Once again, the loudest cheerleaders for the war were at Fox News. Shedding any pretense of objectivity, the network unabashedly took the administration’s perspective, appropriating the Pentagon’s name for the war, “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” and using it as the title for its own coverage. As one newspaper noted with alarm, “the United States quickly becomes ‘our’ in reporters’ parlance.” The network led its viewers to see support for the war as the only patriotic choice, encouraging them to send in pictures of their families supporting the troops. “There are so many pictures of protesters out there,” noted Steve Doocy, cohost of the morning show Fox & Friends. “We want to show pictures of pro-Americans.” Notably, leading figures on the network insisted there was nothing wrong with their pro-administration approach. “So am I slanted and biased? You damn well bet I am,” anchor Neil Cavuto said in response to such criticism. “You say I wear my biases on my sleeve? Better that than pretend you have none, but show them clearly in your work.” 56
Despite such positive spin from supporters in the media, it quickly became clear that there were real problems in Iraq. Notwithstanding the president’s speech on the Abraham Lincoln, combat operations continued and in many cases became more complicated. Soon after coalition forces took control of the country, for instance, severe looting took place at the antiquities museums of Baghdad. Secretary Rumsfeld shrugged off the problem with a flippant answer: “Stuff happens.” Much more serious was the fact that after a thorough search of the entire country, no evidence of weapons of mass destruction was found anywhere. The rationale for the entire war had proved to be false. Commentators started to conclude that the evidence used by US officials had been faulty and misleading, and that there had been a rush to war. At the same time, it soon became clear that preinvasion predictions that Iraq’s oil wealth would effectively pay for the conflict had been wildly overoptimistic. When the administration went to Congress in October to seek $87 billion in supplemental funding, even Republican members began to balk. John Pitney, a political scientist, captured the growing problem for the administration well: “The president’s poll numbers are down, the casualty rate [in Iraq] is up, and Republicans are nervous.” 57
Meanwhile, other problems mounted for the Bush White House. First, a congressional commission conducted hearings to determine whether the 9/11 attacks could have been prevented. The commission reviewed the Presidential Daily Briefings provided by the intelligence community and concluded that there had been strong suggestions about the possibility of an attack. On May 1, 2001, for instance, the CIA had informed the White House that a terrorist operation was being planned; on June 22, it had explained an al-Qaeda strike was “imminent.” Most damning, on August 6, 2001, Bush had received a briefing paper authored by counterterrorism official Richard Clarke entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” When some administration officials pushed back, the CIA gave the president a detailed analysis insisting the intelligence was very sound. Providing a sobering account of the mistakes made before 9/11, Clarke published a book describing how such warnings had been ignored.58
Another scandal that rocked the administration centered on the Abu Ghraib detention center outside Baghdad. Photographs released on CBS’s 60 Minutes 2 on April 28, 2003, showed US soldiers humiliating and brutalizing prisoners in the facility. One picture showed a male prisoner hooded with his hands tied with wire; another depicted guards forcing a different male prisoner to mimic sexual activity with another. One of the most disturbing photographs showed Private Lynndie England displaying a “thumbs up” sign to the camera as she gleefully pointed to a naked Iraqi man who was being forced to masturbate while his head was covered by a bag. Investigative reporting by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker indicated that these events had not been an aberration by renegade soldiers but rather an outgrowth of a systematic program of torture. He reported one case where an Iraqi prisoner was “stressed . . . out” so badly by CIA officials that “the man passed away. They put his body in a body bag and packed him in ice for approximately twenty-four hours in the shower. . . . The next day the medics came and put his body on a stretcher, placed a fake IV in his arm and took him away.” Hidden from public record, according to Hersh, the victim never even had an official number.59 Such exposés implicated the harsh interrogation policies that the Pentagon had been using since 9/11. “It’s a blinding glimpse of the obvious to say we’re in a hole,” admitted Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. “For many of our European friends, what they saw on those horrible pictures is tantamount to torture. . . . In the Arab world there is general dismay and disgust, but in some places we were not real popular to start with.” 60 In a review of press opinion in Germany, Der Spiegel concluded: “In editorials, most newspapers on Friday call for Guantanamo to be closed—once and forever.” Despite public outrage, Bush refused to let Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld resign.61
