COMMENTARY: In Selling Miers, Rove Commits a Mortal Spin

c. 2005 Religion News Service (UNDATED) Everyone has his own conception of hell. I experienced mine recently. Some old high school friends were in town. We met at a hotel bar, and it was karaoke night. The loud, dreadful singing was punctuated by bursts of even louder, more dreadful disco music. I ran to the […]

c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Everyone has his own conception of hell. I experienced mine recently. Some old high school friends were in town. We met at a hotel bar, and it was karaoke night. The loud, dreadful singing was punctuated by bursts of even louder, more dreadful disco music. I ran to the bar for relief, but the one good beer on tap, Bass Ale, ran dry after my first glass. I was thus forced to endure the experience without an acceptable sedative.

This got me thinking about Harriet Miers. Unless the priests and nuns who taught me in high school were wrong, Miers will spend eternity in such a place. She was baptized a Catholic, but as an adult made a decision to embrace what we were taught is pure heresy. I escaped that Holiday Inn at closing time. But unless she mends her ways, Miers will spend her afterlife of eternal karaoke at Beelzebub’s Bar and Grill.


This controversy seems to have been lost on Karl Rove when he decided to pitch Miers as someone who “found Christ” and was “brought to the Lord” when she “became a Christian” in 1989 _ to employ the terminology used by the Miers adherents to sell her as a person who found deep religious faith. The message for Catholics was the exact opposite. She didn’t find religious faith; she lost it.

One such Catholic is Bill Waddington, a retiree from Bayville, N.J. He e-mailed me the other day to protest the idea that Catholicism can be treated as one among a number of “a la carte personal choices.”

I gave him a call.

“I would like to know her rationale, why she chose to give up the Catholic religion,” Waddington said. “Was it because the church is against gay rights or against abortion? There has to be some reason. You just don’t give up something as important as your faith without damn good logical reasons.”

Similar questions are being asked by Catholics on a number of blogs. One such blog even directs the reader to a fundamentalist site (http://www.chick.com) that categorizes Catholicism as a “cult” and lists the reasons that Catholics are not Christians.

This is a common view in the Deep South, according to Rick Shaftan, a political consultant who does a lot of work for candidates in the Bible Belt. Shaftan notes that people in those parts tend to use the term “Christian” in a manner that excludes Catholics.

“When they’re talking about `Christians,’ they’re talking about people we could call evangelicals,” said Shaftan, who is Jewish and therefore doesn’t have a dog in this fight. “They mean people who were born again. They exclude anyone who’s not an evangelical.”

Catholics, of course, view themselves as the only true Christians. So this is not the sort of thing that a politician would want to stir up. Yet stir it up Rove did.


I view this stunt as yet further evidence that Rove is losing his edge, perhaps because he’s devoting so much time to fending off indictment in the Valerie Plame case.

It’s not just that this bit of spin set off the Catholics. That was just a minor problem. The whole point of stressing the religious angle was to signal pro-lifers that Miers would reverse Roe v. Wade. Those signals were too subtle for the pro-lifers, but the pro-choicers heard them loud and clear. They’re already gearing up to stop Miers if she ever gets to her confirmation hearings. Rove seems to have accomplished the near-impossible here. He’s managed to package the first-ever Supreme Court nominee to be rejected on both the left and the right.

To give credit where it’s due, though, Rove kept the public from picking up on the essential incompetence of George W. Bush for five long years. In his prime, Rove was quite a spin doctor. But now he reminds me of those karaoke singers I heard the other night. He may know the words, but he’s having a real tough time with the music.

MO JL END MULSHINE

(Paul Mulshine is a columnist for The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J.)

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