Bush Steps Outside His Bubble: Is Karl Rove Starting to Believe His Own BS?

[host]

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>

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.

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." ................

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."

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 &amp;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.

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..............

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.............

[arch13]

"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." ................

Bingo.

It should say something that so many of the faculty placed an ad in the paper. I was pleasantly suprised to see students at the graduation with anti-Bush statements on their cap and gown along side Pro-Bush statments. Both had their place there, and both had the right to be there derived from the students paying for their attendence.
To put that another way, the students foot the bill, so they can make whatever statements they want, and I was glad to see both ends of the spectrum, as well as the center, represented.

This is a great example of everyone making a stand without having to stoop to low political blows. (And I mean that positivley fror all sides.)

[samcol]

I have to hand it to Bush and his speech writers. The first five minutes of his speech was hailarious. Then I just kinda zoned out after he kept going on about the same ole. Who gets to decide which of Bushes many speeches gets televised anyway? It does seem like he's been less visable so far this term.

[martinguerre]

i think something really valuable to see here is that evanglic or conservative Christianity is not a unified monolith, but a really complex project with competing values. if conservative Calvin is divided like this in terms of political expression, then it certainly contests claims (from both right and left) that to be religious (especially Christian) is to be politically conservative.

[roachboy]

of course christianity--even evangelical protestantism--is more complex than the right would like to pretend. i have been really pretty amazed at the extent to which a very particular variant of christianity--this bizarre fire and brimstone christianity motored by resentment you see floating about in tv land--managed to co-opt the label christianity for itself, that it was able for any amount to time to claim that it and it alone represented the entirety of this complex religion. most amazing to me is the degree to which what passes for christianity in the context of the american political right manages to evacuate the central messages of christ in the gospel, which have to do with the dignity of the poor, compassion, etc.--pretty much the basis for the objections to bush/rovbe outlined by the calvin faculty/students.

what i find strange in the above is the claims that concern "the christian left"--these positions, outlined by folk at calvin who oppose the bushvisit, are central to the new testament, would seem to me central to any reading of its books--i dont really understand how the "emergence" of the central elements of christ's message can be construed as the rise of a political left within the christian political movement.

what is even more bizarre to me is that folk further to the right politically, who claim the name christian for themselves, and who claim to rely on a literal interpretation of the bible, manage to erase these central tenants of the gospels which they claim to defend. i am surprised that the far right political version of christianity is not thoroughly offensive to most christians, representing a basic gutting of the basis of their beliefs.

[stevo]

Originally Posted by host

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?

I'll be in annapolis friday morning and can hardly wait to hear bush's commencement speech. I can tell you right now I'll be in the audience and I was in no way pre-screened for this event.

That really doesn't matter to you, host. No matter what bush does or doesn't do you will still find something to whine about. During bush's first term I thought it was cheney who was pulling the strings. Do you have the approximate time that rove took control over puppet bush? who's going to call the shots next year? do you have that figured out yet? maybe you can look online and find a whole bunch of articles to link to that will pinpoint this handover of puppet-master-power.

[filtherton]

Originally Posted by stevo

I'll be in annapolis friday morning and can hardly wait to hear bush's commencement speech. I can tell you right now I'll be in the audience and I was in no way pre-screened for this event.

The administration knows that it doesn't need to prescreen the military.

maybe you can look online and find a whole bunch of articles to link to that will pinpoint this handover of puppet-master-power.

I just think that its funny that host gets ridiculed for posting information backing up his arguments. Actually i think it is rather sad and typical.

[Cynthetiq]

Keep this thread away from personal attacks and insults.

[smooth]

Originally Posted by roachboy

of course christianity--even evangelical protestantism--is more complex than the right would like to pretend. i have been really pretty amazed at the extent to which a very particular variant of christianity--this bizarre fire and brimstone christianity motored by resentment you see floating about in tv land--managed to co-opt the label christianity for itself, that it was able for any amount to time to claim that it and it alone represented the entirety of this complex religion. most amazing to me is the degree to which what passes for christianity in the context of the american political right manages to evacuate the central messages of christ in the gospel, which have to do with the dignity of the poor, compassion, etc.--pretty much the basis for the objections to bush/rovbe outlined by the calvin faculty/students.

what i find strange in the above is the claims that concern "the christian left"--these positions, outlined by folk at calvin who oppose the bushvisit, are central to the new testament, would seem to me central to any reading of its books--i dont really understand how the "emergence" of the central elements of christ's message can be construed as the rise of a political left within the christian political movement.

what is even more bizarre to me is that folk further to the right politically, who claim the name christian for themselves, and who claim to rely on a literal interpretation of the bible, manage to erase these central tenants of the gospels which they claim to defend. i am surprised that the far right political version of christianity is not thoroughly offensive to most christians, representing a basic gutting of the basis of their beliefs.

