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January 13, 2007

I Smell Grover Norquist

Two seemingly unrelated stories today tell me that Grover Norquist is busily at work capitalizing on Christians' fear of impending persecution to try to help Republicans win back power. This sort of broad-based effort is what his famed "Wednesday Group" is all about.

The first story talks about John McCain's efforts to win the Presidency in 2008. Keep in mind that the ongoing feud between McCain and Norquist is in large part over campaign finance reform, and Norquist has been clearly implicated in the Jack Abramoff scandal, which revealed problems that this legislation is designed to fix. As Norquist once said, the power of religious right groups "has always been ministers who let the coalition hand out materials." Political materials, that is. Things like voter guides.

When asked in a radio interview to comment on the early lead of John McCain and Rudy Giuliani in the polls for 2008's Republican nomination for the presidency, James Dobson said he would not vote for John McCain "under any circumstances." He said that McCain is joining with Democrats in supporting pending legislation to require groups like Focus on the Family to report expenses and contributions any time they try to get their members to contact members of Congress or engage in many other activities that are commonly used to influence elections and votes. The legislation, he claimed, would silence Christian voices and keep them from being able to communicate with Congress.

American Family Association Donald Wildmon, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins and American Values President Gary Bauer (all of whom you may remember from last fall's Republican Christian event, the Values Voters Summit), are also asking their members to oppose the legislation, saying it is an effort to silence Christians. If having to report their contributions and expenditures makes it impossible for them to speak, however, one must wonder what they are hiding.

Dobson launched into a tirade about how Republicans blamed Christians' heavy involvement in government for their defeat and said, "Values Voters are not going to carry the water for the Republican Party if it ignores their deeply held convictions and beliefs." He has previously said that without Christians, Republicans would have fallen in a hole in 2004 and John Kerry would be president right now. Then, perhaps unwittingly revealing the person pulling his strings, Dobson said, "Republican leaders in Congress during this term apparently never understood, or they forgot, why Ronald Reagan was so loved and why he is considered one of our greatest presidents. [Norquist is Chairman of the Reagan Legacy Project] If they hope to return to power in '08, they must rediscover the conservative principles that resonated with the majority of Americans in the 1980s – and still resonate with them today. Failure to do so will be catastrophic." Not coincidentally, the President of Dobson's Focus on the Family is Don Hodel, a former Reagan Administration cabinet member. And it was Reagan who tapped Norquist to run Americans for Tax Reform, an in-house Administration effort to build support for his tax policies.

The Norquist-Christian Right anti-McCain dynamic is nothing new. The same tactics were used in 2000. McCain wants to stop the use of these sorts of groups to hide political contributions and expenditures. The right wing, under the leadership of Norquist, wants to take advantage of Christian groups to conduct political campaigning off the record. Recently, Norquist had this is to say about James Dobson:

"As someone who’s interested in trends, the most important effect he has on politics is not that every once in a while he’ll endorse candidates, although I understand he doesn’t do a lot of that, but he has done some in the past. But the fact is that people who get married and stay married and have kids vote Republican. For every intact family he’s helped create, promote, or prolong, he’s actually created more small “c” conservatives. So the private is public. The personal is political.… If a baseball player said, 'Write your congressman,' I’m not sure if people would listen. The level of trust that he has and respect people have for him over time gives him a fairly powerful voice."

And there is no better, more "personal" way to scare Christian voters away from a candidate than to have a religious leader that they trust tell them that candidate is trying to prevent them from speaking out about politics – trying to shut them up and make them go away.

The other article that caught my eye today was an op-ed by Rabbi Daniel Lapin warning Christians that they are indeed under attack by liberals and urging them to "resist." Lapin has previously been very active in raising the alarm over the phony "war on Christmas." Comparing the "attack" to the efforts of Hitler to end the English way of life and the terrorists' attack on the United States on September 11, 2001, he says:

[A] serious war is being waged against a group of Americans. I am certain that if we lose this war, the consequences for American civilization will be dire. Phase one of this war I describe is a propaganda blitzkrieg that is eerily reminiscent of how effectively the Goebbels propaganda machine softened up the German people for what was to come. There is no better term than propaganda blitzkrieg to describe what has been unleashed against Christian conservatives recently.

Lapin writes that the potential loss of Christians in America terrifies him. You really have to read the editorial to believe it. It is fearmongering of the worst kind.

Where does Norquist fit in with Lapin? Well first, I happen to know that one of Lapin's staffers at his group Toward Tradition, Elie Pieprz, used to work for Norquist at Americans for Tax Reform (I worked with Pieprz during the time Norquist was laundering money for Bill Sizemore). But that in itself isn't terribly significant. Neither is the fact that Lapin is "close friends" with Tom DeLay and frequently meets with Karl Rove or stays with Jack Abramoff, all of whom are tightly linked with Norquist.

The direct connection actually began when Norquist, before focusing his efforts on bringing Muslims into the Republican fold, worked with Rabbi Lapin to win over Jews for the GOP.

Norquist is one of the undisputed masters of Republican coalition building. And so it is no surprise that he has turned his attention to America's fast-growing Muslim population, which by some accounts now stands at seven million strong. (Although two other recent reports suggest it is less than three million.) "He's worked with [Rabbi Daniel] Lapin to bring Jews into the fold," says one Norquist associate. "That was an uphill effort. So he figured that he could turn Muslims into the obvious counterweight to the relationship between the Jews and Dems."

The relationship between Norquist and Lapin is so close that Lapin was reported by the Washington Jewish Week to have formally introduced Norquist and his new Muslim bride to attendees at their 2005 wedding reception.

Norquist has, in short, been working for years to bring together members of the world's three great religions - Christianity, Islam, and Judaism - in a political movement in support of the GOP. Now, as he senses the desire of the Christian community to pull away, having been burned by Bush, he is working to keep them in the fold. Fear is his ally.

Norquist is the consummate strategist. He does not allow decency to get in the way of his efforts. And so he is now orchestrating, with the complicity of his close political friends and allies, a complex plot to convince Christians that their very existence and religious freedom depends on defeating moderate Republicans and all Democrats and their efforts to clean up the political system – efforts that could interfere with the dirty right-wing's attempts to retake control of this country.

Posted by Becky at January 13, 2007 01:23 PM