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Banned
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Bush Steps Outside His Bubble: Is Karl Rove Starting to Believe His Own BS?
Did Karl Rove miscalculate the strength of sentiment for Bush among midwestern evangelical christians, in choosing Calvin College as a venue for Bush's only 2005 commencement speech, besides an address planned at the US Naval academy, or was the choice of Calvin part of a broader plan that Rove deemed worth the risk of departing from the more typical, highly scripted, Bush appearance, with a pre-screened audience, on a military base, or at some other site where all access to protestors can be blocked?
<h4>I am still surprised that "Bush in a Bubble" is now accepted as "normal" instead of as an indictment of his isolation, arrogance, aloofness, and of the disconnect between the reality of his inability to engage an audience of real random Americans, asking unrehearsed and unscripted questions to the "leader of the free world" vs. the perception of his supporters that he is a capable leader.</h4>
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http://www.mlive.com/news/grpress/in...0010291020.xml
President to deliver Calvin commencement address
Thursday, April 21, 2005
About a month ago, Karl Rove pulled aside a West Michigan congressman with an idea.
"Would Calvin College be interested in having the president as a speaker?" the Bush adviser asked U.S. Rep. Vern Ehlers, R-Grand Rapids.
The result: The president will speak May 21 at the college's 85th commencement ceremony. It is a major coup for the Christian Reformed-based liberal arts school.
"It is a great honor to have the president of the United States speak at Calvin," Calvin President Gaylen Byker said today. "The presence of President Bush will certainly make this a commencement that students, parents and the Calvin community will remember for years to come."
Ehlers said he was in touch with Calvin and the White House for several weeks about the appearance. He credited West Michigan businessman Peter Secchia with playing a significant role in landing the president.
"Peter just has great connections to the White House," Ehlers said.
Ehlers said the president has "fond memories" of his appearance in January 2000 at a nationally televised debate at the Calvin College Fine Arts Center.
"That was a good kickoff for him," Ehlers said.
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http://www.mlive.com/news/grpress/in...2310294150.xml
Why did White House choose Calvin?
Friday, May 20, 2005
By Steven Harmon
The Grand Rapids Press
GRAND RAPIDS -- Could it be that Karl Rove's family history played a role in President Bush's visit to Calvin College this weekend? .........
..................."I think the White House knows Calvin is not a clone of the more fundamental universities, like Bob Jones University," said Joel Carpenter, the college provost. "It's an opportunity to extend their constituency."
Bush's appearance may signal a desire to identify himself more closely with the Christian center rather than with the religious right, where critics often have pigeonholed him, said the Rev. Peter Borgdorff, executive director of ministries for the Christian Reformed Church.
"I think Calvin College represents a more centrist place on the spectrum than perhaps some other places," said Borgdorff, who has met with Bush as a board member for the faith-based Call to Renewal anti-poverty movement. "He knows better than to assume every Christian college is associated with the religious right. The president is interested in being perceived as a religious moderate, not a religious extreme." ................
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2005Apr22.html
Commencement, Christian-Style
By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtontpost.com
Friday, April 22, 2005; 12:43 PM
The White House announced yesterday that President Bush will give two commencement addresses next month, one at the U.S. Naval Academy and one at Calvin College in Western Michigan.
The Naval Academy is not a surprise. Bush has been maintaining the tradition of rotating between the military service academies, and this year it's Annapolis's turn.
But Calvin College? It's a small Christian college with 900 graduating seniors in Grand Rapids. Why's he going there?
Well, although Calvin is little known amongst the general public, it is nevertheless a highly regarded center of evangelical intellectual thought.......
...............So just how did the Calvin selection come about?
The official story, out of Calvin, is that it's all thanks to the persistence of an alumnus, U.S. Rep. Vernon Ehlers, along with college booster, Republican donor and former ambassador Peter Secchia.
But the Grand Rapids Press says it happened this way: "About a month ago, Karl Rove pulled aside a West Michigan congressman with an idea.
