LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY kittynboi)

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/070225/5evangelicals.htm

Here's another article dealing with the dominionists dissatisfaction with the current G.O.P. candidates.



Keeping the Faith
Evangelicals know what they want in a candidate. But the current crop may not have it.
By Dan Gilgoff
Posted 2/25/07
Veteran Christian activist Marlene Elwell is not inclined to make political compromises. She helped engineer Pat Robertson's victory over George H. W. Bush in 1988's Iowa caucuses and led Michigan to constitutionally ban gay marriage in 2004. But after meeting with Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback, interviewing California Rep. Duncan Hunter, and studying former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee-all 2008 presidential hopefuls who, like Elwell, are dyed-in-the-wool religious conservatives-she concluded that none could raise the tens of millions of dollars necessary for a competitive campaign. So she looked to the top-tier Republican candidates who were less ideologically pure on abortion and gay marriage.

Of course, that decision had its own challenges. Elwell knew she could rule out supporting ex-New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, a social liberal. She sat down with former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, a onetime supporter of gay rights and abortion rights who now calls himself a staunch social conservative, but couldn't get past his "sketchy and inconsistent" record. So Elwell cast her lot with Arizona Sen. John McCain, who infuriated religious conservatives by supporting embryonic stem cell research and opposing a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. She reasoned that McCain's many antiabortion votes in the Senate made him enough of a social conservative and that he has a strong shot at actually winning. Elwell signed on, not just as a supporter but as McCain's faith outreach director. Now her task is to convince fellow Christian right activists that the senator is not the social moderate they think he is. "At first, audiences say, 'Oh, my-McCain isn't pro-life,'" Elwell says. "But after I discuss his record, they're pleasantly surprised. There are converts."

Whether McCain and the other leaders of the GOP presidential pack-Giuliani and Romney-can make enough converts among the Republican Party's base of religious conservatives may determine whether any of them can win the presidential nomination. Because of their political records and personal lives, all three have raised abundant doubts within the Christian right. And what happens next could be crucial. "One possibility is that Christian right activists coalesce around Brownback or Huckabee-if united, they would be formidable," says John Green, a scholar at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. "And if they unite against any one candidate's nomination, they could prevent him from winning the nomination." Trying to stave off either possibility, McCain and Romney-and, to a lesser extent, Giuliani-have launched Christian conservative outreach plans. But some powerful Christian right activists are skeptical. And others are determined to stop the front-runners in their tracks.

The Christian right's consternation over Giuliani, McCain, and Romney is a remarkable turnabout from 2004, when the movement was united behind the re-election of George W. Bush. White evangelicals, who made up roughly a quarter of the electorate in 2004 and 2006, accounted for nearly 4 in every 10 Bush votes. "I don't think any of the three are remotely acceptable, and I don't think I'm an outlier," says Michael Farris, a top Christian activist who organized meetings between Bush and evangelical leaders for his first presidential run. "Giuliani holds the opposite view of the Republican platform on social issues, Romney has held both sides of those issues, and McCain picked fights with us the last time he ran for president." An early February meeting of the Council for National Policy, a club of powerful social conservatives whose members include Focus on the Family founder James Dobson and Left Behind author Tim LaHaye, was thick with fretting over '08. "I've never seen more disillusionment at this point in the election in 30 years," says a source close to the Council for National Policy, which prohibits members from discussing meetings with the media. "There's a revolt out there, a feeling these top three are being pushed on us by Republican leadership in D.C."

Splits. Some heavyweights within the Council for National Policy and other conservative coalitions are weighing an effort to galvanize behind a socially conservative second-tier candidate, such as Huckabee or Brownback, in an attempt to catapult him into the top tier. "There is a very strong feeling that we have to assert ourselves or we're going to end up with somebody we can't support," says Paul Weyrich, a longtime conservative activist and cofounder of Moral Majority. Weyrich says Christian right leadership is currently split "around fifty-fifty" over whether to pursue such a plan or to adopt an every-man-for-himself approach, in which activists would gravitate toward the candidate of their choice.

