All presidential candidates are going to appease the base, which has really been primed by the Tea Party and by the religious right to have this antipathy towards paying taxes to a government that they portray as this greedy monster that’s stealing their money. I mean, with this weekend in Iowa, the number of times that I heard candidates refer to the government and taxes in terms of it being a “money-eating machine” — that’s a term that Bachmann used — or theft, the idea that the government is this big behemoth that takes your money for no reason but to oppress you is really the heart of what the Republican economic message is right now. And that’s why all the candidates felt compelled to say that even that amount of spending cuts versus tax increases would not be adequate for them; they want all cuts and no taxes.
Michele Bachmann’s economic message is very much focused on this same thing, that government is something that—the federal government is something that oppresses you, that it takes your money. Like I said, she called—on the stump, she called it a “money-eating machine.”
“I will not rest” — this is in her stump speech — “I will not rest until Obamacare is repealed.” She wants to repeal the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform bill. She wants to basically get rid of all EPA regulations. So, any federal regulations that protect consumers from environmental harm or from predatory lenders, things like that, she’s opposed to that.
And this is not just a Tea Party message, and she is not just a Tea Party candidate. This is a message that resonates with the religious right, because they believe that the government—that God grants three different spheres of society different types of authority. And they think that God granted the government very limited authority, and if the government, in their mind, exceeds that, through promulgating regulations, then they consider that tyranny and enslavement. And so, this is why her message resonates both with fiscal conservatives, who are very anti-tax, anti-government, sort of what—traditionally what people think of as Tea Party types, but also with the religious right. And this is the coalition that came together to give her this victory in Iowa.
Bachmann went to the law school at Oral Roberts University, which, later, after she graduated, got absorbed into Regent University, the university founded by Pat Robertson in Virginia Beach. But I did a story last month about Oral Roberts and the type of legal education that she got there, and it was very much along the lines of what I just described before with this view of constitutional law, that God grants certain authority to government, the Church and the family, and that your rights are granted by God, and if the government infringes on those rights by exceeding the authority that it was granted by God, then that’s tyranny. The whole aim of Oral—founding Oral Roberts University was to, in the mind of the founders, reinstitute biblical law over man’s law in jurisprudence and in politics, and to train lawyers and future leaders, just like Michele Bachmann, to rise to the level of leadership that she has risen to.
So, as you point out, the irony in all of this is that she went on to become a tax lawyer and worked for the IRS, the very agency that Tea Partiers and many people in the religious right see as this oppressive beast, and that, even though she wants to cut federal spending and cut the social safety net, she and her husband, in their Christian counseling business that she often touts on the campaign trail as being a—you know, she’s a small business owner and she’s a job creator, that they benefited from Medicare reimbursements.
Governor Rick Perry
this is very reflective of his reaching out to a certain element of the religious right, the people that he worked with to do his prayer rally in Houston last Saturday, the very week before the straw poll in Iowa and the week before he announced in South Carolina. And these people consider themselves to be modern-day apostles and prophets who are out to engage in spiritual warfare with the forces of Satan. And so, when he is describing himself as prophet, he’s dog-whistling that base by saying that, you know, “Hey, look, I do these things because God is telling me to. And if maybe you don’t like some of them, well, you know, if you look at the Bible, not all the prophets were completely popular in their time either, but they turned out to be prophetic.”
Ron Paul, this very strong antiwar message, a libertarian.
he’s not exactly a libertarian. I think his antiwar message resonates with people who aren’t conservative who are against the war, but he also has the very strong message against the power of the federal government that I was describing before that Michele Bachmann has, viewing it as a tyrant that’s coming to take your gun away or to, in his words at the straw poll—in his last speech before the voting ended, he talked about armed IRS agents coming to take the money of pro-life people to pay for other people’s abortions. So he is not beyond trying to reach out to the religious right part of the base. In fact, he’s hired the same evangelical outreach adviser that was used by both Presidents Bush. So he’s clearly trying to connect with that part of the base, even though many of the, say, the homeschoolers—Bachmann has a lot of support from homeschoolers, but her support from homeschoolers is generally from Christian homeschoolers. There are others, other homeschoolers that call themselves liberty-minded, that are less focused on the religious aspect of it, that are very much behind Paul. But he’s also—he’s not reaching the very same part of the religious right base that Bachmann is, but he is using—using some of the same rhetoric to attract those same voters. And he’s very anti-abortion, just like she is. He’s anti-gay marriage, just like she is.
But all three of the front-runner candidates—Romney, Bachmann and Perry—to varying degrees, are going to use religion and social issues in the race. They’re going to use this small government message. I think that Bachmann is, much more than the rest of them, going to use the language, the sort of rhetoric and ideology that she learned at Oral Roberts to meld the fiscal conservatism, small government message with her religious message.
Romney
he can always say that he wasn’t really competing in Iowa, and that’s why—that’s why he didn’t make a good showing there, and he’s been focused on New Hampshire and South Carolina. But I think that he, as much as he tried—I saw him speak at the State Fair last week, where he infamously now said that corporations are people, and he’s trying very hard to reach the base with his, you know, small government message, his pro-corporate message, but I don’t think that he is speaking the radical, anti-government message that the base seems to want to hear and that Perry and Bachmann seem more attuned to speaking.
Discussion with Sarah Posner.
Sarah Posner, senior editor of Religion Dispatches, contributor to The Nation magazine, and author of the book God’s Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters.
– from democracynow.org