" 'Would Calvin College be interested in having the president as a speaker?' the Bush adviser asked U.S. Rep. Vern Ehlers, R-Grand Rapids.
"The result: The president will speak May 21 at the college's 85th commencement ceremony. It is a major coup for the Christian Reformed-based liberal arts school."
Kathleen Gray writes in the Detroit Free Press: "Bush will encounter a college officials describe as 'unapologetically Christian.' Students must take religion courses, including biblical liturgy and theology and developing a Christian mind. Spiritual activity coordinators live in each dorm. There is no alcohol allowed on campus."
Alan Wolfe wrote in the Atlantic Monthly in 2000 that Calvin College is "part of a determined effort by evangelical-Christian institutions to create a life of the mind."
He also notes that the college asks "its faculty members to belong to the Christian Reformed Church; they are all also expected to sign three confessional creeds of the church: the Heidelberg Confession, the Belgic Confession, and the Canons of Dordt."
In 1999, James C. Turner wrote in Commonweal magazine that Calvin is one of the "seedbeds of an intellectual renaissance within American evangelicalism."
Flashback to 2000
Bush has been to Calvin College before. It was the site of one of the Republican presidential candidate debates in 2000.
Congressman Ehlers told the Grand Rapids Press that the president has "fond memories" of his appearance there.
Candidate Bush shared the stage with Sen. John McCain of Arizona, Sen. Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, Gary L. Bauer, Steve Forbes and Alan Keyes.
There were quite a few memorable exchanges between Bush and McCain, his only serious opposition at the time.
For example, McCain was relentless in his criticism that too much of Bush's proposed tax cut proposal would benefit the wealthiest of Americans while ignoring other needs.
"There's a fundamental difference here," McCain said. "I believe we must save Social Security, we must pay down the debt, we have to make investment in Medicare. For us to put all of the tax cuts -- all of the surplus into tax cuts, I think, is not a conservative effort. I think it's a mistake. I think we should put that money into allowing Americans to be sure that their Social Security system will be there when they retire."
Bush shot back: "I have a plan that takes $2 trillion over the next 10 years and dedicates it to Social Security. My plan has been called risky by voices out of Washington. In my judgment, what's risky is to leave a lot of unspent money in Washington, because guess what's going to happen: It's going to be spent on bigger federal governments."
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http://www.mlive.com/news/grpress/in...6940221400.xml
Protesters line roads with signs
Sunday, May 22, 2005
By Ted Roelofs
The Grand Rapids Press
It is perhaps to be expected that a visit by President Bush would attract a crowd of demonstrators. All his trips as president have sparked some kind of local dissent. ....................
...................While Bush imparted his words of wisdom to Calvin's graduating seniors, Bradford was one of many Calvin alumni who stood on the edge of campus, eliciting everything from honks of support to obscene gestures from passing motorists.
They were joined by several hundred marchers from across West Michigan who demonstrated Saturday. The peaceful demonstration stretched from the East Beltline Avenue to Burton Street to parts of the campus, representing groups including Confronting Empire and the West Michigan Justice &Peace Coalition.
Grand Rapids police reported no arrests. ......................
........Standing in the median between lanes on East Beltline, 1984 Calvin graduate Julia DeJonge saw the president's visit as one more attempt by Republican strategists to hijack Christianity for their political ends.
Given the reaction by some faculty and graduates, DeJonge believes Bush political strategist Karl Rove may have misread Calvin.
"I am deeply disturbed at the way religion and Christianity gets represented in the media," said DeJonge, 42, a resident of East Grand Rapids. ........
......Even before the demonstrations, Bush's appearance touched off a fierce debate among Calvin students, faculty and alumni about his choice as commencement speaker.
On Friday, the names of 823 faculty, alumni and friends of Calvin appeared in a full-page ad in The Press with an open letter saying they were "deeply troubled" by his visit.
That was followed Saturday by a half-page ad listing a third of Calvin's faculty, who welcomed the president to Calvin, but expressed their disagreement with a number of his policies.
