Political crackup

By intervening in the Schiavo case, Bush moved the religious right into the heart of the GOP. Now there will be hell to pay.

By Sidney Blumenthal

Mar 31, 2005 | The Bush administration doesn't have a faith-based initiative; it is a faith-based initiative. When President Bush rushed back to the White House from his Crawford, Texas, ranch to show his urgency to sign the congressional bill on Terri Schiavo, who died Thursday at 41, he demonstrated his faith in the infallibility of his political strategy. Just months earlier in the 2004 presidential election he had proven its efficacy. By joining the flag to the cross, Bush's campaign linked the war on terrorism to the culture war. Under these banners Bush marched as the crusader king against barbarian hordes without and within.

In unprecedented numbers evangelical Protestants and conservative "faithful" Catholics flocked to the polls to vote for him. Ballot initiatives in 11 swing states against gay marriage helped magnetize these constituencies. By a simple symbolic gesture in the Schiavo case he would become the transcendent holy warrior again, suddenly lifted by "values" from the slough of despond he had found himself in over his Social Security privatization scheme. It never dawned on him or his Cardinal Richelieu (Karl Rove) that the polls, like the heavens, would come crashing in on him.

The entry of a host of political actors transformed the private tragedy into a public drama. Its grotesque unfolding has revealed scenes of ambition and hypocrisy, the inner politics of religious fanaticism, and the limits of the Republican strategy that was launched by Richard Nixon and has now reached its apotheosis under George W. Bush.

It was almost inevitable that the biographies of the politicians using the Schiavo case as a platform would be examined for their own decisions about the medical care of their family members or patients. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, bedeviled by ethical scandals, forced the bill through the House, while issuing medical bulletins that Schiavo "talks [and] laughs [and] expresses likes and discomforts," and comparing his political embattlement to the effort to reattach her feeding tube. In 1988, according to the Los Angeles Times, DeLay decided along with other members of his family to pull the plug on his father, Charles Ray DeLay. There was no chance he would recover from a tram accident and would "basically be a vegetable," according to DeLay's aunt. The instruction posted on his chart read: "Do not resuscitate." DeLay filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against the tram manufacturer and settled for $250,000, after which he became a leading opponent of such lawsuits.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, M.D., who offered a positive diagnosis of Schiavo's recovery on the basis of having viewed clips of videotape and called for her "rescue," had as a doctor pulled the plug on a "regular basis," his staff acknowledged. And in 1989, Frist published a book, "Transplant," in which he stated that anencephalic infants, suffering the same condition as the cortex-dead Schiavo, should be classified as "brain-dead."

Even the Franciscan Brothers of Peace, a ministry numbering only 10 monks, two of whom have appeared as personal counselors to the Schindlers, Schiavo's parents, confronted a crisis when the founder of their group suffered a heart attack and severe brain damage. He was kept alive through a feeding tube, but in 2003, after a dozen years, the monks decided to withdraw his life support. Their inconsistency in doing one thing while encouraging others to do another is best left for them to explain. More important, their presence is a small indicator of a larger political crackup.

Bush believes that he won his reelection in great part on "values" and that all he needs to do to refresh his power is to invoke them. But in signing a private bill by Congress that could not stand constitutional scrutiny for the sake of gratifying a faction of the Republican base, he has exposed and inverted the raw politics of the culture war. Instead of being blinded by the light of his shining faith, the public was repelled by what it saw as crass exploitation.

After a week of damage, the White House was quietly leaking to the press that Bush had not wanted to return from Crawford after all. His effort to distance himself from the corrosive Schiavo issue had the effect of depicting him as ambivalent and indecisive -- the negative image he had sought to project of John Kerry.

Next Page: Bush's problem is that he has helped move the religious right to the heart of his party

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