Date: 15 Apr 93 19:02:09 To: All Subj: 15% Solution _ [cross-posted from the CIVLIB Echo]

Date: 15 Apr 93  19:02:09
From: Hank Roth
  To: All
Subj: 15% Solution
____________________________________________________________________________

[cross-posted from the CIVLIB Echo]

[Originally posted on 1:363/118]

*-*-* pnews conferences *-*-*

Ever hear of the 15 percent solution?
How the Christian Right is
building from below to take over from above...

Greg Goldin did his research in part with a grant from the Fund
for Constitutional Government. He tells us that the "Christian
right has reinvented itself, although it is still led by the
familiar faces who gravitated to the pinnacle of power in the
Reagan Administration: There is Pat Robertson's Christian
Coalition, with $13 million to annually dole out to hand-picked
candidates and causes, all of it wired into his Christian
Broadcasting Network audience of 16 million. There is Paul
Weyrich's Free Congress Foundation, beaming marching orders along
its closed-circuit National Empowerment Television to 65 far-
flung satellite-dish affiliates in more than 30 states. There is
Robert Simond's Citizens for Excellence in Education, which
claims that its 1210 chapters have helped elect nearly 3500
school board members. Along with a dozen other organization, the
Christian right has set out to complete what '60s radicals dubbed
"the march through the institutions."

"The formula they've concocted has been called the `15 per cent
solution' by the Christian Coalition. Even in a well-attended
presidential election, only 15 per cent of eligible voters
determine the outcome. Here's the simple math: about 60 per cent
of the qualified electorate is registerd, and only half of them
vote. Half again of that 30 per cent determines the outcome,
hence the all-powerful 15 per cent. "We don't have to worry about
convincing a majority of American to agree with us," Guy Rodgers,
the Christian Coalitions' national field director declared at the
1991 Road to Victory conference. "Most of them are staying home
and watching FALCON CREST.""

"In 1992, according to People for the American Way, the liberal
consitutional watchdog, extremist Christian candidates racked up
a 40 per cent win record in state and local races. And, to the
horror of Republicans across the nation, they've dominating a
number of statewide Republicn Party committees. "What the
Christian right spends a lot of time doing," says Marc Wolin, a
moderate Republican who ran unsuccessfully for Congress from San
FRancisco last year, "is going after obscure party posts. They
try to control the party apparatus in each county. We have a lot
to fear from these people. They want to set up a theocracy in
America.""

"An invocation to God at a school board meeting in Vista,
California, might not seem momentous---though it might spark a
latter-day Scopes Monkey trial. Like the Colorado battle over gay
rights, the elections of three fundamentalists to this small-town
board is part of a strategy to convert America to Christendom.
Instead of high-profile homophobia or abortion clinic blockades,
however, the religious right has has embarked on a new crusade---
triumphant in Vista and in hundreds of other districts throughout
the nation last November---that tranforms church-going zeal into
nitty-gritty, grassroots, trickle-up electoral power. The same
day Bill Clinton won the White House, the Crhistian right
captured seats on school boards, hospital boards, county party
committees, from Alaska to Minnesota, Washington to Texas. While
national attention focused on George Bush's resounding defeat,
few noticed that the fanatics who'd brought him to his knees at
the Republican Convention in Houston were jubilant.

"As many observers in the press rushed to note, Clinton did not
receive a sweeping mandate on November 4. What they failed to see
was the nascent counter-revolution that garnered millions of
votes from America's disaffected middle class. The same
Reaganites who cast their lot with Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot
because they were worried---resentful even--about losing their
toehold on prosperity were wooed by Christian activists and
zealot.

"These electoral victories were not the product of the willy-
nilly book burner or the old pulpiteer exhorting the like-minded
to flock to the polls to defeat an occasional incumbent. Behind
successes in local races in Iowa, Virginia, Oregon, Colorado,
California, and New Yourk--among others--is a national network
supplying money and know-how, pulling candidates from the pews
and putting them into public office. (Similar efforts are
underway for New York City's school board elections May 40.

"The insurgency is the natural culmination of a process that
began in 1980. Ronald Reagan entered Washington braced by a
coalition of monied Rockefeller Republicans, disgruntled working
class Democrats, and hardcore Christians. The new president
promptly offered the latter, in particular, direct access to
Washington, giving them legitimacy and a national platform. The
Christian right, in turn, provided him with a club--in the form
of Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority and Terry Dolan's National
Conservative Political Action Committee--to wield against
Democrats unwilling to capitulate to the "bipartisan" mood.

But the Reagan alliance began to crumble with the end of the Cold
War, Anticommunism, the glue that held together otherwise
contentious partnerships, died a belated death. By the time Bush
was elected in 1988, the Christian right was hopelessly at odds
with the White House. They despised Bush, the ultimate Republican
elitist and pragmatist, waffling on abortion and tax increases.
So they set out to retool the Repulbican Party. At the Houston
convention, the Christian right exerted its considerable
leverage, creating the spectacle of George Bush pandering to Pat
Robertson and the Armageddon choir. It was hell for Bush, but a
godsend for his foes.

By the time of the GOP convention, with Bush fading, America's
Christian right had already cooked up their strategy. If they
couldn't shape policy from the top, they'd take over the bottom.
`We tried to charge Washington,' says Christian Coalition
executive director Ralph Reed, contemplating the end of their
Washington clout in 1988. `We should have been focusing on the
states. The real battles of concern to Christians are in
neighborhoods, school boards, city councils, and state
legislatures.'

[This is part of a more extensive article by Greg Goldin which
has been funded in part by the Fund for Constitutional Government
and published in the Village Voice, April 6, 1993--HR]

* Origin: Rights On!-Host/Moderator of A_THEIST-Titusville_FL_USA (1:374/14)