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http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/05/22/news/letter.php
White House Letter: President gets lecture from the Christian left
Calvin College, a small evangelical school in the strategic Republican stronghold of Grand Rapids, Michigan, seemed a perfect stop this past Saturday for the president's message. Or so thought Karl Rove, the White House political chief, who two months ago effectively bumped Calvin's scheduled commencement speaker when he asked that Bush be invited instead.
But events at Calvin did not transpire as smoothly as Rove might have liked. A number of students, faculty and alumni objected so strongly to the president's visit that by last Friday nearly 800 of them had signed a letter of protest that appeared as a full-page ad in The Grand Rapids Press. The letter said, in part: "Your deeds, Mr. President - neglecting the needy to coddle the rich, desecrating the environment and misleading the country into war - do not exemplify the faith we live by."
The following day, Bush was greeted by another letter in the same newspaper signed by about 100 of 300 faculty members that objected to "an unjust and unjustified war in Iraq" and policies "that favor the wealthy of our society and burden the poor."
At first glance, it seemed as if a mainstay of Bush's base, the Christian right, had risen up against him. At second glance, the reality was more complex. The protests at Calvin showed that Bush's evangelical base was not monolithic, and underscored the small but growing voice of the Christian left.
That movement, loosely defined as no more than several million of some 50 million white evangelicals, opposes abortion and generally supports traditional marriage. But as a group it is against the Iraq war, the administration's tax cuts, Bush's environmental policies and, not least, the close identification of evangelicals with the current White House.
A leader of the Christian left is Jim Wallis, the editor and founder of the Christian political magazine Sojourners and the author of "God's Politics: Why the Right Gets it Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It." Wallis, whose book has been on The New York Times best-seller list for the past 15 weeks, appeared at Calvin College on May 5 and is advising Democrats on how to appeal to religious voters.
"The monologue of the religious right is over," Wallis said in an interview before Bush's appearance. "There is a progressive, moderate evangelical constituency that is huge."
Others see the group as a far less powerful force, but they acknowledge that the Christian left cannot be a cheery development for Rove. "Were this movement to continue to grow, it could create some problems, probably not for President Bush but for future Republican candidates," said John Green, the director of the Ray Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron in Ohio and an expert on the voting patterns of religious groups. In short, Green said, "Democrats have an opportunity to get some votes."
One question is whether Rove knew what he was getting into when he asked that Bush be invited to Calvin, a theologically conservative college in the tradition of the Christian Reformed Church that is politically more progressive than other evangelical schools. (Faculty members estimate that about 20 percent of students opposed Bush in 2004.) Rove secured the invitation through Representative Vernon Ehlers, the Republican who represents Grand Rapids and attended Calvin.
"I think they understood the nature of Calvin," said Jon Brandt, Ehler's press secretary, who also attended Calvin. "The White House isn't stupid."
That would be the view of Corwin Smidt, a political science professor at Calvin and the director of the Henry Institute for the Study of Christianity and Politics. Bush's visit, he said, was both "rewarding the faithful" who voted for him in 2004 and a strategic positioning for 2006.
That is when Dick DeVos, an heir to the Amway fortune and a member of the Michigan family that has been a major contributor to the Republican Party and Calvin College, may challenge the Democratic governor, Jennifer Granholm. Republicans will also try that year to unseat another Democrat, Senator Debbie Stabenow of Michigan..............
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http://www.freep.com/news/mich/bush19e_20050519.htm
.......One-third of the faculty members have signed a letter of protest that will appear in a half-page ad in the Grand Rapids Press on Saturday, the day Bush is to deliver the commencement address to 900 graduating seniors at Calvin. The ad cost $2,600.
"As Christians, we are called to be peacemakers and to initiate war only as a last resort," the letter says. "We believe your administration has launched an unjust and unjustified war in Iraq."
More than 800 students, faculty and alumni also have signed a letter protesting Bush's visit that will appear Friday as a full-page ad in the Grand Rapids paper. The ad cost more than $9,500.............
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