Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, March 21, 1994 TAG: 9403260010
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOE PATRICK BEAN
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The coalition, a special-interest political-action network founded and headed by ultraconservative telepolitivangelist Pat Robertson, will spend $1.4 million to humiliate a president loathed by the far right - for reasons that have little to do with health care.
Clinton's reform effort is certainly subject to careful, valid scrutiny on several points.
Can it achieve its professed goals of universal coverage and portability? How much will it cost? Will it preserve a patient's right to choose her or his own health-care providers? Will it create too much new government bureaucracy?
These are legitimate questions all Americans should be asking as they study the president's plan on its merits and compare it with other reform packages pending in Congress.
But the debate over health-care reform is only a means to an end for Robertson and the rest of the religious right.
Their true agenda is imposing their narrow, intolerant views on hot-button social issues on the rest of the country. They are willing to do virtually anything to turn this nation into a rigid theocracy.
They want to turn the nation's public schools into fundamentalist Bible classes and prayer meetings, deny equal rights and equal protection under law to lesbian and gay Americans, outlaw abortion completely and make life miserable for people - especially fellow Christians - who disagree with their blindered view of the world.
Robertson, however, is savvy enough to have figured out that this "gospel" scares the stuffing out of the majority of Americans.
His tirade at the 1992 Republican National Convention in Houston, along with that of fellow right-winger Pat Buchanan, greatly contributed to the GOP's defeat.
The shrill, mean-spirited, exclusionary tone of the party's presidential campaign, dominated by the religious right, drove millions of moderate and liberal Republicans, independents and "Reagan Democrats" to vote for Clinton or Ross Perot.
But Robertson also knows that many Americans who profess to be moderate or liberal on social issues are fiscally conservative, too. They don't like tax increases or expensive, wasteful federal programs and bloated bureaucracies. They want to keep government out of their bedrooms and their wallets.
So the coalition is strategically broadening its appeal. It hasn't abandoned its true agenda, only temporarily muted it.
Robertson is now targeting the Clinton health-care reform package and other mainstream pocketbook and good-government issues with widespread appeal.
Ralph Reed, the coalition's executive director, is painting the president's plan as fundamentally "anti-family" to rally the true believers. But he is also calling it "a prescription for Byzantine bureaucracy, health-care rationing, loss of physician choice and lost jobs."
This preys on - and deliberately exaggerates - fears most Americans share. It is designed to mobilize broader opposition to the Clinton package and support for Robertson and his coalition.
Another example of this strategic shift is found in a recent coalition fund-raising letter. The enclosed scorecard on 1993 congressional votes listed, in addition to social matters, such issues as the federal budget, higher taxes, Social Security, the national-debt ceiling and congressional term limits.
Robertson's attempt to mainstream his appeal is a well-funded, clever, sophisticated seduction. It has far less to do with health care or other pocketbook issues than it does with bolstering his coalition's financial and political power bases.
If Robertson succeeds, the religious right will be better positioned than ever before to impose its true agenda on the country.
That would seriously endanger the long-term health of the nation's body politic.
Joe Patrick Bean is a columnist and editorial writer for the San Antonio Express-News.
by CNB