The Rove Da Vinci Code - New York Times
The New York Times

May 21, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist

The Rove Da Vinci Code
By
FRANK RICH

IF we're to believe the reviews, "The Da Vinci Code" is the most exciting
summer blockbuster since, well, "Poseidon." But the "Da Vinci Code"
marketing
strategy is a masterpiece: a perfect Hollywood metaphor for the American
political culture of our day.

The Machiavellian mission for the hit-deprived Sony studio was to co-opt
conservative religious critics who might depress turnout for a
$125-million-plus
thriller portraying the Roman Catholic Church as a fraud. To this end, as
The New Yorker reported, Sony hired a bevy of P.R. consultants, including a
faith-based
flack whose Christian Rolodex previously helped sell such inspirational
testaments to Hollywood spirituality as "Bruce Almighty" and "Christmas With
the
Kranks."

Among Sony's ingenious strategies was an elaborate Web site, The Da Vinci
Dialogue, which gave many of the movie's prominent critics a platform to
vent
on the studio's dime. Thus was "The Da Vinci Code" repositioned as a
"teaching moment" for Christian evangelists - a bit of hype "completely
concocted
by the Sony Pictures marketing machine," as Barbara Nicolosi, a former nun
and current Hollywood screenwriter, explained to The Times. The more
"students"
who could be roped into this teaching moment, of course, the bigger the
gross.

Ms. Nicolosi remains a vociferous opponent of the film. On her blog she
chastises Sony's heavenly P.R. helpers for coaxing "legions of well-meaning
Christians
into subsidizing a movie that makes their own Savior out to be a sham." But
you do have to admire the studio's chutzpah, if the word may be used in this
context. It rivals Tom Sawyer's bamboozling of his friends into painting
that fence. The Sony scheme also echoes much of the past decade's Washington
playbook.
Politicians, particularly but not exclusively in the Karl Rove camp, seem to
believe that voters of "faith" are suckers who can be lured into the big
tent
and then abandoned once their votes and campaign cash have been pocketed by
the party for secular profit.

Nowhere is this game more naked than in the Jack Abramoff scandal: the
felonious Washington lobbyist engaged his pal Ralph Reed, the former leader
of the
Christian Coalition, to shepherd Christian conservative leaders like James
Dobson, Gary Bauer and the Rev. Donald Wildmon and their flocks into
ostensibly
"anti-gambling" letter-writing campaigns. They were all duped: in reality
these campaigns were engineered to support Mr. Abramoff's Indian casino
clients
by attacking competing casinos. While that scam may be the most venal
exploitation of "faith" voters by Washington operatives, it's all too
typical. This
history repeats itself every political cycle: the conservative religious
base turns out for its party and soon finds itself betrayed. The right's
leaders
are already threatening to stay home this election year because all they got
for their support of Republicans in the previous election year was a lousy
Bush-Cheney T-shirt. Actually, they also got two Supreme Court justices, but
their wish list was far longer. Dr. Dobson, the child psychologist who
invented
Focus on the Family, set the tone with a tantrum on Fox, whining that
Republicans were "ignoring those that put them in office" and warning of
"some trouble
down the road" if they didn't hop-to.

The doctor's diagnosis is not wrong. He has been punk'd - or Da Vinci'd -
since 2004. Though President Bush endorsed the federal marriage amendment
then,
there's a reason he hasn't pushed it since. Not Gonna Happen, however many
times it is dragged onto the Senate floor. The number of Americans who
"strongly
oppose" same-sex marriage keeps dropping - from 42 percent two years ago to
28 percent today, according to the Pew Research Center - and there will
never
be the votes to "write discrimination into the Constitution," as Mary Cheney
puts it.

The real Republican establishment - including Laura Bush, who has repeatedly
refused to disown the many gay families at this year's White House Easter
Egg
Roll - senses the drift of the culture. "Will & Grace" may have retired to
reruns last week, but it's been supplanted by a gay "Sopranos" tough guy who
out-brokebacks Jack and Ennis.

The religious right's hope for taming that culture is also doomed, however
much Congress ceremoniously raises indecency fines in an election year. The
major
media companies, heavy donors to both parties, first get such bills watered
down, then challenge the Federal Communications Commission's enforcement in
court.

