Garry Wills on Karl Rove/Huckabee

This first link below is the one I have been looking for, SBC takeover Architect Paul Pressler's relationship and History with Mike Huckabee and Ronnie Floyd in Arkansas.

http://www.thebigdaddyweave.com/2007/11/judge-speaks-paul-pressler-on-mike.html

http://www.ethicsdaily.com/article_detail.cfm?AID=9757

http://www.scpols.com/ Good link for Hbee's FI SC event.


Back on October 23 I had a long quote from this review of Wills if you want to go there and see how it inflects Casey Mattox and some of his shaping.
But here is the strong case in regard Karl Rove.
I am hoping some of Mike Huckabee's staff I read yesterday, even the Governor Himself will take a strong look at Wills and share and grow with Frank Page and Richard Land.
Go ahead, surprise US
And Rick Lance and Joe Bob Mizzell; nothing says you should be immune from reading and sharing with Dan Ireland's successor Joe Godfrey.


Wills moves chronically through U.S. history, outlining the ebb and flow of enlightenment and evangelism through the decades and centuries, pausing throughout to provide thumbnail sketches of the significant personalities involved.

Eventually he comes to the Bush administration: "The right wing in American likes to think that the United States government was, at its inception, highly religious, specifically highly Christian, and -- and more to the point -- highly biblical." This was not true of that or any later government -- until 2000.

Wills is particularly shrewd in delineating Karl Rove's part in bringing this about: While crediting the former White House advisor's mastery of electoral technologies, Wills argues that "his real skill lay in finding how to use religion as a political tool . . . . He shaped the hard core of the Republican Party around resentments religious people felt over abortion, homosexuality, Darwinism, women's liberation, pornography and school prayer . . . . Rove made the executive branch of the United States more openly and avowedly religious than it had ever been, though he had no discernible religious belief himself.

His own indifference allowed him to be ecumenical in his appeal to Protestants, Catholics and Jews."The Protestant wing of this coalition, Wills writes, was predisposed toward Bush, but Catholics were the big electoral prize. Pollsters have noted that Catholics who regularly assist at Mass are more socially conservative and open to GOP candidates. Moreover, Father Richard John Neuhaus, editor of the influential journal First Things and a convert from Lutheranism's evangelical wing, was a fixture in the Bush White House.