Back in October, The New York Times' Elisabeth Bumiller wrote a piece the paper headlined "Evangelicals Sway White House on Human Rights Issues Abroad."
The article could just as accurately have been titled "White House Courts Evangelicals with Human Rights Issues Abroad."
Bumiller describes the various human rights issues that are of particular concern to many American evangelical Christians — war in the Sudan, AIDS in Africa, sexual trafficking — and of the commitments they have received from President Bush's White House to work on these issues.
The political benefit for President Bush is that this allows him to fire up his religious conservative base while still avoiding their hobbyhorse hotbuttons — abortion and homosexuality — that tend to alienate swing voters:
… religious leaders and administration officials note that white evangelicals accounted for about 40 percent of the votes that Mr. Bush received in the 2000 presidential election. In 2004, political analysts say, he is unlikely to be re-elected without the strong support of this constituency, which is predominately but not wholly Republican, and which in other years has thrown significant support to southern Democrats like Bill Clinton. Mr. Rove is now tending to the constituency with great care.
"You're not going to run into too many people who are smarter than Karl," said Dr. Richard D. Land, the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, who is in regular contact with Mr. Rove. "Karl understands the importance of this segment of his coalition, and I think the president understands it. The president feels that one of the contributory factors to his father's loss is that he didn't get as many evangelical votes as Reagan did."
The human rights issues offer a politically safe way for the president to appeal to his base of white evangelicals, who leading scholars and pollsters define by their membership in historically white evangelical denominations, like the Southern Baptists and the Assemblies of God. Evangelical churches believe that the Bible is truth, that members have an imperative to proselytize and convert and that Jesus Christ is the only way to salvation.
"There are these issues below the radar screen that are of deep concern to the evangelical community, and while they are sincerely held by the administration, they also have the benefit of allowing the president to say, 'I have responded to what you wanted me to do,' " Rabbi [David] Saperstein said. "But they're not issues that will alienate large segments of the center in America. These are all-win issues for the administration."
These below-radar issues have comprised half of President Bush's strategy for reaching out to religious conservative voters.
The other half of that strategy is the religious language and symbolism supplied by speechwriter, and Wheaton College-alumnus, Michael Gerson. Gerson ensures that all of President Bush's prepared statements contain this subtle, but powerful, language. Such language is notably absent on those rare instances when the president is allowed to speak without a prepared text. (Consider again Bush's rambling remarks during Sunday's Meet the Press interview — no "wonder working power," no allusions to hymns or parables or scripture. That seems to support the idea that, without Gerson's hand at work, this language does not come naturally to the president.)
But many of the White House's initiatives on these "human rights issues abroad" suffer from the same someday, somewhere-over-the-rainbow, quality that characterizes President Bush's other domestic proposals. With great fanfare, he commits $15 billion to fight AIDS in Africa, but there's little immediate funding — only promises that years from now he'll pay off the balance. Just like the tax cuts, the deficit-reduction, prescription drug benefits, the Mars mission … you name it. It's promises today, big spending someday. And Bush's evangelical supporters are beginning to get suspicious.
The Massachusetts Supreme Court has altered President Bush's strategy toward religious conservatives. With support for an anti-gay-marriage constitutional amendment becoming a litmus test for support from the religious right, the president is having to take sides in a high-profile, hot-button debate. Once he does this, he doesn't need the below-the-radar support from those evangelicals who were concerned about things like AIDS in Africa or sexual trafficking. And funding such things is expensive, threatening his support from the small-but-vocal deficit-hawk wing of his own party.
Whether due to this change in strategy, or due to the fact that his initial promises were disingenuous, President Bush is not living up to his commitments on these human rights issues:
Groups such as the National Association of Evangelicals pressured Bush last month to include in his budget proposal a $3.6 billion catch-up on his 2003 Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief that promised $15 billion over five years. The first installment last year was $2.4 billion.
The Rev. Richard Cizik, NAE vice president for governmental affairs, was among those urging the $3.6 billion figure. …
"I'm confident in the end that we're going to get the dollars that have been promised," Cizik said. "It's just that at this point in this budget cycle, we're not going to pull them out unless we get the Democrats to do it and if they do, I say God bless them."
"God bless" the Democrats? Could Bush's failure to live up to his commitment on this really result in a loss of votes? As Steven Waldman of Belief.net has pointed out, that's not so far fetched.
The lesson here for President Bush is ably described by Slate's Timothy Noah, who points out that lying to his political opponents is one thing, but lying to his own supporters is far more serious. Noah's topic is Bush's nonsense numbers about discretionary spending, but the principle applies here as well:
… in his Feb. 9 Meet the Press interview, Bush told an entirely new sort of lie — one that may cause him a different sort of trouble than he's used to. …
He's lying, in short, to people who believe in him. …
Is it possible all these conservatives are going to take Bush's lie, er, lying down? Be warned, Republican brothers: Once Bush starts lying to you, he may never stop.
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