Will Bush alienate the fundamentalists and evangelicals?

Now that he has his war, supported by them in great part, will he tromp on their moral agenda for America?

In recent weeks Kristol, Perle, Gaffney, Gingrich, and company have had a heyday attacking the administration. They grouse that they have lost control of "their" war. Kristol carps that Dean might win because Bush hasn’t invaded enough countries; Gaffney warns that Grover Norquist has infiltrated the White House with Moslem supporters of terrorism. Last month, Richer Perle startled the policy community when he publicly admitted that the invasion of Iraq was a violation of international law (but we invaded anyway, because his private agenda was more important). To top it off, Newt Gingrich now announces that Iraq policy has gone "off a cliff."

The neocon treachery has left Bush in a quandary. How will he shore up support for the war from other quarters?  article

Let's see, the last I read, to date he has amassed $112 million in campaign funds. (All nine Democrats put together have something considerably less.)

Sure, Bush will finally realize that the neocons have betrayed him – as true conservatives for two years have warned him they would. About that time, Jim Baker, the Texas street-fighter and the Florida Fixer, will come back with the first draft of a fix in Iraq and tell him, "what the hell did you expect? Broom’em all!"

But Karl Rove, duplicitous to the end, will tell him, "You can’t win without these guys. And they are smart enough to know when they’re being betrayed."

"Smart enough" – unlike the hapless evangelicals, who (Rove will assure Bush) are just as "poor, undereducated, and easily led" as the Washington Post said they were so many years ago.

Bush is afraid of the neocons. They can turn on him, and ruin him, in a New York Minute. But he does not fear the evangelicals. They have nowhere else to go. So Bush will betray them, even as he has been betrayed by the neocons – as planned by the neocons.

This coming year Bush will mouth repeated pieties about the sacred character of marriage, and do … nothing. No midnight phone calls, no arm-twisting, no bribes, no threats like those leveled at Republicans who dared vote against Medicare, no all-night roll-calls. "You’re on your own," Rove will tell evangelicals, "we’ve done all we can." The judges will lose. The Marriage Amendment will lose. The neocons will have nothing to fear.

...Ever since the invasion of Iraq, Karl Rove has been traveling the country mobilizing the evangelical vote for the 2004 elections. In city after city, he is meeting with evangelical leaders. He begs: "in 2000, only 16 million of you voted. We need the other four million."

...I wonder, what will those four million evangelicals tell Karl Rove next November, when he says, once more, how much Bush needs them in 2004?

Well, we'll see. This has been a long-running show with lots of twists and turns. Every day brings a new surprise.

Are we having fun yet?