|
The New York Times
OPINION
Rudy, the Values
Slayer
By FRANK RICH. Op-Ed
Columnist nytimes.com on the Web. October 29, 2007
WITH the new president heading off to
his Texas vacation during that slow news month of August 2001, I wrote a column
about a man who would never be president: Rudy Giuliani. Banished
from Gracie Mansion after dumping his second wife for Judith Nathan, New York’s
lame-duck mayor had been bunking for two months with a gay couple. No
brand-name American politician had ever publicly done such a thing, so I decided
to pay a visit to Rudy’s home away from home.
His Honor was out that day, but Howard Koeppel, a garrulous Queens car dealer,
and his partner, Mark Hsiao, a Juilliard-trained pianist, were gracious tour
guides to their 32nd-floor apartment on East 57th Street. I asked Mr.
Koeppel, a born comic, whether it was unexpected that Rudy would live with an
openly gay couple. “I don’t know if it’s any more unusual than him wearing
a dress,” he deadpanned. On a more sober note, Mr. Koeppel told me that
the connubially challenged mayor was an admirer of his and Mr. Hsiao’s
relatively “idyllic life” and had assured them that “if they ever legalized gay
marriages, we would be the first one he would do.”
That this same Rudy Giuliani would emerge as the front-runner in the Republican
pack six years later is the great surprise of the 2008 presidential campaign to
date, especially to the political press. Since the dawn of the new
century, it has been the rarely questioned conventional wisdom, handed down by
Karl Rove, that no Republican can rise to the top of the party or win the
presidency without pandering as slavishly as George W. Bush has to the most
bullying and gay-baiting power brokers of the religious right.
When Rudy’s candidacy started to show legs, pundits and family values activists
alike assumed that ignorant voters knew only his 9/11 video reel and not his
personal history or his stands on issues. “Americans do not yet realize
how far outside of the mainstream of conservative thought that Mayor Giuliani’s
social views really are,” declared Tony Perkins, the Family Research Council
leader, in February. But despite Rudy’s fleeting stabs at fudging his
views, they are well known now, and still he leads in national polls of
Republican voters and is neck and neck with Fred Thompson in the Bible Belt
sanctuary of South Carolina.
There are various explanations for this. One is that 9/11 and terrorism
fears trump everything. Another is that the rest of the field is weak.
But the most obvious explanation is the one that Washington resists because it
contradicts the city’s long-running story line. Namely, that the political
clout ritualistically ascribed to Mr. Perkins, James Dobson of Focus on the
Family, Gary Bauer of American Values and their ilk is a sham.
These self-promoting values hacks don’t speak for the American mainstream.
They don’t speak for the Republican Party. They no longer speak for many
evangelical ministers and their flocks. The emperors of morality have in
fact had no clothes for some time. Should Rudy Giuliani end up doing a
victory dance at the Republican convention, it will be on their graves.
Part of their demise, of course, can be attributed to the pileup of personal
hypocrisies that have always undone Elmer Gantrys in America, from Jimmy
Swaggart to Jim Bakker. The Ted Haggard revelations were in that tawdry
tradition, and so was the news that the Christian Coalition’s front man, Ralph
Reed, looked forward, as he put it, to “humping in corporate accounts” in
collaboration with the now-jailed K Street lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Their
fall from grace was synergistically augmented by their scandal-prone
family-values allies on Capitol Hill. Even now, the virulent marriage
defender David Vitter retains his Senate seat despite having confessed to
unspecified sins after his name surfaced in bordello scandals in both Washington
and New Orleans.
Also staying put in the Senate is Larry Craig, who, consciously or not, is
calling the whole moral brigade’s bluff. After he was busted in the Minneapolis
airport, Republicans insisted he undergo an ethics committee investigation on
the assumption that he’d disappear before they could conduct it. Now they
will have to make good on their word.
Mr. Craig is not just refusing to leave, but, as he demonstrated to Matt Lauer,
he is ready, willing and able to re-enact his toilet pas de deux on national
television. The Larry Craig show could be C-Span’s hit of the election
season. It will culminate with its star’s return to the scene of the crime
during the Republican National Convention, which, as perverse poetic justice
would have it, is taking place in Minneapolis.
