'LAT's Ronald Brownstein: Culture of Life' Issues Split GOP

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NEWS ANALYSIS

'Culture of Life' Issues Split GOP
By Ronald Brownstein
Times Staff Writer

March 28, 2005


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Yet as legal and political options for extending Schiavo's life dwindled, so did public support for Washington's involvement in the dispute, according to several national polls. In a CBS News survey, opposition was so widespread that even decisive majorities of Republicans, conservatives and white evangelical Christians said Bush and Congress should not have intervened.

(snip)

Although a core of social conservative activists passionately embraced the cause of extending the Florida woman's life — and many Americans felt conflicted about her fate — the case seems to show the limits of public tolerance for political involvement in such intimate decisions.

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But many on both sides agree that the emotional confrontation — and the constellation of similar issues developing from advances in medicine and science — will reinforce the shift from economic interests to cultural values as the principal force unifying each party's electoral coalition. "We have moved from an alignment that is primarily based on class to one that is primarily based on culture," said Mark Mellman, the pollster for 2004 presidential nominee Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.). "And one of the consequences of that change is that the issues we are talking about are not easy to compromise."

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The case measures not only the rising influence of social conservatives in the GOP, but also their broadening political strategy. And the controversy is likely to stand as a milestone in efforts by the president and other Republicans to present much of their social agenda as part of a culture of life. President Bush and other GOP officials, echoing language from religious leaders, increasingly apply that phrase to their views on issues revolving around the beginning and end of life — such as their support for banning abortion and opposition to embryonic stem cell research and euthanasia.

Many Democrats see the effort to link these issues as a back-door attempt to undermine support for legal abortion by implicitly tying it to unsettling practices such as euthanasia. Yet the sharp reaction in polls against federal intervention in the Schiavo case suggests that many Americans, even many conservatives, view these issues less in philosophical than pragmatic terms and do not hold opinions that activists on either side would consider consistent.

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