circus circus

Schiavo Circus Hurt the GOP

Friday, April 1, 2005

San Diego -- NOW THAT Terri Schiavo has died, many of the questions the country has been wrestling with are moot.

It no longer matters which doctor had the right diagnosis, or whether Schiavo's husband or parents had her best interests at heart, or whether the federal government should have been involved, or whether this was a case that was best handled by doctors and family members as opposed to politicians and judges.

But, when it comes to the political legacy of Terri Schiavo, there is at least one question that is still open: Did this whole circus hurt the Republican Party? I'm afraid the answer is "yes."

Sure, there were some Democrats who supported reinserting Schiavo's feeding tube. It was hard to miss Rev. Jesse Jackson's surprise visit this week to the hospice in Pinellas Park, Fla. But it was Republicans in Congress who ran this sideshow -- and, in the process, they nearly ran their party into the ground.

Democrats need to suppress their glee. They did much the same thing 20 years ago. During the 1980s, Democrats went so far overboard in pandering to the special-interest groups that made up Jackson's Rainbow Coalition that they lost sight of the fact that Americans were not of one mind on issues such as immigration, affirmative action, gay rights and abortion. It wasn't that Democrats were listening to the wrong people. It was that they didn't spend enough time outside their comfort zone considering alternative points of view. They were also too quick to demonize the other side, and portray themselves as more progressive and more enlightened.

That's the way it was until the creation of the Democratic Leadership Council and the arrival on the national scene of a certain charismatic governor from Arkansas, who wasn't afraid to tell the country that he supported the death penalty and wanted to "end welfare as we know it."

Some people think that the hardest thing about politics is getting things done when you're in the minority. But what's really challenging is not overreaching when you're in the majority.

That's a lesson that Republicans are having trouble with. Lately, it seems they don't know how to act gracious in victory. They control both houses of Congress. They won the presidency by more than 3 million votes. They control a majority of the nation's governorships. And they're almost single- handedly responsible for most of the ideas floating around Washington, good and bad.

Republicans are making inroads with Latinos, thanks to White House efforts to reform the immigration system. They're laying the groundwork to do well with young voters for years to come by trying to make Social Security more equitable for the taxpayers of tomorrow. And, according to polls, they're still the choice of a majority of Americans when it comes to which party can be trusted to fight the war on terrorism.

Now those gains are threatened by the rigid agenda of social conservatives within the GOP. Democrats once convinced themselves that they were more open-minded than anyone else; for social conservatives, it's all about being closer to God than anyone else. They spend a lot of time trying to convince the country that they have cornered the market on morality and they imply, or sometimes say outright, that anyone who disagrees with them comes up short in that department.

That was the modus operandi of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay once the Schiavo drama kicked into high gear. He referred to Michael Schiavo's attorney as the "embodiment of evil." He insisted to a group of religious conservatives that God "brought us Terri Schiavo." He demonized those who disagreed with him -- those who thought that Terri Schiavo's husband should decide her fate -- by accusing them of being part of a larger conspiracy to harm DeLay's reputation and that of other conservatives. He dared try to link his own ethical problems with Terri Schiavo's ordeal.

And DeLay did all this despite the fact that -- as we now know thanks to a report in the Los Angeles Times -- he and his family confronted a similar predicament 16 years ago with DeLay's dying father, and they decided to cut off life support. According to the paper, DeLay did not object to that decision at the time.

DeLay insists that the two cases are in no way comparable. His father had no chance of recovering, he says. Where have I heard that before? I know -- from Michael Schiavo, in talking about his now departed wife.

- Ruben Navarrette Jr., San Diego Union-Tribune