The ?Chicken Little? syndrome
So here’s the big Republican agenda for the 2006 elections: Other people’s sex lives (aka gay marriage), flag-burning, illegal Mexican immigrants, tax cuts and Chicken Little. There’s no surprise about the first few. A GOP campaign resembles a traveling tent show. White House sideshow barker Karl Rove hopes the rubes who line up every two years to see the two-headed calf and the bearded lady will fall for flag-burning again.
Never mind that Republicans have done nothing about it since President Bush’s father visited a flag factory during his 1988 campaign. They may end up having to bribe illegal immigrants to torch the Stars & Stripes, because flag-burning as a protest all but disappeared after Sept. 11. Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., has also joined this crusade — the surest sign she’s contemplating running for president in 2008.
Amending the constitution to forbid gay marriage is another election-year shell game. Finessing it shouldn’t be too hard for Democrats: If your church refuses to solemnize same-sex marriages, that’s its undeniable First Amendment right. Forbidding people to enter into domestic partnership contracts due to sexual orientation, however, would be un-American.
No, that won’t persuade obsessive homophobes, but they’re fewer all the time.
Illegal immigration’s something else Republicans have ignored for six years. Ironically, President Bush’s stance reflects the “compassionate conservatism” he campaigned on in 2000, but abandoned, maybe because Mexican immigration’s a very old story in Texas he actually knows something about.
Which brings us to the Chicken Little theme on which Republican hopes appear to hinge. Sen. Elizabeth Dole, R-N.C., first raised it a recent a fund-raising letter on behalf of the party’s Senatorial Campaign Committee. If Democrats regain Congress, see, they’ll treat Bush the way Republicans treated Bill Clinton, resulting in “endless investigations, congressional censure and maybe even impeachment of President Bush.”
And then the terrorists would win!
Many pundits who helped publicize the 1,000-odd subpoenas congressional Republicans dispatched to the Clinton White House now find the prospect of Democrats issuing subpoenas terribly alarming. Slate’s John Dickerson worries that a Democratic-led House might “get bogged down with investigations and embrace the worst Bush-hating tendencies of its members.”
Time columnist Joe Klein, aka “Anonymous,” author of the novel “Primary Colors,” who’s grown adept at advancing GOP themes while affecting to deplore them, laments that the possible succession of Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., to chair the House Judiciary Committee gives Republicans a chance to play the race card.
Because Conyers is African-American, and has sometimes used the words “Bush” and “impeachable offense” in the same sentence, Klein fears Rove will have a big time depicting the veteran Detroit congressman as Kenneth Starr in blackface.
Conyers wisely stresses that the GOP impeachment of President Clinton proved “that partisan vendettas ultimately provoke a public backlash and are never viewed as legitimate.” Nobody wants a government that does nothing but investigate itself. But the GOP Congress has completely abdicated its constitutional responsibilities. Our democracy cannot long survive a president who claims the prerogatives of a king.
That’s an argument that Democrats must win.
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Gene Lyons can be reached at [email protected].