But the most significant — and happiest — explanation for the values czars’
demise as a political force is that white evangelical Christians and a new
generation of evangelical leaders have themselves steadily tacked a different
course from the Dobson crowd. A CBS News poll this month parallels what
the Times reporter David D. Kirkpatrick found in his examination of evangelicals
for today’s Times Magazine. Like most other Americans, they are more
interested in hearing from presidential candidates about the war in Iraq and
health care than about any other issues.
Abortion and same-sex marriage landed at the bottom of that list; fighting
poverty outpolled abortion as a personal priority by a 3-to-2 margin. To
see just how large a gap separates that evangelical electorate from the values
organizations that purport to speak in its name, just look at the Values Voter
Summit that the Family Research Council convened to much press attention in
Washington last weekend. In a survey of participants to determine which
issue would be “most important” in choosing a presidential candidate, the
summit’s organizers didn’t even think to list the war, health care or fighting
poverty among the 12 hot-button options.
The Values Voter Summit’s survey of the attendees’ presidential preferences
showed just as large a disconnect. Rudy Giuliani came in next to last
(behind Tom Tancredo, ahead of John McCain) in the field of nine candidates,
earning only 1.85 percent of the vote. By contrast, among white
evangelicals nationwide in the CBS News poll, he was in a statistical dead heat
for first place with Fred Thompson; indeed, Mr. Giuliani’s 26 percent among
evangelicals nearly matches his showing among all Republican voters. The
discrepancy between the CBS poll and the summit survey leaves you wondering who
exactly follows Dr. Dobson and Mr. Perkins beyond the ticket buyers who showed
up for their media circus last weekend at the Washington Hilton.
Of late Dr. Dobson has been throwing a hissy fit about Rudy’s rise, reminiscent
of his 2005 condemnation of the cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants for
appearing in what he labeled a “pro-homosexual video.” Apparently
suffering from the delusion that he has the pull on the right that Ralph Nader
once did on the left, he has threatened to bolt to a third party. But for
all this huffing and puffing, Dr. Dobson and his stop-Rudy brigade are as
politically hypocritical as the Reverend Haggard was sexually hypocritical.
If they really believed uncompromisingly in their issues and principles, they
would have long since endorsed either Sam Brownback, the zealous Kansas senator
fond of using fetus photos as political props, or Mike Huckabee, the former
Arkansas governor who spent 15 years as a Baptist preacher, calls abortion a
“holocaust” and believes in intelligent design rather than evolution.
But they gave Senator Brownback so little moral and financial support that he
folded his candidacy a week ago. And they continue to stop well short of
embracing Mr. Huckabee, no matter how many rave reviews his affable personality
receives on the campaign trail. They shun him because they know he’ll
lose, and they would rather compromise principle than back a loser.
Backing a loser, they know, would even further diminish their waning Washington
status in a post-Rove, post-Bush G.O.P. The more they shed their illusion
of power, the more they imperil their ability to rake in big bucks from their
apocalyptic direct-mail campaigns. They must choose mammon over God if
they are to maintain the many values rackets that make up their various business
empires.
Hilariously enough, some other big names on the right, typified by Sean Hannity
of Fox News, are capitulating to the Giuliani candidacy by pretending that he,
like the incessantly flip-flopping Mitt Romney, is reversing his previously
liberal record on social issues. The straw they cling to is Rudy’s promise
to appoint “strict constructionist” judges to the Supreme Court.
Even leaving aside the Giuliani record in New York (where his judicial
appointees were mostly Democrats), the more Democratic Senate likely to emerge
after 2008 is a poor bet to confirm a Scalia or Alito even should a Republican
president nominate one. No matter how you slice it, the Giuliani positions
on abortion, gay rights and gun control remain indistinguishable from Hillary
Clinton’s.
“You have absolutely nothing to fear from me,” Rudy disingenuously told the
assembled at the Values Voter Summit last weekend. Actually, there’s
plenty for everyone to fear from a Giuliani presidency, starting with the mad
neocon bombers shaping his apocalyptic policy toward Iran. But that’s
another story. Whichever candidate or party lands in the White House, this
much is certain: Inauguration Day 2009 is at the very least Armageddon for
the reigning ayatollahs of the American right.
Posted Oct.28, ‘07
|
