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Bush's Faustian bargain
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March 10, 2000 | Back on the campaign trail, he will continue to portray himself as the No. 1 family guy: a devoted father, a loving husband, a loyal son. "The most important job," he says time and again, "is to love your children ... It's important for a president to say that repeatedly." Bush has hardly been shy about using his own family in appealing for votes. Though neither of the Georges, father or son, are known for self-analysis, it doesn't take a therapist to see that a key motivation for George the Sequel is a desire to avenge the honor of his father, who was humiliated at the polls by the Democrats eight years ago.
But there is a specter haunting Bush's effort to be both Mr. Tolerance and the Good Son, and that is Pat Robertson, the evangelist who founded the Christian Coalition. At the Wiesenthal Center, Bush declared himself a foot soldier in the never-ending battle against hate and bigotry: "We must teach our children to respect those whose ancestry or religion is different from their own," he proclaimed. Robertson, for starters, could use such instruction. In 1991, the televangelist said Episcopalians, Presbyterians and Methodists represent "the spirit of the Antichrist." He also maintained that "liberal Jews" were mounting "an ongoing attempt to undermine the public strength of Christianity." He has repeatedly called Hinduism "devil worship." Not exactly the language of tolerance, nor, for that matter, "compassionate conservatism." Yet after John McCain blasted Robertson for leading conservative Christians down the path to bigotry, Bush, looking to bolster his standing with religious right voters, quickly sided with Robertson and chided McCain for daring to criticize this upright Republican. Robertson, after all, had been assisting Bush's campaign in Michigan by launching blistering taped phone messages against McCain. And Robertson's one-time lieutenant, Ralph Reed, is a key consultant for Bush. When Robertson's calls backfired in Michigan, the Bush campaign asked him to cool it. But that was a tactical decision, and Bush has not chosen to publicly repudiate Robertson, and he seems unlikely to do so since he wants (and needs) the votes of the Christian conservatives who compose up to a third of the GOP electorate. Besides, look what happened to John McCain when he took on Robertson. So Bush the Tolerant won't hold Robertson's mean and excessive rhetoric against him. But Bush also has a personal reason for excommunicating Robertson from his campaign, however. In 1992, Robertson published a bizarre book called "The New World Order." In this barely coherent tract, Robertson claimed there was a global (if elusive) conspiracy involving the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, other policy elites, secret societies and New Agers. The goal of this nefarious coalition was to impose a new world order that would wipe out national sovereignty, foment a "complete redistribution of wealth," and bring about the "elimination of Christianity." The key to penetrating the plot, Robertson argued, was to see that the Gulf War that had been waged and won by President Bush was, in fact, "a setup." This was Robertson's reasoning (using the word loosely): "Powerful people of the world wanted a situation that was so obviously dangerous to the entire world that all nations would join together to deal with it ... [a situation] that would cause the nations of the world to forget for a time their own claims of sovereignty in order to submerge their interests into that of a worldwide authority such as the United Nations."
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