The mogul most ostentatiously supportive of Republican causes, Rupert
Murdoch, may perennially fan the flames of a bogus "war on Christmas" on
Fox, but
he's waging his own, far more lethal war on the Christian right by starting
a companion TV network this fall to match MySpace.com, his hugely popular
and
hugely libidinous Internet portal. Mr. Murdoch's new gift to America's
youth, My Network TV, "will showcase greed, lust, sex,"
according to The Wall Street Journal.
Conservatives fretting about his fund-raiser for Hillary Clinton don't even
know what's about to hit them.

But for all these betrayals, Dr. Dobson and Company won't desert the
Republicans come Election Day. If Mr. Rove steps up his usual gay-baiting
late in the
campaign, as is his wont, maybe the turnout of those on the hard-core right
will eke out a victory for the party that double-crossed them not just on
cultural
issues but also on secular conservative principles (like fiscal
responsibility and immigration-law enforcement). If so, they'll promptly be
Da Vinci'd
yet again. A Republican retreat on stem-cell research is already under way.
If there's electoral fallout from the South Dakota Legislature's Draconian
abortion ban - the Republican governor's job-approval rating fell from 72
percent to 58 percent in a single month after he signed it - the pro-life
checklist
in Congress will suffer as well.

Whatever happens in November, the good news is that the religious right
leaders most stroked by Mr. Rove, many of them past 70, may no longer
command such
large blocs of voters anyway. As Amy Sullivan writes in the latest New
Republic, Mr. Rove has reason to worry about "another group of evangelicals:
the
nearly 40 percent who identify themselves as politically moderate and who
are just as likely to get energized about AIDS in Africa or melting ice caps
as partial-birth abortion and lesbian couples in Massachusetts." The bad
news is that no sooner does the religious-right base show signs of cracking
in
a youthquake than the Democrats trot out their own doomed Da Vinci strategy.

This idiocy began the morning after Election Day 2004, when a vaguely worded
exit-poll question persuaded credulous party leaders that "moral values"
determined
their defeat (as opposed to, say, their standard-bearer's campaign). Their
immediate response was to seek out faith-based consultants not unlike those
recruited by Sony, and practice dropping the word "values" and biblical
quotations into their public pronouncements. In the House, they organized,
heaven
help us, a Democratic Faith Working Group.

As the next election approaches, they're renewing this effort, to farcical
effect. The Democrats' chairman, Howard Dean, who proved his faith-based
bona
fides in the 2004 primary season by citing Job as his favorite book in the
New Testament, went on the Pat Robertson TV network this month and yanked
his
party's position on same-sex marriage to the right. (He apologized for his
"misstatement" once off the air.)

Not to be left behind, Senator Clinton gave a speech last week knocking
young people for thinking "work is a four-letter word" and for having TV's
in their
rooms, home Internet access and, worst of all, that ultimate instrument of
the devil, iPods. "I hope that we start thinking some very old-fashioned
thoughts,"
she said. (She also subsequently apologized, once her daughter complained,
joining the general chorus of ridicule.) However "old-fashioned" Mrs.
Clinton's
thoughts, don't expect her to turn back Mr. Murdoch's campaign cash in
protest against his steamy new TV channel.

The one New York politician even more disingenuous in this racket is Rudolph
Giuliani. He outdid John McCain's appearance with Jerry Falwell by
campaigning
last week for Ralph Reed in the lieutenant governor's race in Georgia. Any
religious conservative who mistakes "America's mayor," an adamant supporter
of abortion rights and gay rights, for a fellow traveler is in desperate
need of an intervention, if not an exorcism.

But that hypothetical, easily duped voter may no longer exist. Like the Bush
era, the cynical Rove strategy of exploiting faith-based voters may be
nearing
its end. For proof, just take a look at the most craven figure in American
politics: the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist. To flatter the far right,
this Harvard-trained surgeon misdiagnosed Terri Schiavo's vegetative state
from the Senate floor, and justified abstinence-only sex education in AIDS
prevention
by telling ABC's George Stephanopoulos that he didn't know for certain that
tears and sweat couldn't transmit H.I.V. But increasingly it's not only
liberals
who see through him. One of his latest stunts, a proposed $100 gas-tax
rebate, provoked Rush Limbaugh to condemn him for "treating us like we're a
bunch
of whores."

When senators as different as Mr. Frist and Mrs. Clinton both earn
bipartisan ridicule for their pandering, you have to believe that there's a
god other
than Karl Rove watching over American politics after all.

Posted by Miriam V.