Viguerie: "Now Comes the [Right-Wing Theocratic] Revolution"

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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/04/politics/campaign/04conserve.html?pagewanted=print&position=

November 4, 2004
CONSERVATIVES
Some Bush Supporters Say They Anticipate a 'Revolution'
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

ARLINGTON, Va., Nov. 3 - Exulting in their electoral victories, President Bush's conservative supporters immediately turned to staking out mandates for an ambitious agenda of long-cherished goals, including privatizing Social Security, banning same-sex marriage, remaking the Supreme Court and overturning the court's decisions in support of abortion rights.

"Now comes the revolution," Richard Viguerie, the dean of conservative direct mail, told about a dozen fellow movement stalwarts gathered around a television here, tallying up their Senate seats in the earliest hours of the morning. "If you don't implement a conservative agenda now, when do you?"

By midday, however, fights over the spoils had already begun, as conservatives debated the electorate's verdict on the war in Iraq, the Bush administration's spending and the administration's hearty embrace of traditionalist social causes.

Conservative Christians, both Protestant and Catholic, were first in line to stake their claims, citing polls showing that a plurality of Bush supporters named "moral values" as the most important issue and arguing that a drive to ban same-sex marriage boosted turnout in Ohio.

"Make no mistake - conservative Christians and 'values voters' won this election for George W. Bush and Republicans in Congress," Mr. Viguerie wrote in a memorandum sent to other prominent conservatives. "It's crucial that the Republican leadership not forget this - as much as some will try," he said, underlining the final clause.

"Liberals, many in the media and inside the Republican Party are urging the president to 'unite' the country by discarding the allies that earned him another four years," Mr. Viguerie continued. "They're urging him to discard us conservative Catholics and Protestants, people for whom moral values are the most important issue.''

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1. kick

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2. Mr. Norquist eagerly predicted

the accomplishment of a long agenda of government reduction: repealing the estate tax, privatizing Social Security, restricting medical and other liability lawsuits, closing military bases, opening more government jobs to competitive bidding to lower costs and weaken unions, imposing new disclosure requirements on organized labor, and expanding health care and investment savings accounts.

Most conservatives, however, agreed that among the three arms of the right - religious traditionalists, opponents of big government and foreign policy hawks - it was the religious right that pulled the most weight in Mr. Bush's re-election.

Stephen Moore, president of the Club for Growth, a group that advocates limited government, said the Bush administration's spending had irked many of his members. "My fear is that Republicans will learn the wrong lesson from this victory and say, hey, we can spend and borrow hundreds of millions of dollars and the voters won't hold us accountable," he said. "There were a lot of conservatives who really had to hold their nose to vote Republican."

By all accounts, the war in Iraq only hindered Mr. Bush's re-election, renewing debate among conservatives over its wisdom, especially during the hours on Tuesday when early polls suggested that Mr. Bush might be headed for defeat. "We need a major national debate on, what kind of foreign policy is this country going to have?" said Paul Weyrich, founder of the Heritage Foundation and now chairman of the Free Congress Foundation. "Are we going to continue on the offense, where we make more enemies than we can defeat? Or are we going to return to the traditional foreign policy that we do not attack unless attacked?"

But some of the intellectual proponents of the war known as neoconservatives called the vote something close to a vindication of Mr. Bush's policy of pre-emptive action against potential sponsors of terrorism.

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3. Hello?

Anyone home out there?