A concerted attempt to steer evangelical and conservative Roman Catholic voters toward a second-tier candidate could hit Romney hardest. In reversing his support for abortion rights and gay rights, Romney's strategy is to convince right-wing Republicans leaning toward Huckabee or Brownback that he's the more viable candidate. (The plan presumes that McCain and Giuliani will fight for the votes of the Republican establishment.) "There's a big group of pragmatic social conservatives who don't want to waste their votes," says a Romney aide. "We're going to be the second choice of a lot of people who want to follow their hearts but want a strong candidate."

Of the three front-runners, Romney has been courting evangelical leaders most zealously. After a meeting at his Massachusetts home last fall with roughly 15 high-powered religious conservatives, Romney sent each attendee a wooden captain's chair mounted with a brass plaque that reads, "You are welcome at our table anytime." Because many evangelicals consider Romney's Mormonism to be a cult, he has the most to gain by winning over visible evangelical leaders. "If the person in the pulpit says [Mormonism] is a line you cannot cross, then you can't reach the person in the pew," says evangelical publicity executive Mark DeMoss, who organized the Massachusetts meeting. The courtship continued in February at the National Religious Broadcasters convention in Orlando, where DeMoss introduced Romney to closed-door sessions of Christian right activists by saying: "I've found the answer to the question of whether you can support a Mormon: It depends on who the Mormon is."

Romney has picked up support among key evangelicals, including DeMoss and Jay Sekulow, who runs the Christian legal group American Center for Law and Justice, founded by Pat Robertson. Romney's campaign has also been assiduously courting Dobson, the nation's most politically powerful evangelical leader, who announced earlier that he couldn't support McCain or Giuliani. U.S. News has learned that Romney sat down with Dobson last week at Focus's Colorado Springs, Colo., headquarters for their first getting-to-know-you session. Christian right activists say that unless Romney can win his support, Dobson-who has not met with other presidential candidates at Focus HQ-is inclined to back a second-tier candidate.

Critics. Romney has suffered among social conservatives in recent months, as activists around the country have E-mailed to one another more than a dozen memos and news clips criticizing his gubernatorial record. Among other things, the memos allege that Romney appointed liberals to fill state court vacancies and that he failed to use his executive power to stop the distribution of marriage licenses to gay couples. The Romney campaign notes that his court appointees needed approval of Democratic officials and argues that an amendment to the state Constitution to ban gay marriage, which Romney backed, was preferable to a one-time executive injunction. But many conservatives remain skeptical. " If there's anything else [social conservatives] should know, he should let them know now," says Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, who stood with Romney last fall in Massachusetts to oppose the state Supreme Court's legalization of gay marriage.

Even before recent disclosures about what an ardent gay-rights and abortion-rights supporter Romney had been, some activists were dubious of his conversion to social conservativism. "Bush had a pretty consistent record of being pro-life and pro-family-it wasn't perfect, but it was consistent," says Farris. "Romney is not even in the ballpark."

That's where the McCain campaign sees its opening. In the past month or two, McCain has hired a handful of staffers to make the case to religious conservatives that McCain's antiabortion record in the Senate makes him a trustworthy alternative to Romney. McCain recently told a South Carolina audience that Roe v. Wade should be overturned, and he has been lobbying the National Right to Life Political Action Committee for an endorsement. That effort has so far failed to bear fruit, but McCain's pitch is resonating. "One's record is a good indicator of future performance," said Perkins after emerging from a meeting with McCain at the National Religious Broadcasters conference. "The senator does have a pretty solid record on the life issues."

McCain has begun tying his support for states' rights on the issue of abortion to his view that states should decide how to deal with gay marriage. But his opposition to the so-called Marriage Protection Amendment isn't McCain's only sticking point with religious conservatives. Grass-roots groups like Focus on the Family loathe the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law because they say it restricts their ability to communicate with constituents before elections. And, despite McCain's recent buddying up with Jerry Falwell, many activists are still sore over his "agents of intolerance" excoriation of Christian conservatives in 2000. "People say, 'McCain hated us then,'" says Weyrich. "'How do we know that he doesn't still hate us?'"

Faith. Unlike Romney, an active member and former official in the Mormon Church, the Episcopal McCain rarely speaks about his religious life. That's another possible stumbling block among religious conservatives, whose favorite politicians, like George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, discussed their faith openly. Though McCain's aides say he will avoid talking about his religion, he does, in sessions with religious conservatives, tell of his role as an unofficial chaplain among his fellow POWs during the Vietnam War.