As controversy mounted and the war wore on, Bush found his public support flagging. His approval rating, which had skyrocketed from the mid-50s to nearly 90 in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, had slowly come back down to the 50s in the months that followed. It jumped back into the 70s during the early months of the Iraq war, but once again, as the initial thrill wore off and Americans confronted the true costs of the conflict, the president’s popularity sagged. By December 2003, the CBS News-New York Times poll had his approval rating at 52 percent; it briefly shot up again to 58 percent when Saddam Hussein was finally captured by American troops, but the fluctuations only showed how precarious his position would be as he headed into his reelection campaign.62
In the end, the series of events that began with 9/11 radically transformed the nation. In terms of its national security approach, the United States thoroughly overhauled its military and diplomatic footing, vastly expanded the reach of the federal government with new programs, ramped up its counterterrorism infrastructure and, most notably, engaged in two major wars. But beyond the obvious changes of the post-9/11 world, the threat of terrorism saturated the landscape, impacting popular culture and deepening the lines of partisan division as well. While much of the strategy initiated by the Bush administration and its bipartisan supporters in Congress would remain contested, by the time Bush left office the policies initially put into place to combat al-Qaeda had become firmly entrenched. The Cold War had been replaced by the war on terror. And much as the struggle against Communism had shaped the domestic life of the mid-twentieth century, the fight against terrorism would shape the contours of life in the twenty-first.
CHAPTER 13
The Politics of Mass Destruction
AS HE TURNED TO HIS REELECTION CAMPAIGN IN 2004, George W. Bush retreated from “compassionate conservatism” and rediscovered the divisive issues of the culture wars to rally his base. Increasingly playing to the political struggles over abortion and LGBTQ rights, the president rallied the Religious Right and, in so doing, deepened the nation’s divisions over gender and sexuality. A new wave of liberal critics rose to challenge the president, working across a range of media, but ultimately his plan worked.
However, scorched-earth politics came at a cost. Bush won reelection by the narrowest margin for an incumbent president in over a century’s time, and found himself increasingly vulnerable in his second term. As the Iraq War soured abroad, at home the administration found itself under fire for its mishandling of Hurricane Katrina and other crises. Democrats soon turned the tables on the president, politicizing national security issues in the 2006 midterms in much the same way that Republicans had in 2002. Divided more and more by domestic politics and foreign affairs, the nation became driven to starker levels of polarization and partisanship.
Return to the Culture Wars
As the 2004 election drew near, Bush’s advisors convinced him he needed to rally religious conservatives. Accordingly, the president picked up many of the old issues of social conservatives and pressed them to new heights. The struggle over abortion, for instance, quickly moved to the forefront of
his agenda. Bush had, of course, already shown his support for the right-to-life movement with some symbolic steps. Its political allies were given prominent positions in the administration, including John Ashcroft as attorney general and Tommy Thompson as secretary of health and human services. More significantly, on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, Bush resurrected a ban on federal funding for any organizations that provided abortion services abroad, a restoration of a Reagan executive order known by pro-choice critics as the “global gag rule.” 1
In addition to these executive actions, Bush worked to secure two landmark pieces of pro-life legislation at home. In November 2003, the president signed into law the measure known by antiabortion activists as the “partial-birth abortion ban.” Although the specific procedure was incredibly rare, the ban was seen by all sides as a major step in the long campaign of religious conservatives to roll back abortion rights. The following year, in April 2004, the president signed another major piece of antiabortion legislation: the Unborn Victims of Violence Act (UVVA), which held that, if a pregnant woman were murdered, the fetus would be legally considered a second victim. Once more, the practical applications of the law were quite limited, but the larger ramifications were nevertheless quite considerable. “What the UVVA does is give legal recognition to life in the womb,” noted a spokesperson for Focus on the Family.2
