Why the Gay Marriage Issue Helps Bush
By: Dick Morris
FrontPageMagazine.com | Wednesday, March 03, 2004
Just as Bush-41 never really focused on crime as his core issue, but won the election by using the lifer furlough policies that sprung Willie Horton from prison for a disastrous weekend, so Bush-43 has discovered in gay marriage a potentially winning issue.
While opinions are evolving on this question, most polls still indicate solid majorities opposed to same-sex marriages. Though I personally favor them, voters see gay marriage as an attempt by the homosexual community to spread its lifestyle, and they side with President George W. Bush in opposing same-sex unions.
Normally, right-wing constitutional amendments do not make good election fodder.
While top-heavy majorities have always favored amendments banning school busing, requiring balanced budgets and allowing school prayer, those issues have never won the GOP any votes they did not already have. Voters are notoriously reluctant to amend the constitution.
But Bush’s argument that activist courts are forcing his hand by reading rights into the Constitution that have eluded our scrutiny for two centuries turns the tables on this hesitation and puts him in the position of defending the Constitution by amending it. With each indication of the power of courts and city halls to take matters into their own hands, his case will grow stronger.
Sen. John Kerry will lose a lot of votes over the issue. But he will likely lose even more from his handling of it. As he tries to thread his way between his gay supporters and donors and the majority of the voters on this issue, he will come across as looking very weak and very political. His layered position — opposing the amendment, backing civil unions, opposing gay marriage and voting against the Defense of Marriage Act that President Clinton signed — will seem disingenuous to voters on both sides of the issue.
What will begin as a values issue will end up as a character test for the Massachusetts Democrat as he squirms around to find a politically safe position.
Because the issue is starkly moralistic, like abortion, voters will be unforgiving of a candidate who is all over the map in his positions on it. Kerry will seem like the quintessential political weather-vane candidate as he trims his views to suit the polls.
By contrast, Bush will come across as simple and straightforward as he fights for his amendment. Of course, the amendment won’t pass. Senate Democrats will not be caught voting against the position of their presidential nominee right before an election. But the on-the-record votes senators such as Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) will have to cast will likely come back to bite them in the November elections.
Kerry’s vote against the Defense of Marriage Act serves as the best example Bush can cite of his liberal polarity. As one of only 14 senators to vote against a bill that a Democratic president signed, Kerry will come across as a Dukakis-like liberal on the issue.
Kerry has other problems, too. Bush’s decision to run TV ads this early bashing Kerry puts the Democrat in a difficult position. With Ralph Nader trying to get on the ballot by petition, the Democratic senator cannot move to the center to counter Bush’s attempt to paint him as an ultraliberal. The more moderate Kerry acts, the more he fuels the Nader candidacy on college campuses and energizes the left of the party to put the gadfly on the ballot.
For those who warn of Bush’s demise, lets all remember that Bush-41 was 17 points behind then Gov. Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts with three months to run in the 1988 campaign. But the aggressive negative television ads engineered by the late Lee Atwater closed the gap quickly, and Bush had a comfortable lead by mid-September.
If this President Bush uses his war chest to run early and massive negative advertising against Kerry’s Senate record and raises voters’ concerns about the threat of terrorism to jolt us out of our current complaisance, the current dismal polls could turn around very, very quickly.
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