Bush's Personal Culture War

by David Corn

First, there was "a compassionate conservative." But what did that slogan imply about other conservatives? Then, after John McCain wiped the smirk off W.'s face by rallying voters in New Hampshire with his cry for campaign finance reform, Bush became "a reformer with results." What a coincidence. Next up was "a different kind of Republican." Doesn't that make us wonder what's wrong with other Republicans? And when Bush unveiled Dick Cheney as his running mate/chaperone, the Texas Governor stood behind a podium emblazoned with the latest motto, "Renewing America's Purpose."

A few questions for Bush: What has been America's purpose? Why does it have to be renewed? Did America have a better purpose when his pop was president? Should the present purpose be scrapped or merely altered to achieve the necessary renewal? Do other nations have purposes? Are any of these purposes better than ours? How about Canada? Does it have a purpose different than America's? Is it fulfilling its own purpose-potential? I'd like to see Bush talk -- extemporaneously -- on all this for, say, an hour. No index cards.

But Bush doesn't tend to go too deep -- on anything. He once explained his anti-abortion position by saying, "Don't like it. I have a personal opinon." Still, Hanna Rosin of The Washington Post recently endeavored to tease out Bush's political philosophy and her intriguing article provided a few clues as to what Bush has in mind when he thinks about America the Concept.

When Bush was considering running for Texas governor in 1993, Rosin reports, he and Karl Rove, his chief political lieutenent, posed a question to themselves: why are we doing this and what are our priorities? Their answer: "change the culture." And they identified the enemy as lefty Ivy Leaguers.

In doing so, both relied on their experiences coming of age in the 1960s. In fact, Rosin asserts, Bush and Rove knit together an overarching view of American culture that was primarily a reaction to that tumultuous decade. He and Rove, she wrote, "began with a list of what they see as '60s symptoms still infecting America: elitism, cynicism, anti-Americanism, self-absorbtion enforced by a penchant for psychobabble."

The civil rights movement, the women's right movenemt, the populist movement to end a war authored by a bipartisan elite -- none of that had much of an impact on Bush and Rove. Basically, they were both pissed at the overachievers they knew or saw when they were in college and who now are running the world -- the people who, Bush said, "think they're all of a sudden smarter than the average person because they happen to have an Ivy League degree," the people who "decide for everyone else what they should do." So Bush wants to rescue America from the "grinds" of the 1960s.

Can't we get over that ten-year span? Apparently not. Bush, though, does not refer to the 1960s when he speaks on the campaign trail. This is an undeclared war. And it's quite personal. Unlike the know-it-all snots that the 1960s produced, Rove snorts, Bush "got his values from Midland, Texas, where people don't care if you went to Yale, or what your name is, where you get ahead based on hard work and luck."

Tell me when you have stopped laughing.

His last name and his first were assests that assisted him in the world of Texas oil. They certainly were more valuable than his inability to strike oil. Had he not been a Bush, the odds are longer than a Texas mile that he could have led a group that bought the Texas Rangers baseball team for $34 million (with little of his own cash) and then sold it a decade later for $250 million.

Is Rove that out of touch with the real-world that he does not realize that Bush's name was more crucial to his success than the address on his driver's license? As for the self-absorbtion of the 1960s, it you want an example of me-firstism, look at Bush's wartime service: the National Guard. He put his own survival ahead of "America's purpose." As did Dick Cheney, who collected five deferments to avoid military service during Vietnam.

This is the Bush/Rove view: to counter the elitism lingering from the 1960s the nation must elect two oilman/millionaires, both financed by the Fortune 500.

To dress up Bush's all-too-personal vendetta, he has recruited a few cranky right-wing intellectuals. One is David Horowitz, the 1960s radical turned 1980s conservative, who asserts that the left of today, still running on the fumes of the 1960s, dominates the culture and needs to be eradicated. ("The first truth about leftist missionaries....is that they are liars," Horowitz pronounced in April.) Horowitz is fond of attacking the 1960s set for not coming to terms with its immaturity and excesses." The Sixties," he once wrote, "was a decade of adolescence filled with lost boys and girls who never grew up politically and have thus ignored the promptings of history to take stock of the consequences of their acts." Yet Bush won't come clean about his own drug use and the details of what he calls his "young and irresponsible" days.