As Bush moved to advance the Religious Right’s agenda on abortion in 2003 and 2004, he likewise moved to meet their demands to block gains in LGBTQ rights. The president had long wanted to avoid the controversial issue and had successfully done so for years. As he well knew, public attitudes on LGBTQ rights had grown considerably more liberal over the last decades. The portion of Americans who considered homosexuality an “acceptable lifestyle” had risen from 34 percent in 1982 to 50 percent in 1999, while attitudes to civil rights protections showed even broader support. The percentage of Americans who believed gays and lesbians should have the right to equal job opportunities, for instance, rose from 56 percent in 1977 to 88 percent in 2003. Such polls showed that religious conservatives, who saw such protections as unwarranted “special rights” for gays and lesbians, were on the losing side of cultural changes. When the Supreme Court handed down the Lawrence v. Texas decision striking down bans on sodomy in June 2003, it sparked a renewed backlash on the right. “We think this is the start of the court putting San Francisco values on the rest of the country,” noted an analyst with the Culture and Family Institute. In particular, they feared federal courts would extend the logic of Lawrence and legalize same-sex marriage as well. “That’s where we are headed,” worried Richard Lessner of the Family Research Council. “We’re convinced this case was brought to provide the foundation for same-sex marriages.” When Massachusetts became the first state to legalize same-sex marriage, prompted by a court decision in 2004, the Religious Right’s worst fears seemed to be coming true.3
To prevent other states from following suit, religious conservatives focused on a new campaign for a constitutional amendment that would formally define marriage as a partnership between one man and one woman. In the eyes of the Religious Right, the drive for this amendment took on heroic proportions. James Dobson of Focus on the Family said the fight would be nothing less than “our D-Day, or Gettysburg, or Stalingrad.” The Traditional Values Coalition mailed out literature at a rate of 1.5 million pieces monthly, while other organizations like the Family Research Council and Focus on the Family fully devoted themselves to the cause. That fall, the Arlington Group—a new umbrella organization formed specifically for the fight against same-sex marriage—announced plans to distribute literature to 70,000 congregations and reach millions more through radio and television. The strong engagement of religious conservatives in the Republican base forced Bush to abandon his hands-off approach to LGBTQ rights. In February 2004, the president formally called for passage of the Federal Marriage Amendment (FMA). “Activist judges and local officials have made an aggressive attempt to redefine marriage,” Bush insisted. “If we are to prevent the meaning of marriage from being changed forever, our nation must enact a constitutional amendment to protect marriage in America.” The FMA campaign stalled in the Senate after a few weeks, but religious conservatives kept the base focused on the campaign through ballot referenda on same-sex marriage in eleven states. “Make no mistake, my friends,” said Gary Bauer, “the sanctity of marriage will be the defining issue of 2004.” 4
As the Right mobilized for another round of the culture wars, so did the Left. Seeing the success conservatives had had in the 1990s using innovative media forms like talk radio, the internet, and cable to challenge a Democratic administration, liberals tried to form the same sort of media resistance now that there was a Republican in the White House. In March 2004, Air America Radio debuted, offering a new network of liberal talk-radio programming that was meant to copy and counterbalance the success of right-wing radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. Early hosts included left-leaning comedians like Al Franken, Marc Maron, and Janeane Garofalo, liberal journalists like Sam Seder and Rachel Maddow, and Chuck D of the hip-hop group Public Enemy. Despite the early promise and enthusiasm, Air America had trouble finding stations and securing a regular audience. While it began operations on only five stations, Limbaugh and Hannity were on hundreds each. Moreover, reviewers noted that the liberal hosts were temperamentally different from the conservatives they hoped to mimic. “Satire and sarcasm come more easily than rage to Mr. Franken,” one noted. “And rage—unbound by reason or reticence—is what fuels most successful political talk shows.” On-air problems were nothing compared to the behind-the-scenes chaos. Over its first two months of operation, the New York Times reported, the “fledgling talk-radio network has replaced five top executives, been taken off the air in two of its top three markets and lost several crucial producers.” The network struggled with funding from the start and, in October 2006, had to file for bankruptcy.5
