Bush moves to satisfy conservative base

With President Bush's embrace yesterday of a marriage amendment, the compassionate conservative of 2000 has shown he is willing, if necessary, to rekindle the culture wars in 2004.

Bush's plan was to run for a second term on the basis of his performance as a war leader and as a tax cutter, eschewing divisive social issues as he did in 2000 while campaigning as "a uniter, not a divider." But in the end, Republican strategists said, Bush had no choice but to change course and add a highly charged cultural issue to the center of the campaign.

Bush's conservative base of support, despite three years of cultivation, had grown restless over the budget deficit, government spending and his plan to liberalize immigration. At the same time, he was on the defensive over the economy and the Iraq war, and facing an uncharacteristically unified Democratic party.

So when gay marriages advanced in Massachusetts and San Francisco, Bush felt a need to respond to the cries of social conservatives -- even if it meant losing some swing voters he needs in November.

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"Ultimately, I don't think he had any choice," said Gary Bauer, a religious conservative who challenged Bush for the Republican nomination in 2000. "The president has never really shown an enthusiasm about the wars over the culture." Bauer added: "It would've been inconceivable that a president so associated with traditional values would have sat idly by while marriage was being redefined. He had to act."

Securing the base
Bush thus is turning with some reluctance to a technique his father, George H.W. Bush, used in 1988, when issues such as the Pledge of Allegiance, flag desecration, Willie Horton and the American Civil Liberties Union competed with the usual national security and economic concerns. Such social issues -- abortion, prayer, patriotism, homosexuality and popular culture -- often work to the GOP's advantage by mobilizing the partisans.

"This is an attempt, probably successful, to make sure their base remains with them," Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg said. He said the strategy will still be a "net positive" for Bush but will not work as well as it did in 1988.

"The cultural war gets you to even, but it doesn't get you to a Bush-Dukakis election, because the country is more diverse and more tolerant," Greenberg said.

Democrats were already squirming yesterday after Bush's announcement. Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), the Democratic front-runner to be Bush's opponent in November, coupled his announcement that he would oppose the amendment with many qualifiers.

He said he believes "marriage is between a man and a woman," but supports "civil unions" and believes states should make gay-marriage decisions. Kerry also complained Bush is "trying to drive a wedge."

But if the move made Democrats uneasy, a Senate Republican with ties to the religious conservative movement said "the last place Bush wanted to be" at this time in the electoral cycle was wooing his base of support. "He should be coasting on being the war president and deliverer of tax cuts; instead, he has to take a divisive role on a contentious social issue that could undercut him as a compassionate conservative," this official said.

Concern was evident in some of the public caution voiced by Bush allies on Capitol Hill yesterday. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), while applauding Bush's "moral leadership" on the issue, said, "We're not going to take a knee-jerk reaction to this. We are going to look at our options, and we are going to be deliberative about what solutions we may suggest."

Rep. David Dreier (R-Calif.) said he is "not supportive" of an amendment and suggested the matter first go through the court system.

'The frontiers of liberty'
This reluctance is not surprising, said Andrew Kohut, whose nonpartisan Pew Research Center has polled extensively about gay marriage. Recent polls, including a new Washington Post-ABC survey, show majorities oppose gay marriage, but the public is divided on the need for a constitutional amendment.

It ranked 23rd out of 24 policy priorities in a January Pew poll. At the same time, Kohut said, "There are a fair number of swing voters who take a libertarian point of view, and if Republicans are seen as taking rights away, it's not a good thing."

Indeed, at a fundraiser Monday night, Bush vowed to "extend the frontiers of liberty." But 15 hours later, he threw his support behind an amendment that would be only the second in U.S. history other than Prohibition to curtail public freedoms. In the 2000 campaign, Bush himself opposed federal intervention on the subject, saying in a Feb. 15 interview with CNN's Larry King that states "can do what they want to do" on gay marriage. Vice President Cheney, similarly, said in 2000, "I don't think there should necessarily be a federal policy in this area."

Republican pollster David Winston said Bush likely would have preferred to let the issue make its way through the courts, but the San Francisco gay marriages "forced his hand" by infuriating conservatives. Although Bush's opposition to gay marriage has the support of the "overwhelming majority of Americans," Winston said, such social issues can mutate in unpredictable ways. "It's a very difficult balance."

Already, some conservatives are pushing Bush to back an amendment that outlaws civil unions, too.

"In the last couple of months, the base has been hungry for moral leadership to come out of White House and was urging him to do something strong like he did today," said Robert Knight, director of the Concerned Women for America's Culture and Family Institute.

But Knight said conservatives will balk if Bush sanctions an amendment allowing civil unions. "Creating counterfeits by any name hurts the real thing," he said.