Bush's bait and switch

Liberal author Thomas Frank and conservative opinion maker Richard Viguerie agree that Bush roped in voters with moral issues, only to sell them out with his Social Security plan.

By Farhad Manjoo

Read more: Politics, News, Farhad Manjoo

Feb. 25, 2005 | On just about every pressing political issue of the day, Geoff Davis, a newly elected Republican representative from Kentucky, stands close to George W. Bush. This seems to make political sense. Kentucky is very nearly the reddest of red states, where voters supported Bush by an overwhelming margin in November, and where the fuzzy concept of "moral values" was a huge hit on Election Day. In his first few months in office, Davis signed on to several red-meat GOP bills. He favors the Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act of 2005, which would require that "women seeking an abortion are fully informed regarding the pain experienced by their unborn child." He also voted for legislation prohibiting states from issuing driver's licenses to illegal immigrants.

But Davis hasn't signed on to Bush's paramount domestic policy issue this year, the proposal to privatize Social Security. And he's not the only Republican member of Congress who isn't a fan of the ambitious plan to divert payroll taxes into private accounts invested in the stock market. Others include Jerry Moran of Kansas, who supports such family-values issues as the Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act and a prohibition on Medicare payments for impotence drugs, and Mike Rogers, an Alabama Republican who also supports the abortion bill and who voted for the driver's license proposal. Then there's Virgil Goode of Virginia, who would seem to be the ne plus ultra of right-wing representatives. In this term alone, Goode has signed on to the abortion bill, a constitutional prohibition on burning the American flag, legislation that requires American schools to encourage students "to have an appreciation of Western civilization," and a bill that would ban gay marriage in the nation's capital. But in a letter to his constituents, as blogger Josh Marshall points out, Goode has declared himself "negatively inclined towards" Bush's Social Security idea.

The lukewarm reception to Bush's plan among folks who would seem to be natural allies illustrates a deep problem for the White House's Social Security initiative. Social Security privatization is shaping up to be something of a wedge issue within the Republican Party -- a proposal that may split the ranks of business-friendly conservatives from those most interested in such "family values" issues as abortion and gay marriage -- which could prove costly to the party at the polls.

People in red states, particularly social conservatives, aren't clamoring for privatization. Although there have been no definitive, large-scale state-by-state surveys on Social Security, a handful of scattered red-state surveys show the president's proposal faltering in usually friendly territory. Such numbers aren't surprising, since red states are disproportionately made up of older, poorer Americans, people who greatly benefit from Social Security in its current form and don't want to see it monkeyed with.

But there's another reason red-state voters may be upset about the Social Security plan: It isn't what they thought they were pushing for when they joined Team Bush. Among social conservatives, the popular explanation for Bush's handy victory in November is "moral values": Bush didn't win because people appreciated his plan on Social Security but because he stoked the passions of the pious and the prudish with his call for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. While that theory has been pretty well shot down by people outside the religious right (foreign policy and economic issues, most analysts say, were probably more important to voters than moral-values issues), the conservative movement's leading lights still maintain that Bush won only because religious people put him in office. Some of these leaders don't seem pleased that the president is now spending his political capital on Social Security reform rather than on a crusade to reform the American soul.

They include Gary Bauer, a former presidential candidate and the head of the group American Values. "Regardless of which side of the Social Security debate you are on, real 'social security' -- that which truly makes society secure -- has less to do with retirement benefits and financial entitlements than it does with protecting and promoting our most vital social institutions," Bauer wrote recently in WorldNetDaily. Bauer belongs to a loose federation of right-wing operatives known as the Arlington Group. In a letter to the White House that was leaked to the New York Times, that group vented its frustration over the White House's legislative goals, warning that if Bush didn't push family-values issues, religious people could withhold their support for the Social Security plan.

Some Republicans say it might be premature to see the religious right's displeasure with Social Security privatization as a sign of an emerging split in the Republican Party between social conservatives and Wall Street types. However divergent their various goals, Republicans say they know that their party works better as a united group, when all sides band together and stick it to the Dems rather than to each other.

Still, Bush's second-term focus on money issues like Social Security, the tax code, and tort law, rather than on gay marriage and abortion, proves a point that several liberal analysts put forward during the campaign: Republican politicians constantly use the culture wars to hoodwink religious people into voting for big-business ideas that, ultimately, run against the financial interests of the voters. "This is a party with a mission, a historical mission it's adhered to since the 1930s -- and that has been the mission of the business community, the repeal of the New Deal and war with the labor movement," says Thomas Frank, whose book "What's the Matter With Kansas?" offers the most detailed explication yet of the theory that Republicans fan the flames of social issues only to get their way on business issues. Social Security privatization, Frank says, is further proof that religious people "are getting played."

Richard Viguerie, the direct-mail maven who is considered one of the engineers of the religious right's political dominance, echoes Frank. "I'm not surprised. I'm disappointed," Viguerie says of Bush's focus on Social Security reform rather than social issues. "I'm not surprised because that's the way Republican presidents always do it -- they use and abuse conservatives. We're the shock troops. We do the heavy lifting, making the phone calls, walking the precincts." But when they win elections, "the Republican politicians in the Congress and in the White House have, as long as I can remember, taken the religious conservatives for granted. They treat us in a symbolic way, give us symbolism."

With this evidently occurring once again, Viguerie warns that social conservatives may soon get fed up with the Republican leadership. He won't go so far as to say they'll abandon the party, but values voters, he argues, won't be willing to do any of the heavy lifting that Republicans have come to rely on them to do. "It's going to be hard for our people to get excited" over issues like Social Security, he says. "How do you get conservatives excited if you ignore our issues?"

Next page: Thomas Frank: Bush's plan could be a disaster for the Republican Party