Frank Rich writing in today’s NY Times compares the pr machine behind Sony’s potential blockbuster “The Davinci Code” with the “Washington playbook” used by many politicians over the last decade:

“The Machiavellian mission for the hit-deprived Sony studio was to co-opt conservative religious critics who might depress turnout for a $125-million-plus thriller portraying the Roman Catholic Church as a fraud. To this end, as The New Yorker reported, Sony hired a bevy of PR consultants, including a faith-based flack whose Christian Rolodex previously helped sell inspirational testaments to Hollywood spirituality like “Bruce Almighty” and “Christmas With the Kranks.”

“The Sony scheme also echos much of the past decades Washington playbook. Politicians, particularly but not exclusively in the Karl Rove camp, seem to believe that voters of “faith” are suckers who can be lured into the big tent and then abandoned once their votes and campaign cash have been pocketed by the party for secular profit.”

“But for all these betrayals, Dobson and Co. won’t desert the Republicans come Election Day. If Rove steps up his usual gay-baiting late in the campaign, as is his wont, maybe the turnout of those on the hard-core right will eke out a victory for the party that double-crossed them not just on cultural issues but also on secular conservative principles (like fiscal responsibility and immigration-law enforcement). If so, they’ll promptly be Da Vinci’d yet again.”

He continues to get it right again skewering not only Rove and our own Senator Frist but Rudy Giuliani, Hillary Clinton and Howard Dean for trotting out their own “Davinci Strategy.”

“The idiocy began the morning after Election Day 2004, when a vaguely worded exit-poll question persuaded credulous party leaders that “moral values” determined their defeat (as opposed to say, their standard-bearer’s campaign). Their immediate response was to seek out faith-based consultants not unlike those recruited by Sony [producers of “The Davinci Code” movie], and practice dropping the word “values” and biblical quotations intor their public pronouncements. In the House, they organized, heaven help us, a Democratic Faith Working Group.

“As the next election approaches, they’re renewing this effort, to farcical effect. The Democrats’ chairman, Howard Dean, who proved his faith-based bona fides in the 2004 primary by citing Job as his favorite book in the New Testament, went on the Pat Robertson TV network this month and yanked his party’s position on same-sex marriage to the right (He apologized for the mis-statement” once off the air).”

“Not to be left behind, Senator Clinton gave a speech last week knocking young people for thinking “work is a four-letter word” and for having TV’s in their rooms, home internet access and, worst of all, that ultimate instrument of the devil, iPods. “I hope that we start thinking some very old-fashioned thoughts,” she said. (She also subsequently spologized, once her daughter complained, joining the general chorus of ridicule.) However, “old-fashioned” Mrs. Clinton’s thoughts, don’t expect her to turn back Mr. Murdoch’s campaign cash in protest against his steamy new TV channel.”

“The one New York politician even more disingenuous in this racket is Rudolph Giuliani. He outdid John McCain’s appearance with Jerry Falwell by campaigning last week for Ralph Reed in the lieutenant governor’s race in Georgia. Any religious conservative who mistake’s “America’s Mayor,” an adamant supporter of abortion rights and gay rights, for a fellow traveler is in desperate need of an intervention, if not an exorcism.”

“But the hypothetical, easily duped voter may no longer exist. Like the Bush era, the cynical Rove strategy of exploiting faith-based voters may be nearing its end. For proof, just take a look at the most craven figure in American politics: the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist. To flatter the far right, this Harvard-trained surgeon misdiagnosed Terri Schiavo’s vegetative state from the Senate floor, and justified abstinence-only sex education in AIDS prevention by telling ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that he didn’t know for certain that tears and sweat couldn’t transmit HIV. But increasingly it’s not only liberals who see through him. One of his latest stunts, a proposed $100 gas-tax rebate, provoked Rush Limbaugh to condemn him for “treating us like we’re a bunch of whores.”

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This post was written by Mary Mancini