Nov 19, 2004  |  By: Chris Crain  | COMMENTS     

GEORGE W. BUSH has rewarded his campaign manager Ken Mehlman, who executed the divisive strategy this president rode to re-election, by naming him to head the Republican National Committee.

The sexual orientation of Mehlman, who is 38 and unmarried, has long been the subject of speculation, and he refused to answer earlier this year when asked directly by this publication whether he or other top Bush campaign staffers are gay.

The announcement raises mixed emotions for me. I have known Ken since we were both law students and he worked for me at the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, a libertarian/conservative law review. As young Washington attorneys in the early ‘90s, we even joined with others to create an organization called Square One that advocated limited government.

There are plenty of reasons for Ken’s success. He is über-bright, extremely personable, and as dedicated as he is ambitious. Tapped to head the majority political party before he even turns 40, Ken has obviously mastered the art of politics, learning at the feet of the master, his mentor Karl Rove.

But the real disappointment for me comes at the path Ken has taken to find such success. I have not spoken to Ken in a decade, and I have no personal knowledge about his sexual orientation, but whether or not he is gay, he has ridden to success on the coattails of a candidate who betrayed the core principles that we both stood for as young political activists.

We believed in a government that should stay out of our pocketbooks and out of our bedrooms. George W. Bush has certainly steered clear of our wallets — enacting tax cut after tax cut — but he has failed to curb pork barrel spending and even created giant new entitlements. The combination has converted a record surplus into a record deficit and dug the government’s grubby hands into the pocketbooks of generations to come.

Even more fundamentally, the Bush campaign under the strategic direction of Rove and Mehlman used divisive social issues — including gay marriage — to drive deep cultural wedges, just to turn out the evangelical vote.

These GOP “values voters” do not believe in a limited government, at least when it comes to taking sides in the culture wars. They expect the government to impose their particular theological views on the country — and in so doing deprive a minority group the basic equality guaranteed by the Constitution and the freedom promised by the Declaration of Independence.

KEN WOULD PROBABLY respond that the president didn’t pick gay marriage as an issue; that “activist judges” imposed their own cultural values on Massachusetts by requiring the state to issue marriage licenses to gay couples.

But marriage is a peculiar institution, in which the government has chosen to create a bundle of protections and benefits for the committed adult couples who form the core of the American family.

Having created the institution, a limited government that respects the First Amendment prohibition on establishing a state religion cannot listen to one particular theological dogma in deciding which couples will qualify — whether or not that dogma belongs to a vital party constituency or even a majority.

Ken Mehlman should understand that, whether or not he is gay.

If he is gay, like a number of other prominent Republican National Committee staffers, then shame on my old friend for betraying himself and his people, along with his youthful values — and all for an entirely different brand of conservatism, one that envisions an invasive government strong-arm at the expense of personal liberty.

THE DEMOCRATS AREN’T much better. They ran fast and furious away from our issues in the 2004 election and somehow still managed to blame us for their defeat. It still confuses me how a party can refuse to defend us before the general public and still claim their loss is our fault.

Witness Ken Mehlman and Karl Rove’s counterpart on the Democrat side: the wily James Carville.

In a “Meet the Press” appearance that included a piggish crack at the expense of New Jersey’s gay governor (see “On the Record, page 37), Carville sounded almost envious when he described the Republicans’ electoral advantage.

“The purpose of a political party in a democracy is to win elections,” Carville said. “We’re not doing that ...