The Church Lady Party
By JOHN TIERNEY,
Op-Ed Columnist, NYTimes Online July 22, 2006
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Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
John
Tierney |
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Back when Republicans didn’t control
Washington, Jude Wanniski proposed the Two Santa Claus theory as a solution to
their image problem. You can’t win elections by simply vowing to shrink
government, he argued, because that just makes you look like the Grinch.
To compete with Democrats promising benefits to everyone, you have to offer your
own goodies in the form of tax cuts.
The Santa Claus strategy worked, and the Republicans’ reputation for generosity
has only grown thanks to President Bush’s tax cuts and middle-class
entitlements. But now the party has another image problem.
Republicans are looking like moral Grinches — or, more precisely, the Church
Lady, the scold who makes even fellow congregants roll their eyes.
They’re the party whose leader defends the sanctity of embyronic stem cells
against scientists trying to cure diseases. They’re the killjoy who stands
up to object when a gay couple wants to marry. They’re so shocked by
gambling — imagine, Americans betting money! — that the House has just passed a
bill outlawing most online wagering, and federal agents have arrested a visiting
British executive of a sports-betting operation that is perfectly legal in his
country.
Even before there were lottery tickets at gas stations and casinos on
reservations, savvy politicians realized that gambling was a vice to be
denounced but mostly ignored. They generally didn’t raid bingo nights.
They didn’t try to stop people from playing poker in the privacy of their homes,
but that’s the hopeless mission undertaken by the righteous right.
So far, Republicans have staved off gay marriage, but over the long term it’s
another losing cause. Younger voters already are turned off by what they
perceive as the party’s homophobia. As the public gets used to seeing
happy couples exchanging vows, the taboo against gay marriage will ease — and
Republicans will be remembered as priggish wedding crashers.
When conservatives pushed for welfare reform by preaching the work ethic, they
connected with mainstream voters of all ages. When they opposed abortion,
they appealed to a substantial number of Americans. Even many people who
called themselves pro-choice could sympathize with Republican efforts to put
some limits on abortion.
But protecting a cluster of cells the size of a grain of sand is not what most
voters think of as a traditional family value. Embryonic stem-cell
research is so popular that even some conservative Republicans voted for the
bill allowing it to be federally financed. Bush’s veto this week kept in
place the ban on federal funds, pleasing religious conservatives, but they’ll
never be able to stop this research.
In fact, their opposition is probably a boon to the researchers. Even
before this week’s veto, anger over the ban has prompted states and private
philanthropists to put up their own money. They’ve committed well over $3
billion to this research in the next decade, which might be more than Washington
would have provided anyway — and the federal money would have come with strings
attached.
Stem-cell researchers can benefit from the freedom enjoyed by scientists who
developed in vitro fertilization, which Washington also refused to finance
because it was originally denounced as immoral. The absence of federal
involvement sped progress by allowing unregulated private labs and clinics to
innovate.
Given the other sources of money for stem-cell research, including private
companies that see potentially lucrative profits, there’s no pressing need for
Washington to get involved. And as long as some Americans — a minority,
but a passionate minority — oppose the work, there’s no reason to force them to
subsidize it. The result would just be more pressure for Washington to
impose restrictions on what researchers could do.
So even though I have no moral qualms about the research, I think Bush’s veto
was good public policy. But it wasn’t good politics. He tried to
present it as a defense of life — he even used that old campaign ploy, posing
with babies — but he couldn’t compete with the images of paralyzed adults asking
for help.
As the baby boomers age, it’s not smart to be known as the party that won’t pay
for medical research. It’s not smart to have Michael J. Fox and Nancy
Reagan blaming you for blocking cures for Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, or to be
remembered as the party that ignored Christopher Reeve’s pleas before he died.
No matter how moral the Church Lady tries to sound, she’ll never win an argument
with Superman in a wheelchair.
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