Posted on 06/27/2002 2:48:13 AM PDT by kattracks
June 27, 2002 -- CONSERVATIVES and Republicans screamed and hollered yesterday when word came of the federal appeals-court decision against the use of the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools. They were horrified. They shuddered in disbelief. They were consumed with anguish. Don't believe a word of it. In truth, Republicans are in a state of gleeful ecstasy. They're happier than they've been in years.
With its decision, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals handed the Republican Party the keys to a political bulldozer and invited the GOP to flatten American liberalism.
For a year, frustrated conservatives have been trying to figure out how to make an election-campaign issue out of the Democratic Senate's refusal even to hold hearings on George Bush's judicial nominees. Focusing their frustration on Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy has gotten very little traction.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals just gave Republicans all the traction they need. The president can now spend the summer stumping for GOP Senate candidates by telling voters that if the next Senate has a Republican majority, he and his colleagues on Capitol Hill will make sure there won't be any more decisions trashing the sacred Pledge of Allegiance.
Meanwhile, the party's fund-raising arms will be going to town. In letters that will be mailed out by the millions in the next few days, GOP officials will harp on the liberal judges in California who declared that it was unconstitutional for schoolkids to speak the words "under God."
They will raise tens of millions of dollars in a few weeks' time, as the Democratic National Committee goes into a defensive crouch.
Why am I so sure this is a political, ideological and financial windfall for Republicans?
Take a journey with me down memory lane back to 1988, when Michael Dukakis, governor of Massachusetts and Democratic presidential candidate, found himself on the wrong side of the Pledge of Allegiance. Using the same logic deployed by the Ninth Circuit yesterday, Dukakis had vetoed a bill requiring teachers to lead students in the Pledge.
So what did Dukakis' rival, George Bush the Elder, do? He spent three weeks - 21 days - going across the country to flag factories and schools, placing his hand on his heart and reciting the Pledge.
Elite commentators cringed at the demagogic use of patriotic symbols. Sophisticates scoffed. But Dukakis, who'd been 15 points ahead of Bush in polls, went into a public-opinion nose-dive from which he never recovered.
When Bush the Elder took on Dukakis, the nominal subject was the Pledge. But the real subject, the underlying theme, was the discomfort felt by American liberals at the open expression of traditional values, religious faith and patriotic sentiment.
Well, here we are, in 2002. America is at war. The country has just been through a patriotic surge that makes 1988 seem like Kent State. And the federal appeals court that is by all reckonings the nation's most liberal judicial body has gone and done a Dukakis.
Democratic politicians, for the most part, learned their lesson from the Dukakis fiasco. But this time there's precious little they can do to avoid the GOP bulldozer. If they agree with Republican pols that the decision was wrong - which Senate Democrats did yesterday by joining in a 99-0 resolution condemning the ruling - they'll help the GOP raise money.
The Republican Party really ought to send the Ninth Circuit a nice basket of fruit and maybe even some flowers. The judges have made the GOP's day, week, month and year.
Sure this looks like a T-ball pitch, but how many swings will it take to hit it? Do they know which end of the bat to hold?
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