A more signficiant Bush help-mate is Marvin Olasky, who far surpasses Horowitz in the transformation department. In 1972, he joined the Communist Party. Today he is archly conservative. At the age of 13, he was bar mitzvahed. Now he is an evangelical Christian. He's a prime proselytizer for faith-based social programs. His antidote to the social welfare policy of the 1960s -- which, of course, was designed by those elitist grinds Rove and Bush despise -- is bringing in churches and not worrying about the mingling of church and state. Olasky maintains this is the best way to assist the poor, and Bush has embraced his take.

Olasky has an interesting point when he argues that some religious-oriented programs might be useful to certain souls who are down and out. But Olasky is playing for bigger stakes. He doesn't aim to just concoct the most effective manner of aiding the poor. He desires a Christianized America. That's the not very between-the-lines message in an essay he recently wrote for American Outlook, a quarterly published by the conservative Hudson Institute.

In the piece, entitled "Christophobia," Olasky claims that Christianity is the target of a "new wave of religious bigotry in this country." Olasky offers three instances of this rampant anti-Christian prejudice. First, there was the failure of the impeachment drive. It fizzled, he maintains, because of "antipathy to Christianity." That is, many people didn't like Bill Clinton but they "hated and feared" Kenneth Starr because he was "the embodiment, to them, of contemporary American Christianity."

Then there was the Columbine tragedy. After the shooting, he complains, if any analyst mentioned that this horrific event might have been averted had the kid-killers been introduced to God and the Bible, that commentator would have been greeted with anti-Christian cynicism.

His third case of anti-Christian persecution: John McCain's campaign. The Senator dared to criticize the Christian right.

For Olasky, an attack on the Christian right is an assault on Christianity. In his mind, the Christian right is Christianity. He proudly boasts he has spoken at Bob Jones University, Jerry Falwell's Liberty University, and Pat Robertson's Regent University, and he seems to believe that you can have no beef with these people and instituitons unless you're anti-Christian. Bob Jones U. hasn't allowed interracial dating. Jerry Falwell peddled a ludicrous video claiming Clinton had his political enemies killed. Pat Robertson in 1991 wrote a book in which he actually declared that President Bush, by leading the Gulf War coalition, was "unknowingly and unwittingly carrying out the mission and mouthing the phrases of a tightly knit cabal whose goal is nothing less than a new order for the human race under the domination of Lucifer and his followers." (That would make George W., whom Robertson is supporting, the son of a Satanic tool.)

Like Bush, Olasky yearns for a change in culture, and he blames the nation's cultural woes, in part, on Americans who are "searching for...a way of feeling moral without having to answer to any power higher than themselves, and in particular to respond to the claims of Christ." He appears to be suggesting that only God-lovers -- and perhaps only followers of Christ -- can be moral individuals. (Earlier this year, Olasky rapped three Jewish journalists who had criticized Bush for being adherents of the "religion of Zeus" -- whatever that means.)

Reading Olasky's article brought to mind the fact that in 1985 Bush told his mother that only Christians have a place in heaven. Bush later told a magazine reporter: "I said, Mom, look, all I can tell you is what the New Testament says." (A stunned Barbara Bush made an emergency call to Billy Graham.) Last year, in an effort to explain this exchange, Bush quipped, "I believe God decides who goes to heaven, not George W. Bush." Notice how he did not actually recant.

"The next president should initiate a national dialogue on anti-Christian bigotry," Olasky writes. But this former communist hopes for more: a Christianized America where Falwell and Robertson go uncriticized. That would be his way of repairing the so-called damage of the 1960s. It's not fair to tar Bush with all the views of his advisers. But he has repeatedly said he should be judged on the basis of the people he attracts to his campaign. (A candidate with not much governing experience needs to say that.) If Bush is indeed waging a secret crusade against an entire decade and fighting his own culture war, his generals and their holy-war battle plans ought to be closely scrutinized.