Liberal programming found greater success on television, a medium better suited to sarcasm and satire. Most notably, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on the cable channel Comedy Central quickly emerged as a favorite site for bewildered liberals seeking to make sense of the age of George W. Bush. The show, which launched in 1996 but really took off in 1999 when Stewart started hosting, won both critical and public acclaim. The winner of several Emmy and Peabody Awards, the show averaged over a million viewers a night in early 2004. Democratic politicians soon took note, with Senator John Edwards of North Carolina announcing his presidential candidacy on the program. “You know, we’re a fake show,” Stewart responded. “So this may not count.” Despite such claims, more and more Americans were in fact getting their information from a growing number of “soft news” shows that blended entertainment, comedy, and political news. Studies showed that more than a fifth of all Americans under the age of thirty learned about developments in the 2004 presidential campaign from satirical sources like The Daily Show or the opening monologues of late-night talk-show hosts. Riffing on CNN’s slogan—“the most trusted name in news”—The Daily Show dubbed itself “the most trusted name in fake news.” 6
Rather than simply lampooning the “real” news networks, Jon Stewart went a step further and confronted them, both on his own show and, in time, on theirs. In October 2004, he appeared on CNN’s Crossfire, a program that—as its title implied—featured a rapid-fire debate between two combative partisans, one from the left, one from the right. Crossfire had been a staple of CNN’s programming since its debut in 1982, with the pairs of partisan hosts changing over time. Sitting between Paul Begala, a former Clinton aide arguing “from the left,” and Tucker Carlson, a conservative journalist speaking “from the right,” Stewart directly attacked the program itself. “It’s hurting America,” the comedian told the hosts, turning surprisingly earnest. “You have a responsibility to public discourse, and you fail miserably.” When Carlson tried to laugh it off, saying, “You need to get a job at a journalism school, I think,”
Stewart shot back: “You need to go to one.” The episode quickly went viral on the internet, where it found repeated replays. As one media critic noted, Stewart’s outburst “stood out because he said what a lot of viewers feel helpless to correct: that news programs, particularly on cable, have become echo chambers for political attacks, amplifying the noise instead of parsing the misinformation.” As the backlash against Crossfire grew, CNN announced at the start of the next year that the long-running show would be canceled.7
As an alternative to cable news in the Bush era, liberals increasingly turned to the internet. Vermont governor Howard Dean—previously a centrist from the Clinton wing of the party—drew in support from younger and more liberal Democrats through his unapologetic and unambiguous opposition to the war in Iraq. Dean’s campaign ultimately fizzled, in part from a celebratory scream that echoed across cable television, but it nevertheless made a lasting contribution to the mechanisms of political campaigns. Joe Trippi, who came to politics from a background in the computer industry, served as the architect of the Dean movement. He recognized the impact that new sites like Friendster (2002), MySpace (2003), LinkedIn (2003), and Facebook (2004) had in connecting disparate populations around shared professional interests or personal tastes and worked closely with computer gurus Matthew Gross and Zephyr Teachout to pioneer the use of social networking sites to attract a range of supporters. “We were the Wright brothers,” Trippi recalled. “We had great ideas, and we were doing it in a very primitive way with what was possible.” They used early social media sites like Meetup.com to bring supporters together for grassroots campaign events at local coffee houses and neighborhood bars. “A lot of the people on the net had given up on traditional politics precisely because it was about television and the ballot box, and they had no way to shout back,” Dean noted. “What we’ve given people is a way to shout back, and we listen—though they don’t even have to shout anymore.” In addition to mobilizing supporters, the campaign used the internet to raise campaign funds. In the third quarter of 2003 alone, Dean raised nearly $15 million online—setting a single-quarter record for a Democratic presidential candidate and showing the true power of online politics.8
Fault Lines Page 34
