Michelle Cottle at TNR on the Bush plan to spend 1.5 billion to encourage marriage.

Perhaps more important, as the Times (among others) noted, Bush is desperately hoping his efforts to play couples-counselor-in-chief will distract social conservatives fuming over recent assaults on the institution of marriage–such as the Massachusetts court ruling allowing gay marriage and the Supreme Court ruling that gay sex is legally protected behavior. To turn back this attack, conservatives want Bush to come out strongly in favor of an amendment codifying marriage as a one man/one woman arrangement. So far, the president has dragged his feet, and the base is beginning to grumble. “We have a hard time understanding why the reserve,” Glenn Stanton, a policy analyst for the conservative group Focus on the Family told the Times.

Mr. Stanton may well be the only person puzzled by the president’s “reserve.” Issues like gay marriage and shifting sexual mores are tricky terrain for a self-described uniter like Bush. By contrast, cheap-ass, feel-good initiatives aimed at promoting strong marriages–all in the name of happier, healthier children, of course–are something only the most amoral neo-Marxist feminazi could object to. Who cares if the programs actually work? Nearly all of us can agree that they should work–that it would, on the whole, be a positive thing if somehow they could work. And, in an election year, that kind of broad consensus is as good as gold.