Pryor is a Catholic, and he testified in his confirmation hearing that his views on abortion are deeply rooted in his religious beliefs. He has called Roe v. Wade “the worst abomination of constitutional law in our history.” Democrats are united against Pryor’s nomination, and some Republicans are queasy about him, as well. For example, he filed a brief asking the Supreme Court to uphold the Texas law criminalizing homosexual conduct, which the court recently overturned. And he is a steadfast supporter of the Alabama judge who erected a religious monument to the Ten Commandments in the state’s judicial building, a move countermanded in the courts as an overt challenge to the separation of church and state.
There is plenty for mainstream politicians to reject about Pryor without getting into his religious preferences, but Republicans–led by Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum–are accusing Democrats of blocking Pryor because he is Catholic. The charge is ridiculous on its face. Many Democrats in the Senate are Catholic themselves. Plus, additional probing of Pryor’s record would reveal that not all his views stem from his religion. He doesn’t share the Vatican’s opposition to the death penalty, to cite one example. Pryor is using his Catholicism, and the Republicans are using Pryor.
Republicans are playing the religious card in the same way that they have decried the left for bringing up race and gender. The strategy has all the earmarks of Karl Rove, a master practitioner of what a GOP strategist calls “market-niche politics.” The suggestion that Democrats harbor anti-Catholic bias isn’t about Pryor. It’s about winning blue-collar Catholic votes in battleground states like Pennsylvania and Michigan and elsewhere around the country. Rove has fretted about the Catholic vote since Bush’s appearance at Bob Jones University in the 2000 campaign, and the subsequent publicity about the school’s intolerance toward Catholics.
The Bushes, father and son, know how to campaign dirty without leaving a smudge. Bush Senior did it in his first presidential campaign when an outside group with no formal ties to the Bush campaign produced an ad showing mostly black felons moving through a revolving door. The Willy Horton ads, named after a convict in Massachusetts who committed horrific murders while on a weekend parole, were instrumental in defeating Democrat Michael Dukakis.
A Bush family retainer, lawyer Boyden Gray, is doing the honors on the smear campaign against Democrats over the Pryor nomination. The group he heads, the Committee for Justice, produced an ad that says the Democrats are blocking Pryor because he’s Catholic. It ran selectively in states with large Catholic populations. With the single exception of Georgia Sen. Saxby Chambliss, a member of the Judiciary Committee, no Republican has repudiated the crude charges of bigotry–despite calls from Leahy and others to halt the name-calling. Stories about Democrats rebuffing a staunch Catholic play well in the blue-collar strongholds the White House has targeted. “Boyden Gray didn’t come up with these ads on his own,” says a Republican strategist who is not part of the Bush team. “This is Rove’s specialty. He’s the Svengali behind this operation.”
Rove’s typical method is to work through a cutout organization. Think South Carolina and the whisper campaign Bush sympathizers ran against John McCain in the Republican primary. Think New York and the Wylie brothers of Texas, big oil pals of Bush who blanketed the state with ads castigating McCain’s environmental record.
The introduction of charges of religious bias into the political bloodstream is a hint of what’s ahead as Rove and the Republicans gear up for Bush’s re-election campaign. “This is going to be the most polarizing election since probably the Civil War,” says the GOP strategist. Explaining why he believes that, he says the country remains evenly divided with the fault lines evident in everything from policy prescriptions to cultural leanings. Republicans are as unified behind Bush as Democrats are inflamed against him. The coming campaign has all the makings of a culture war. “It will be the patriots versus the unpatriots,” says the strategist.
Never before in a Judiciary Committee hearing has a senator asked a nominee what his or her religion is, yet that’s what Republican chairman Orrin Hatch did in questioning Pryor. Hatch, a Mormon who supports Pryor, opened the door and Rove saw the opportunity. Such blatant exploitation of alleged religious prejudice hasn’t been seen in the nation’s capitol for so long it’s hard to believe even Rove would want to resurrect such an ugly period in our nation’s history. Looking back over the Bush presidency, it seems almost quaint to think–as we all did after 9-11–that politics would be conducted on a higher plane.