Of course, with his well-known defense credentials, McCain stands to benefit if, in the first competitive post-9/11 Republican presidential primary, issues like abortion and gay marriage take a back seat to terrorism and national security. That certainly appears to be Giuliani's calculus. The former New York mayor has been on a hiring spree, but he hasn't brought aboard staff to court religious conservatives. (His campaign notes that Giuliani will speak at Robertson's Regent University in Virginia Beach this spring.) Giuliani has stressed that he would appoint "strict constructionists" to the judiciary, an important cause for social conservatives, and his staff says he holds some positions-like opposing gay marriage and the procedure critics call "partial-birth" abortion-that will appeal to religious conservatives. But his campaign believes the '08 Republican primary will see candidates' leadership qualities overshadow their stances on hot-button issues. "Rudy is moderate on social issues, and despite that, he's leading in the polls," says Bill Simon, a top Giuliani adviser. "This is a time when people feel uncertain about the international situation and want to know the person in the Oval Office is up to the task, even if they don't agree with him on everything."

If Giuliani winds up harnessing enough moderate Republican support to win the nomination, the GOP will have another problem on its hands: how to get evangelicals to the polls in the general election. "Evangelicals just won't vote" if Giuliani is the nominee, says the Southern Baptist Convention's Richard Land. "He'll lose Ohio, perhaps Tennessee-maybe even Texas." To Christian conservatives, it's a losing formula. But they still have to find a winning formula that includes them.

This story appears in the March 5, 2007 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.



I think this is pretty important. Its not just people like us hoping the religious right will have a weak showing in 08, but the dominionists themselves seem pretty candid about the situation as well, and aren't playing up anyone. As I said in my comments to another entry, the Dominionists feel burned by the carrot-dangling tactics of the GOP establishment, and as a result they are demanding an ideologial correctness that is not to be found in any of the practical candidates. The only people who might fit their profile are people who would be lucky to come in with 5% of of the vote in the primaries.

Here are some notable parts of the article I want to comment on;

"One possibility is that Christian right activists coalesce around Brownback or Huckabee-if united, they would be formidable," says John Green, a scholar at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

BUT, this only applies to the primaries, not the general election. They COULD make Brownback or someone like that formidable in the primaries, but someone like Brownback has very dismal chances of winning the ACTUAL election, much less chance than Giuliani and McCain.

Some heavyweights within the Council for National Policy and other conservative coalitions are weighing an effort to galvanize behind a socially conservative second-tier candidate, such as Huckabee or Brownback, in an attempt to catapult him into the top tier. "There is a very strong feeling that we have to assert ourselves or we're going to end up with somebody we can't support," says Paul Weyrich, a longtime conservative activist and cofounder of Moral Majority. Weyrich says Christian right leadership is currently split "around fifty-fifty" over whether to pursue such a plan or to adopt an every-man-for-himself approach, in which activists would gravitate toward the candidate of their choice.

This goes back to the problem I touched on in my comments to the other post; the xian right can turn an election if things are tight AND they vote in a more or less unified bloc. When they fragment, however, it becomes clear that their numbers aren't what they sometimes seem. Their numbers are just enough to be formidable only in the right circumstances, and one of those circumstances is that they be unified, not divided like this.

I think they will be further marginalized by what the other wings of the G.O.P. decide to do, as I can see the business and libertarian wings EASILY going for McCain, or perhaps, Giuliani. After all, McCain has kind of been the darling of that section of the G.O.P. for a long time.

Giuliani's image as a moderate, and to a lesser extend, McCain's, will help them greatly, since the past few years have shown the public attitude towards the religious right somewhat in flux, especially since the Schiavo debacle, which many saw as an example of overreaching fueled by religious right sentiment. More moderate voters not ready to go to the left on these issues, but still nervous about the increasingly bizzare, hateful, and authoritarian elements of the religious right and their sympathizers, may find Giuliani a VERY VERY appealing alternative.

Well, thats the article and my thoughts. Just thought this might be good for generating discussion. And I hope it can cheer some people up, since I really do think that this next election will be a weak showing for the dominionists on the federal level.