I just got off the phone with Bishop Harry Jackson, a pastor and leading conservative evangelical political figure who is friends with both John Hagee and Rod Parsley and supports Hagee's Christians United for Israel.
Jackson says that McCain shot himself in the foot with conservative evangelicals by first seeking out Hagee and Parsley's endorsements and then ditching them when they became a political liability for him. "He reached out to Hagee and Parsley precisely to bolster his acceptance among evangelicals," said Jackson. "Now folks don’t know what he means. Is he for us or against us? I think other pastors and religious leaders would be hesitant to endorse McCain. How does he fill this credibility gap that goes back to 2000? . . . He sought them out in a pandering sort of way, and then he publicly ridiculed them."
Jackson added that McCain missed an opportunity similar to the one that Barack Obama seized in the wake of the Jeremiah Wright episode: to talk about his faith, and explain why his faith didn't line up with theirs. But he didn't do that, and evangelicals sympathetic to Hagee and Parsley view how he handled the situation as an affront. Evangelicals involved in Christians United for Israel, he added, will continue to support Hagee. (The question, though, as I discussed earlier today, is whether they will continue to have the same political clout.)
Of course, a lot of people would take serious issue with Jackson's assertion that Hagee and Parsley are "mainstream" and that there are a lot of people to the right of them. (Really?!) They do have very big followings, but a lot of evangelicals would object to them being characterized as "mainstream."
At the same time, Jackson said that McCain doesn't seem to have a strategy with the moderate evangelicals either, because he's not talking about issues near and dear to them (which Jackson says he and his co-author Tony Perkins also highlight in their new book), like solving poverty and global HIV/AIDS.
I asked Jackson what McCain could do to fix his evangelical problem and his answer was a resounding "Mike Huckabee." Bobby Jindal, who is reportedly on McCain's short list, "would be very wise to stay out of this. He’s young, and he has a wonderful future ahead of him. If he’s not sure he can overcome McCain’s negatives, he might want to wait this out," said Jackson. But Huckabee, he said, "would be a slam dunk. He could heal that breach." He added that "at least half of the evangelical leaders I’ve talked to think Huckabee would be great." Many think he could inject the kind of "zeal" into McCain's campaign that got evangelicals energized for Bush. (I would add that Huckabee is also a favorite of some other evangelicals who have distanced themselves from the religious right but remain probably conservative-moderate, even though Huckabee is, well, conservative. Huckabee himself has known Hagee for a long time, and preached at his church last December, to an adoring crowd.)
And Romney? Well, Jackson admitted that a some evangelicals still have an issue with his Mormonism, and would see McCain picking Romney as a further assault on them. See how much progress we've made in this faith in politics thing?
Obviously Jackson presented one person's view -- but he's a key figure in the religious right coalition, and provides a window into how they're reacting to all of this.
--Sarah Posner
