washingtonpost.com
Target of Opportunism
By Harold Meyerson
March 23, 2005
For Tom DeLay, Terri Schiavo came along just in the nick of time. "One
thing that God brought to us is Terri Schiavo, to help elevate the
visibility of what is going on in America," DeLay told a group of
Christian conservatives last Friday.
And what, exactly, is going on in the United States? "Attacks against
the conservative movement, against me and against many others," DeLay
told his flock. So God has now thrown in with DeLay in his efforts to
pack the House ethics committee with his allies so that he no longer
need be the subject of the scrutiny and censure of his peers.
I don't think this is what Martin Buber meant when he referred to an
"I-Thou" relationship with the Lord, but I could be mistaken.
For Bill Frist, Terri Schiavo came along at an opportune moment. After
inspecting some videotapes made by her parents, the doctor announced
that the examinations by court-appointed physicians were erroneous in
concluding that Schiavo has been in a persistent vegetative state for
the past 15 years. He may also have concluded that if getting the jump
on the 2008 Republican presidential field required issuing a
preposterous diagnosis, that was a small price to pay. Frist isn't
running for Neurologist in Chief, after all.
For George W. Bush, too, Terri Schiavo came along at a propitious time.
All is not well in Bushland. The more the American people hear about
the president's Social Security scheme, the more they reject it --
lately by margins approaching 2 to 1. The Bush bills that have been
moving through Congress -- tightening up bankruptcy regulations,
authorizing drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, limiting
consumer lawsuits -- do nothing for the Christian conservatives who
helped reelect him. Indeed, the whole Bush economic agenda threatens
social conservatives of modest means, as it does anyone of modest
means. If signing a bill in his pajamas meant he could rekindle their
support, why, that was worth even interrupting his sleep.
At its topmost ranks, and not only there, the party of Lincoln has
become the party of Elmer Gantry. It peddles miracle cures and elixirs
of life, to the benefit of the preachers, not the patients. When it
comes to promoting real cures, today's Republicans are nowhere to be
found. The Medicaid cuts pushed by the White House and passed by House
Republicans last week would, if enacted into law, shorten the lives of
numerous poor Americans living in conscious, not vegetative states. But
that's a topic of no demonstrable interest to Christian conservatives,
though I've yet to come across the biblical passage that exempts them
from such concerns.
Bush, Frist, DeLay and the Republican apparat have behaved throughout
this episode as if the political advantage clearly belonged to those
who satisfied the most die-hard elements of the Christian right. But if
polling conducted Sunday by ABC News is even remotely accurate, the
Republicans may be badly mistaken. By 63 percent to 28 percent, the
public supported the removal of Terri Schiavo's feeding tube, and fully
70 percent opposed the federal government's intervention. Those
rejecting the Republican leadership's position included even
Republicans (by a 58 to 39 percent margin) and evangelicals (by a 50 to
44 percent margin).
In their haste to curry favor with the Christian right, the Republican
leaders have run roughshod over some very deeply rooted American -- and
conservative -- beliefs. Americans tend to believe in their doctors,
and in the sanctity of the doctor-patient relationship. They believe in
spheres of privacy where the state cannot intrude. There's no more
distinctly American belief than the right to be left alone by
government. Liberals and conservatives differ over which great causes
compel a suspension of that right, but both sides of the spectrum
acknowledge it axiomatically.
That places a special burden on advocates for governmental activism in
the United States. At a minimum, the consequences that the government's
intervention will have on private lives -- and on the principle of the
private life -- need to be weighed. And by intervening by fiat in the
Schiavo tragedy, at the last minute, from on high, with no serious
inspection of the particulars of the case and to clear political ends,
the Republicans failed that test abysmally. In that sense, the Schiavo
affair looks like their equivalent of what court-ordered busing was to
liberals: an act of social engineering that runs counter to Americans'
desire for control over their own, and their families', lives.
As with Social Security, the Republicans are now going too far,
promoting priorities of party in-groups that don't resonate at all with
the larger public. This is classic second-term overreaching, mixed in
with the most myopic opportunism. The real opportunity here is for the
Democrats, if they have sense enough to realize it.
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