones and John McCain favorably compared Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell to the late Ayatollah Khomeini. The religious right types voted for us in huge numbers. We don’t have to give them anything. It’s all those Americans who voted for the other guy we need to capture, to “reach out” to, in order to broaden our base.

Bush-style Republicans have been talking like this for years, without anything much to show for it. Despite all the silly “reaching out” at Philadelphia’s First Union Center, Bush managed to lose the black vote by an even larger margin than the hapless Bob Dole. One of the first rules in politics is this: Reward your friends and punish your enemies. Liberals practice this with ferocity.

Many social and religious conservatives signed on early with Bush because he seemed to offer the best chance to beat Gore, surrogate for the unbeaten and apparently unbeatable Clinton, not because many of them believed Bush would deliver on their issues. Beating Clinton-qua-Gore was enough for them.

Well, it appears the religious conservatives have their reward. And that’s as much as they’re likely to get.