How can you find it strange, roachboy?

I suspect you share a deeper reservation about your observation than you are articulating.
The notion that these centrists have to take a leftist stance is indicative of the shift of the discursive center. While it's initially unnerving that these people feel the need to classify themselves as leftist christians as a response to the extreme sects claiming the center for themselves, it leaves me to wonder if this opens space for a uniting and transformative politics for the remainder of the christian body.

[Ustwo]

Originally Posted by filtherton

I just think that its funny that host gets ridiculed for posting information backing up his arguments. Actually i think it is rather sad and typical.

There is a line between spam and supporting your argument. Often I can not tell the link between what host pastes and what he is talking about. This causes me to often just ignore his posts which is unfortunet but we can only spend so much time seperating the wheat from the chaff. I would much rather talk about his views then about the mountain of articles he posts.

[host]

Originally Posted by stevo

I'll be in annapolis friday morning and can hardly wait to hear bush's commencement speech. I can tell you right now I'll be in the audience and I was in no way pre-screened for this event.

That really doesn't matter to you, host. No matter what bush does or doesn't do you will still find something to whine about. During bush's first term I thought it was cheney who was pulling the strings. Do you have the approximate time that rove took control over puppet bush? who's going to call the shots next year? do you have that figured out yet? maybe you can look online and find a whole bunch of articles to link to that will pinpoint this handover of puppet-master-power.

Yeah, stevo, I do "have the approximate time that rove took control over puppet bush". Consider that Cheney would not have been selected to "pull the strings" if Rove, Jeb Bush, Kathleen harris, five SCOTUS judges, and Gore's own ineptitude had not combined to bring Rove's serial dirty tricks campaigning to fruition.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontl...rove/cron.html
1973 "Dirty tricks" for the College Republicans?

..........As the College Republicans' chairman in Washington, the 22-year old Rove also performs small tasks for Bush, who is becoming one of his mentors. In November, Bush asks Rove to take a set of car keys to his son George W. Bush, who is visiting home during a break from Harvard Business School. Rove is instantly taken with the young Bush's charisma. The two hit it off.

[filtherton]

Originally Posted by Ustwo

There is a line between spam and supporting your argument. Often I can not tell the link between what host pastes and what he is talking about. This causes me to often just ignore his posts which is unfortunet but we can only spend so much time seperating the wheat from the chaff. I would much rather talk about his views then about the mountain of articles he posts.

There is a line, and as soon as host starts linking articles about penis enlargement he will have crossed it. Otherwise, it seems rather lazy to me to engage in a discussion without the willingness to actually understand the bases of your fellow member's position.

It isn't that difficult to compare someone's interpretation of a news article with the actual article, especially when that article is right in front of you. If you can't find a link between the two, it is generally more helpful to say so and hope for some sort of elaboration from the person in question, than to just skip the post and pretend it was irrelevant. It seems especially backwards, to me, to attempt to mock someone for actually bringing data to an exchange of ideas. I suppose it just serves as a reflection of the overall intellectual laziness of my fellow americans who've been spoon fed empty, superficial garbage by the corporations that control american mainstream culture since conception.

Such mockery does serve to separate the wheat from the chaff though, because you can tell how committed someone is to having a meaningful discussion by their willingness to deal with the facts at hand. Participating in discussions based on factually verifiable information can take considerable intellectual time and effort, two things that are increasingly in short supply when it comes to the part played in american politics by the average american. It is much easier to just fire off some loosely relevant, partisan party-echoing paragraph than it is to formulate your own ideas by paying attention to what is actually going on. Unfortunately, it is also far less useful in terms of actually exchanging ideas or learning anything.

[Ustwo]

Originally Posted by filtherton

There is a line, and as soon as host starts linking articles about penis enlargement he will have crossed it. Otherwise, it seems rather lazy to me to engage in a discussion without the willingness to actually understand the bases of your fellow member's position.

I'm sorry but just because an article has something to do with politics doesn't mean it is needed for the discussion at hand.

[filtherton]

Originally Posted by Ustwo

I'm sorry but just because an article has something to do with politics doesn't mean it is needed for the discussion at hand.

That's true, but you're never going to know that if you skip the whole thing. If you do happen to read the article and find it irrelevant, say so, maybe its just a miscommunication. Otherwise, if you don't want to read the cited text, and don't care to put in the effort to interpret and respond to it, don't complain about it because the problem is with you.

[tecoyah]

OK....it starts here......this is not a political argument.....this is critical interpretation of persona.....no point in continuing here.

closed

Perhaps a message will be understood here.....one can hope