Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [114]
The strategy worked. In 2004, Bush lost the moderate vote by nine percentage points, but he won 84 percent of self-described conservatives, who made up a third of the electorate.25 Twenty-one percent of voters said that moral values were the most important issue, and 78 percent of those voted for Bush. 26
Not only did Bush win reelection despite growing unemployment and the increasingly unpopular war in Iraq, hard-line Republican legislators rode his coattails, resulting in the most conservative Congress in recent history. Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) officially led the House Republicans, but it was the ultraconservative majority leader Tom DeLay (R-TX) who really ran the show. “DeLay is the Vito Corleone of the House,” said Stephen Moore, head of the conservative political group Club for Growth. “Everyone now in leadership basically was put there by him.”27
Tom DeLay, one of the most powerful politicians in the country, drank deep from the chalice of persecution politics. Facing indictments for ethical violations in 2005, DeLay claimed, “One thing God has brought to us is Terri Schiavo to elevate the visibility of what’s going on in America.” What was going on in America, according to DeLay, was persecution of conservatives. He explained:
The other side has figured out how to win and to defeat the conservative movement, and that is to go after people personally, charge them with frivolous charges, link up with all these do-gooder organizations funded by George Soros, and then get the national media on their side. That whole syndicate that they have going on right now is for one purpose and one purpose only, and that is to destroy the conservative movement. It is to destroy conservative leaders, and not just in elected office, but leading . . . This is a huge nationwide concerted effort to destroy everything we believe in.28
In other words, God had induced a cardiac arrest in a young woman in 1990 and maintained her in a vegetative state for fifteen years in order to reveal the secret liberal plot to destroy the career of Tom DeLay and undermine the Republican Congress.
“We’re Watching Their Votes”
DeLay’s theme of conservative persecution was a relatively new front in the culture war. It wasn’t just whites and Christians that George Soros and company despised and tormented; it was an entire political class whose representatives just happened to control the U.S. government. Another man who warned of the new bigotry against conservatives was Stephen Moore, who had likened DeLay’s authority to Don Corleone. In a column for the National Review after the 2004 election, he sarcastically chided, “The party that preaches tolerance as the preeminent virtue just can’t tolerate one thing: conservatives.” Crowing over the Republican victory, Moore encouraged disgruntled liberals to move to Canada: “When you get a fanny-whupping like the Left got on Election Day—when every one of your core values (tax hikes on the rich, abortion on demand, government-run health care, reparation payments for slavery, one-world government, polygamy) has been rejected by your bigoted and narrow-minded fellow citizens—it’s cowardly to stick around.”29
Moore was the president of a political action committee innocuously named Club for Growth. The organization came out swinging in 2004 with an advertisement that pressed Democratic candidate Howard Dean to “take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont where it belongs.”cw30
But the Club for Growth’s primary targets are not latte-drinking Democrats. It spends