Joseph Sobran’s
Washington Watch

The Partisan in the Pulpit

(Reprinted from the issue of April 8, 2004)

After Hans Blix, David Kay, Paul O’Neill, and Richard Clarke, the Bush administration’s case for the Iraq war is looking more dubious than ever. The occupation and transition to democracy aren’t going too well, and the president himself now treats those “weapons of mass destruction” as a joke. He has been embarrassed into allowing Condoleezza Rice to testify publicly before the 9/11 commission.

All this should be good for John Kerry, but it doesn’t seem to be working out that way. Dick Morris, Bill Clinton’s former advisor, has a sharp insight here. He suggests that even the damaging revelations are helping Bush, because national security, polls show, is Bush’s issue. As long as the campaign centers on the subject, Bush wins with the public. If the subject shifts to the economy, the Democrats’ strongest issue, Kerry wins. Morris thinks the election will be decided less by the candidates than by what the country is talking about by November.

A new issue has emerged: Kerry’s religion (if any). It may not become as hot as John Kennedy’s Catholicism was in 1960, but Kerry, for some reason, has decided to call attention to it, stressing JFK analogies. Like Kennedy, he wants it to be known that his religion won’t affect his politics, which of course are pro-abortion and all that; it’s an atheist-friendly sort of Catholicism. This could become explosive, since Boston’s Archbishop Sean O’Malley says that pro-abortion politicians “shouldn’t dare come to Communion.”

What is Kerry trying to achieve? Maybe, in keeping with his record of flip-flopping, he’s trying to neutralize his party-lining liberal past with perfunctory gestures of piety. Maybe he just wants to show that Bush isn’t the only one who goes to church. But again, religion is a Bush issue. Churchgoing is one of the better indices of voting habits; worshipers in general lean Republican, while the Democrats appeal chiefly to those whose religion is little or none. Is Kerry sure he wants to go there?

It appears so. He recently blasted Bush in a Baptist church on a Sunday morning, citing James 2:14: “What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds?” On the other hand, he’s defensive about promoting abortion, offering the usual “thoughtful” bromides about separating church and state: “I don’t tell church officials what to do, and church officials shouldn’t tell American politicians what to do in the context of our public life.”

Well, which is it? We can question Bush’s Christianity if he opposes the Democrats’ agenda, but we can’t question Kerry’s if he favors the slaughter of the unborn? What happened to separating church and state? Do the Democrats get to decide if and when they are to be separate?

Kerry has decided to attack Bush at his perceived strengths, but in doing so he has also revealed his own alleged principles as slippery. This makes his assault on Bush’s religion as hypocritical as it is uncivil. If you’re going to slam another man’s convictions, you’d better have some convictions of your own. Does Kerry have any? We have only his word for it.

Kerry is a seemingly intelligent and sophisticated man, yet I can’t recall his ever saying anything that smacked of either conviction or reflection. At this early phase of the campaign, he’s already ringing hollow. The Democrats decided he was “electable” because he wasn’t Howard Dean; he’d better come up with a better reason by November.
 
Two Farewells

A sad week for Anglophiles. Two of the most charming Englishmen of their time have died — Sir Peter Ustinov at 82, Alistair Cooke at 95.

Pauline Kael called Laurence Olivier “the wittiest actor who ever lived.” Maybe, but I think she was forgetting Ustinov. The two appeared together in the film Spartacus, Olivier as the fearsome Crassus with Ustinov, as the greedy, cowardly slave dealer Batiatus, cringing hilariously before him. When Olivier threatens to send him into battle, Ustinov whines, “But you don’t understand! I’m a civilian! I’m even more of a civilian than ... most civilians!” All right, he didn’t write that line (unless it was one of his great ad libs), but nobody could have delivered it with greater comic timing.

Ustinov could be just as funny without a script. He was famous for his many talents, including that of polished raconteur. He had so many gifts, in fact, that no activity could contain them all at once. He displayed many of them in one very serious work: his own 1962 film adaptation of Melville’s Billy Budd, which he wrote, produced, directed, and, oh yes, acted in, playing the tormented Captain Vere, who reluctantly sentences the innocent Billy to hang. It’s both an exciting and a deeply moving film, thanks to Terence Stamp as Billy, Robert Ryan as the evil Claggart, and, most of all, Ustinov’s presiding genius on both sides of the camera. I watched it again a few weeks ago, and its moral power is undiminished by time. This very funny and convivial man could wring your heart.

Alistair Cooke retired only a few weeks ago, after a long career as writer and radio and television host and commentator. He became most familiar here as host of Masterpiece Theater, but he won worldwide respect for his weekly radio comments, Letter from America. Rarely funny or controversial, he spoke and wrote with a gentle eloquence that I always found irresistible. His words were well chosen and carefully measured, with a fine sense of the dignity and power of the English language. He made being old-fashioned seem less a limitation than a strength, as he observed the turbulent present from the long, calm, confident perspective of a civilized tradition.

Ronald Reagan was once mocked for saying the New Deal had been modeled on Italian fascism, but Cooke had made the same observation. He was at his finest in his book Six Men, personal profiles of Charles Chaplin, Edward VIII, H.L. Mencken, Adlai Stevenson, Bertrand Russell, and Humphrey Bogart.

Did I say he was rarely funny? I didn’t say never. In his profile of Stevenson, he describes a shameless Mother’s Day speech by Estes Kefauver which ended with words of sympathy for “those of you who have lost fine mothers!” The speech went over well, for, as Cooke comments dryly, “There is surely nobody alive who would take the risk of publicly proclaiming, on Mother’s Day, that he had lost a lousy mother.” He also relates how, at the 1960 Democratic convention, followers of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson greeted Stevenson “with faces like slabs of cement.”

Both Ustinov and Cooke were masters of the urbane anecdote. But Ustinov’s humor was nonstop. Cooke’s was like a secret weapon, to be saved for the moment when it would have sudden effect. Both were so widely loved that their obituaries read like thank-you notes.


You can get my unexpurgated anarchic taboo-busting conservative Catholic diatribes only in my monthly newsletter, SOBRAN’S. If you have not seen it yet, give my office a call at 800-513-5053 and request a free sample, or better yet, subscribe for two years for just $85. New subscribers get two gifts with their subscription. More details can be found at the Subscription page of my website.

Already a subscriber? Consider a gift subscription for a priest, friend, or relative.

Joseph Sobran