1. McCain Under Pressure from Evangelicals: Does He Have a Plan?
John McCain was buried under an avalanche of scoldings and recriminations this week about his anemic and poorly executed outreach to evangelicals. Are his discontented allies throwing up their hands, or issuing warnings?
Ultimately, it's hard to imagine Christian right loyalists abandoning McCain; there's far too much at stake for the Christian right, and it's project to create and anti-Roe majority on the Supreme Court, for the hardcore activists to stay home (or vote for Barack Obama) in November. But there's an emerging consensus that McCain's failure to consolidate the support of major evangelical leaders will hurt him organizationally -- especially damaging given Obama's proven grassroots organizing success.
McCain's failure to meet early and enthusiastically with major evangelical leaders was a major tactical error according to Doug Wead, who advised both Bushes on their evangelical outreach. The grassroots tend to follow the leadership, and the leadership, through churches, provides the GOP get-out-the-vote infrastructure.
Warren Smith, a conservative evangelical activist, journalist and member of the Council for National Policy, told me that McCain squandered early opportunities to meet with conservative Christian leadership. For example, he failed to show up for a meeting of some Arlington Group members that took place at the Values Voters Summit last year.
In 2000, Smith said, George W. Bush met privately with evangelical leaders and said, "trust me, I'm with you guys, but I can't talk about these issues on the campaign trail. But trust me, when I get into office I'll be with you." Because McCain hasn't had similar conversations, Smith said, he won't have the flexibility to simultaneously court moderates and conservatives in the campaign.
"McCain's position doesn't have to look like James Dobson's position to win the evangelical vote," Smith added, "but it's got to look like something to the right of Barack Obama."
Well, if that's all it takes, he's got it sealed, doesn't he?
2. The Billy Graham Kerfuffle.
Wead, who played a central role in evangelical outreach for Bush Jr. and Sr.'s presidential campaigns, but is not involved in McCain's, was at the center of a mini-controversy over McCain's evangelical street cred this week. Wead claimed that the McCain camp had rebuffed overtures from him and Brian Jacobs, a Texas pastor, to arrange a meeting between McCain and evangelical icon Billy Graham (who is in poor health and not, apparently, having many meetings anyway). Wead's claim was quickly denied by the McCain campaign, because McCain, of course, doesn't want evangelicals to think he would have turned down a meeting with Graham. The evangelist's spokesperson, A. Larry Ross, said there had been no communication between McCain's and Graham's representatives, and that Wead and Jacobs had no authority to arrange a meeting (although Jacobs, who claimed he had brokered a meeting between Graham and Bush in 2000, told me he was "only trying to help" by making the offer through Graham's grandson Will). In the end, it turned out that McCain had not, in fact, ignored Graham completely; the McCain campaign had contacted the Grahams a few months ago, but no meeting was ever arranged.
Got that? There are possibly a few hundred people who really care about these flare-ups, but the it's the sort of thing that demonstrates just how precarious McCain's relationship with evangelicals is -- that he's repeatedly the target of charges that he's not showing them enough love, and his campaign has to spend time dealing with he said-she said over arranging a meeting instead of just having meetings.
3. Polling and Guessing About Where Will the Evangelical Vote Go.
Leading evangelical public relations executive Mark DeMoss told Beliefnet's Dan Gilgoff last week that he believed that Obama would secure forty percent of the evangelical vote -- a projection that seems more than a tad optimistic. (DeMoss was an early booster of Mitt Romney and a rather reluctant supporter of McCain.)
Optimistic though this projection might be, Obama's planned increase in evangelical outreach, particularly to younger evangelicals and an ideologically diverse group of leaders does signal that his ability to get some share of the evangelical vote should not be underestimated. George Barna, a prominent evangelical pollster, put out numbers this week that he claimed showed that the race "is Obama's to lose," but a Calvin College poll, also released this week, shows less enthusiastic support for Obama among evangelicals.
The Calvin College survey shows, in line with the anecdotal evidence I've reported here, that McCain's support among conservative evangelicals has slipped markedly from the 88% support they offered Bush in 2004 to 64% support for McCain today. However, most voters who supported Bush but do not support Obama are currently undecided.
"I think we won't see that much movement among traditionalists [conservative evangelicals]," said Robert Jones, a Visiting Fellow in Religion at The Third Way and author of the forthcoming book, Progressive and Religious. The "real wild card," said Jones, are centrist evangelicals, who make up nearly nine percent of the U.S. population and are supporting Obama at significantly higher rates than the traditionalists (39% to 14%). Jones says these centrist evangelicals could make a difference in states like Ohio, Arkansas, and Missouri.
4. Can McCain Court Evangelicals Through His Support for the War in Iraq?
The Calvin College survey made some notable findings that also suggested that conservative activists are exaggerating McCain's evangelical problem. Overall, evangelicals remain overwhelmingly Republican, and even though they are not supporting McCain at the same rate they were supporting Bush at the same point in the 2004 campaign, the shift is largely to the undecided column rather than Obama's, particularly among the traditionalists, who make up the base of the religious right. Of course small shifts in Obama's favor could make an electoral difference in closely contested states, but the myth of a massive defection of evangelicals away from the GOP is exaggerated.
Notably, evangelicals remain the biggest proponents of the Iraq war, with 57% agreeing with the statement that "the U.S. did the right thing in taking military action against Iraq," a much higher percentage than any other religious grouping, and the only religious group in which a majority expressed support for the war. Support for the war was at 64% among what the Calvin study termed "traditionalist" (or conservative) evangelicals -- comprising about half of all evangelicals. Between his support for overturning Roe v. Wade and his enthusiasm for the war, McCain seems to have two big evangelical issues working in his favor with the religious right base which is supposedly so discontented with him.
Ultimately, though, the better predictor of election outcomes, as opposed to national attitudes overall, is how enthusiastically religious right activists are organizing behind McCain in swing states where evangelical voters can tip the balance.
5. Leading Charismatic Evangelical Urges Attendance at CUFI Summit.
Stephen Strang, the president of Strang Communications, a leading Christian book and magazine publisher, and a regional director for Christians United for Israel, is urging his followers to attend the organization's summit next month to show their support for John Hagee in the wake of McCain's rejection of his endorsement. In his blog last week, and in an e-mail to supporters, Strang not so subtly reminded McCain that he was an early endorser of Mike Huckabee, and suggested that perhaps the damage McCain inflicted on his evangelical credibility with his poor treatment of Hagee and Rod Parsley could be mended by selecting Huckabee as his running mate.
Strang isn't well-known to non-evangelicals, but he is a major figure among charismatics -- his publishing empire includes their flagship magazine Charisma, which has a paid circulation of 215,000. Strang has long been on the list of evangelicals courted by both Bushes in their presidential bids, and his access to the charismatic world is probably rivaled only by top megachurch pastors and televangelists.
"John Hagee has done so much for Israel and the recent attacks are so unfair that I hope there is a huge outpouring of support for him," wrote Strang. "If you hadn't planned to go for any other reason than to show your support, I believe it would be a good thing -- as the Jews call it, a mitzvah -- to support Hagee by going to Washington."
Contact me at tapthefundamentalist AT gmail DOT com.
