Firing Up the Faithful With Echoes of Culture War Rhetoric

NYT: Firing Up the Faithful With Echoes of Culture War Rhetoric
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
Published: September 4, 2008


(Damon Winter/NYT)
Convention delegates made signs in praise of Sarah Palin.

Rudolph W. Giuliani, a former mayor of New York, said Senator Barack Obama thought a small Alaska suburb was not “flashy enough” or “cosmopolitan enough,” linking his campaign to “Hollywood celebrities.” Mitt Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts, denounced the “Eastern elites” that he said dominated the television broadcasts and editorial pages. Fred D. Thompson, a former Tennessee senator turned actor, mocked Mr. Obama for trying to deflect questions about the science and theology of abortion, promising the Republican convention audience that Senator John McCain would be “a president who doesn’t think that the protection of the unborn or a newly born baby is above his pay grade.”

And the selection of Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as the Republican vice-presidential nominee put the abortion issue center stage: A committed Christian conservative, she has been a hero to the anti-abortion movement since she gave birth to a child with Down syndrome last spring.

The Republican National Convention this week in Minneapolis-St. Paul hardly measures up to the belligerence of Patrick J. Buchanan’s 1992 call for a “cultural war,” but some of the same refrains are playing in the background....The heated debates over social issues like abortion had appeared to be burning out, overshadowed by terrorism, war and economic difficulties. Now, however, the war in Iraq appears to be stabilizing, economics are a delicate subject for Republicans while a president of their party presides over the current slowdown, and the potential for two vacancies on the Supreme Court adds urgency to the issues. An Obama victory risks “a Supreme Court that could be lost to liberalism for a generation,” Mr. Thompson warned.

At the convention, speakers have harped upon certain details of Mr. Obama’s life as recurring themes. His work as a community organizer — a vaguely left-sounding job many Americans would be hard put to explain — has become a laugh line. Several speakers, including Ms. Palin and Mr. Giuliani, alluded to a remark he made at a San Francisco fund-raiser about the need to reach “bitter” working-class voters who “cling to guns and religion.” The aim, of course, is to portray Mr. Obama as an outsider — Mr. Romney suggested that Democrats want the United States to follow a European path — who cannot understand the concerns of ordinary Americans....

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Republican strategists emphasized the differences between this convention and Mr. Buchanan’s famous “culture war” speech at the 1992 convention, widely blamed for hurting President George Bush with moderate voters. There was a speech by Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, who calls himself an independent Democrat, and, there has been no allusion whatsoever to race, a potentially volatile issue with the first African-American nominee of a major party. Whit Ayres, a Republican strategist, argued that the tone of the rhetoric differed as well. The barbs at the convention this year flew toward Mr. Obama, not the broad swath of Americans Mr. Buchanan had in mind. “There is a difference between sarcasm toward individuals and sneering toward an entire group of people,” Mr. Ayres said.

Still, talk of a culture divide was “like wallpaper,” said John Green, a political scientist at the University of Akron in Ohio who studies religion and politics. “There was this relentless emphasis on cultural difference. ‘We are from the real America; our opponents don’t understand it.’”...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/05/us/politics/05memo.html?ref=todayspaper