November 02, 2006

Blogometer Update

BLOGGER VS. BLOGGER: Sullivan's Travels

  It all started with Amy Sullivan's review of a book by ex-Bushie David Kuo that dispelled the myth that the Bush administration was at the beck and call of evangelicals.  Sullivan, writing online for The New Republic, said Kuo's book "hit Washington like a small explosion, generating at least a color orange political threat level.  Here was a conservative Republican, someone who had been on the inside of the president's signature domestic policy agenda of the first term, leveling damaging accusations of hypocrisy, wide-scale manipulation, and deceit."

  She asserted at last that "despite the evidence Kuo presents in Tempting Faith, liberals simply don't believe him.  They've spent so much time fear-mongering about American theocracy that a book illustrating the opposite simply makes no sense to them.  In fact, the real revelation of Kuo's book is not that the Bushies don't care about evangelicals; it's that liberals are too wedded to their views to capitalize on it."

  This set off Scott Lemieux at The American Prospect's TAPPED.  "I have a lot of problems with Amy Sullivan's recent piece about the opportunities allegedly presented by David Kuo's new book," he writes.

  First of all, I reject her entire premise that Democratic politicians don't reach out to religious believers, and since she never mentions the names of prominent Democrats who treat believers with contempt it's impossible to evaluate her claims.

  Second, Sullivan's claim that liberal bloggers have "spent so much time fear-mongering about American theocracy that a book illustrating the opposite simply makes no sense to them" is belied by the fact that what is surely the most-discussed liberal book of the second Bush era makes the well-known case that evangelicals are being played for suckers by the business elite that really holds the power in the GOP.  Kuo's revelations aren't so shocking as to be incomprehensible to knowledgeable liberals, but are rather banal.

  But my biggest problem with Sullivan's argument continues to be that she's frustratingly vague about how, exactly, Democrats should "reach out to disaffected evangelicals."  My understanding is that she's not saying that Democrats should sacrifice core principles such as reproductive freedom.  But if that's the case, I don't know what more Democrats can do.

  Sam Rosenfeld, also writing at TAPPED, replied to Lemieux:

  I agree with you that Amy Sullivan's prescriptive arguments about Democratic outreach to evangelicals are thin.  But I do feel compelled to take Sullivan's side on the broader issue of liberal "theocracy" narratives.  You're right that the "religious right taken for suckers" notion is widely understood by plenty of liberals, that it is central to Thomas Frank's argument, and that it renders David Kuo's book more banal confirmation than explosive revelation.

  But I think Sullivan's right that there is some real tension and dissonance between that understanding of Republican political dynamics and works such as Michelle Goldberg's Kingdom Coming, Jesus Camp, ... and many many more.  The reality is always complicated and contradictory, of course, but it seems to me one that of these two narratives -- the religious-right-as-suckers, and the encroaching theocratic takeover of the GOP (and the country) -- has to be more true than the other one.  And I really think the empirical evidence -- the substantive policy outcomes under Republican rule -- lends credence to the former rather than the latter notion.

  Sullivan got wind of Lemieux's critique and responded (sharply) in kind at The Plank:

  Scott Lemieux "rejects [the] entire premise" of the ... piece I wrote a few weeks ago about why liberals have largely ignored David Kuo's new book.  But the premise he states--that Democratic politicians don't reach out to religious believers--is not the premise of my Kuo piece.  It is also not the premise of anything I've ever written. ...

  If he had bothered to read the article, Lemieux might have realized that it was simply an argument against the idea that evangelicals aren't worth targeting as Democratic voters (an argument he endorses in his post). ...

  Finally, if Lemieux doubts any of this is worthwhile, he has only to pick up a newspaper these days to see poll numbers indicating that the number of white evangelicals who are fed up with Republicans (but not yet migrating over to Democrats) is significantly larger than the number that would fit in even Sienna Miller's walk-in closet.

  Then Ezra Klein at TAPPED weighed in on a related series of correspondences between Sullivan and Joe Loconte at TNR, regarding Sullivan's take on evangelicals and the Bush administration.  Klein was moved to comment:

  As for the larger debate on whether to target evangelicals, such discussions always put me in the mind of a report finding that, if you put together the findings of all those studies saying that X amount of productivity is wiped out by the flu, and Y from smoking in cars, and Z from picking your nose, you're eventually left with a number far larger than the entire global economy.  Democrats, it seems, are supposed to be fighting for libertarians, Southerners, Westerners, churchgoers, Indians, blacks, whites, "ideopolises," rural voters, and all the rest.  Add them up and I'm sure you'll have a couple electorates stacked atop each other.  Seems to me the party would be better off crafting a compelling message that assembles a broad coalition, not adopting the specificity needed to wrest a single group.

  Adele M. Stan, posting at Prospect via Rosenfeld, finds Sullivan's argument "over whether or not the religious right is a tool of the man, or poised to become the man himself, largely irrelevant; either way, we wind up with law written by self-appointed religious sages."  She later rues liberal acceptance of the argument being framed as whether Democrats are too for or too against religion.  "We focus on religion at the expense of spirituality.  There are a great many 'unchurched' among the electorate, and most of them vote Democratic.  And most of them believe in God."

  Then Kevin Drum at The Washington Monthly took a crack at the discussion, in particular Lemieux's reaction.  He wrote:

  [L]et's get real: It's true that Democratic politicians are uniformly respectful toward religion, but it's equally true that the Democratic Party responds to liberal concerns, and that means it's more sympathetic than the Republican Party is to a whole raft of positions that even some moderate believers view as anti-religious.  Maybe Democrats should do something about this, maybe they shouldn't.  We all have our own take on that.  But it's not as if the problem is just a figment of Amy Sullivan's imagination.

  But it's Big Tent Democrat at TalkLeft who gets the last word for now.  "I have tried to ignore Amy Sullivan's return to her rather inane fixation on Democrats and religious voters," says BTD, "but Kevin Drum wrote an annoying post so here I am again."  He asserts:

  [T]here is only one thing that will satisfy "values" voters enough to put them in play for Democrats -- [Drum] knows it, Amy Sullivan knows it, you know it.  Abandon a woman's right to choose.  And not only will Democrats not do that, it would boggle the mind if they even contemplated it.  It would be political suicide.  The Democratic Party would cease to exist.  If the repeal of a woman's right to choose is your number one issue - then you should be a Republican really.  And nothing is going to change that.  So now, what is the correct political response to the Republican Party's marriage to the Religious Right?

  Let's think now.  Terri Schiavo.  Stem cell research.  The attack on science.  How's that working out for the GOP this cycle?  Does anyone see any political opportunities for Democrats here?  Of course there are.  Anyone who is not a fool knows what is there - like Lincoln and FDR, the Democrats need to negatively brand the GOP - now as a Party enslaved to the extremist, anti-science, anti-choice, anti-education Religious Right - the Party of Dobson.

  Moderate voters disapprove of this aspect of the GOP.  EVERY poll says so.  Why then this contiued nonsense from Amy Sullivan, the DLC, Barack Obama and now, Kevin Drum?  Frankly, I have no idea.  These are smart people.  I can not explain why they are so dumb on this.  And yes, what they are on this is dumb.

[Mike Sheehan]

Posted by Conn Carroll at November 2, 2006 09:27 PM