Saturday, April 18, 2009

Steve Schmidt and the Strategic Moment   [Maggie Gallagher]

Steve Schmidt says the problem with the GOP is too many religious voters.

Funny, this is the Democrats' view too.

Democrats are engaged in a highly sophisticated outreach strategy with the same basic message point: The GOP is not the natural home for religious people. Prolife Catholics can support Obama. The public things you see are only a small part of the money being flooded into penetrating religious peoples' intellectual networks to reduce effective opposition to sexual liberalism by disaffiliating their leaders from either the GOP or from their traditional stands on morality (cf. Rick Warren).

This is the Democrats’ carrot to religious people. They also are developing an increasingly big stick: After gay marriage, the most religiously committed Americans will be effectively marginalized as a public force — because they cannot act or support the idea that gay unions are marriages. Such people will, if we lose the marriage debate, be treated the way we treat bigots who oppose interracial marriage. Imagine: All it will take to make, say, a judicial nominee unconfirmable will be to establish that they are indeed Catholic.  

Here's the Democrats strategy: Lure some small portion of the GOP’s religious base with sweet talk (see Pres. Obama’s upcoming Notre Dame speech). Next, remove the one quarter or so of Americans most committed to Christians moral teachings from public influence. Then play democracy (win elections) with the three quarters that remain. 

Let’s put aside the question of Steve’s qualifications for telling the GOP how to win. Steve (and his faction) and the Democrats can't both be right. The change Steve is recommending will either be good— and I’m speaking here only politically — for either the Republicans or the Democrats; it can’t be good for both parties. Who do you think has the more sophisticated strategy for victory: Steve Schmidt or the Obama machine?  

Economic conservatives (of which I am one) need to come to grips with the fact that although they are far more welcome in cultural elites than social conservatives, they don’t really have a majority of Americans on their side. Americans are not libertarians. The majority are perfectly happy with GOP ideas when we deliver economic growth or the hard benefit of a tax cut (increasingly difficult to do because we removed a lot of folks from the rolls). 

When the economy collapses, the majority of Americans want government to protect them. That’s our dilemma, our problem to figure out. The first step is to recognize it. When the economy is going well, voters feel free to vote their values and we often win. When the economy collapses, they want to strike back at whomever is hurting them. People are like that. How we tap the resentment and turn it to good economic policy is a real urgent problem to resolve. Getting religious people out of politics isn’t going to help us in this endeavor. Remember the party of Gerald Ford?

Social conservatism as a movement has its own problems: The key one is, with masses of voters on our side on an issue like gay marriage, six years into a national debate on the topic, the movement hasn’t really created large, effective, competent, strategic grassroots organizations that can influence politics. Social conservatives have bad models of political engagement and we aren’t on enough of a learning curve from our experience; the main criteria for leadership tends to be fidelity rather than competence. What we need are fewer people quoting Mother Teresa’s admonition that God requires fidelity not success, and more people who say, as a good friend of mind once told me, “Just because you’re a good Catholic doesn’t mean you get to waste a lot of money.”

The good news is that we (at the National Organization for Marriage) are finding that even deep in blue states like Connecticut, building such an activist network on the marriage issue is not difficult. Many people are out there who care about this issue waiting to be mobilized, energized, equipped, and pointed in the right direction — a strategy that really makes sense and makes a difference.

We need many other such organizations: We need for example, an activist, grassroots organization that will defend religious liberty not just in court (where we do have some great public-interest law firms), but in legislatures and the public square.

Here's the bad news: If we don’t do this, churches (and synagogues, etc.) are going to get rolled.

It's really simple.

Here's the good news: If we do do this, the electoral landscape will be changed dramatically in a few short years.

04/18 02:47 PMShare