Sidney Blumenthal writes an excellent Salon Article on the fallout from the Terri Schiavo imbroglio. From his article:
Bush believes that he won his reelection in great part on "values" and that all he needs to do to refresh his power is to invoke them. But in signing a private bill by Congress that could not stand constitutional scrutiny for the sake of gratifying a faction of the Republican base, he has exposed and inverted the raw politics of the culture war. Instead of being blinded by the light of his shining faith, the public was repelled by what it saw as crass exploitation.
After a week of damage, the White House was quietly leaking to the press that Bush had not wanted to return from Crawford after all. His effort to distance himself from the corrosive Schiavo issue had the effect of depicting him as ambivalent and indecisive -- the negative image he had sought to project of John Kerry.
Bush had no instinct that he was overreaching. He did not grasp that the case would become for the Republican Party something like what the gay marriage decision of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has been for the Democratic Party. In both incidents the parties have been pushed to their marginal bases. Bush's problem is that he has helped move the religious right to the heart of his party.
Blumenthal lays out a pretty good case. We'll see how it plays out between now and the November 2006 elections.
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