1. Religious Right Power Brokers Endorse Ken Blackwell for RNC Chair
Some of the leading figures in the Christian right, including honchos James Dobson and Tony Perkins, joined hands through the Council for National Policy's political advocacy arm, CNP Action, to endorse former Ohio secretary of state and failed 2006 gubernatorial candidate Ken Blackwell to chair the Republican National Committee.
Other endorsers include Stuart Epperson, a contributor to Blackwell's 2006 campaign and chair of Salem Communications Corporation, the Christian radio network on which Blackwell has been a political commentator; Phyllis Schlafly, the anti-feminist icon who just this week blamed the increased number of young evangelicals voting Democratic in 2008 on public education and Bill Ayers; Tim LaHaye, whose Left Behind series has sold nearly twice as many copies as Rick Warren's Purpose-Driven Life; and Colin Hanna, a rising star out of Pennsylvania whose organization, Let Freedom Ring, is aimed at persuading moderate voters that religious-right positions are not so extreme after all.
Schlafly, who played a key role in swaying Republican leaders away from backing Mike Huckabee's 2008 presidential candidacy, is seen as wielding significant influence over RNC members who will vote on the new chair at the end of the month. Huckabee's former campaign manager, Chip Saltsman, who mailed committee members a CD of the Rush Limbaugh musical favorite, "Barack the Magic Negro," is also contending for RNC chair. Other candidates include Mike Duncan, the current chair; Michael Steele, the former lieutenant governor of Maryland and current chair of GOPAC, the Republican Party's political-action committee; and state-level party chairs Katon Dawson of South Carolina, who recently resigned his membership from a segregated country club, and Saul Anuzis of Michigan.
The candidates participated in a dull debate Monday at the National Press Club, sponsored by Americans for Tax Reform and moderated by its president, Grover Norquist. The event was short on questions about religious-right topics -- only in a lightning round were the participants asked if they were pro-life -- and heavy on questions about rebuilding the grass roots, using social networking, and expanding beyond the party's base of white voters. Blackwell, who is black, called for a "shareholder revolt" against the "corporate model" of the RNC, which he charged "has outlived its usefulness ... we have to build coalitions, and we have to do this by flattening the RNC and pushing responsibility outside of the Beltway ... the RNC must no longer be a social club but a flagship organization in this country."
All that anti-Beltway, grass-roots-revolution talk sounded downright Huckabee-esque. A bit ironic, perhaps, as Huckabee has chosen to work from outside the RNC to build his own political action committee, with a national volunteer team that has a presence in every county in America.
2. Blackwell's Religious-Right Ties
With his many connections to religious-right organizations, if Blackwell is chosen as RNC chair he'll have a built-in network of activists ready to get to work. As a fellow at the Family Research Council, he would undoubtedly draw on that organization's state affiliates and their activist bases, along with those of Dobson's organization. That infrastructure would be helpful to Blackwell should he win the chairmanship, but his leadership of the party could further fracture it. When he ran for governor, Blackwell was abandoned by prominent Ohio Republicans who denounced him as "intentionally divisive" and out of the mainstream of the Republican Party. "This regular recital of having God supporting us and somehow what we do, what the Republicans do that offends a lot of people is nevertheless countenanced by God, I think that's a hard pill to swallow," Columbus lawyer Charles "Rocky" Saxbe, who hails from an influential Ohio Republican family, told me in 2006, after he endorsed Ohio's Democratic governor, Ted Strickland.
As the Republican Party struggles to rebrand itself, it's clear that the religious-right leadership is counting on its worker-bee activists at the state and local levels to continue to train and push its favored candidates into leadership positions. While religious-right heavies like Perkins won't have the same sway in official Washington as they did during the Bush era, now is the time to watch what they're doing at the local level. As the Los Angeles Times reported last year, conservative religious activists like Keith Butler, a megachurch pastor and an executive board member of John Hagee's Christians United for Israel, are winning seats as RNC members and will vote on its next chair.
3. Has Obama "Defanged" The Religious Right?
At his new blog at U.S. News and World Report, Dan Gilgoff, who covered the 2008 presidential campaign with the gimmicky "God-o-Meter" blog at Beliefnet, is off the races touting Obama's religious outreach as indicative of the rise of a new religious left and a "defanging" of the religious right.
But, as Obama's selection of Rick Warren to give the inaugural invocation shows, Obama's strenuous religious outreach does not necessarily "defang" the religious right; it acknowledges and legitimates its insinuation into our political and civic discourse. Tom Sheridan, a lobbyist for progressive causes including LGBT rights who has worked with Warren on the ONE Campaign, said, "Obama handed Warren an enormous bully pulpit that can be used for an anti-civil-rights agenda. The consequence of that belongs to Obama. It's not a gesture of coalition politics; it's much deeper than that. He has, essentially, created the next Billy Graham."
The Rev. Welton Gaddy, president of the Interfaith Alliance and an advocate for the separation of church and state, added, "if the new president allows himself to be tagged as a new kind of evangelical, I don't think he is served well by that. I would want him to be known as a president who appreciates religion, but his office is to lead the nation, not to be a new religious leader, or even to pick a new religious leader."
4. Chicken Little on Focus on the Family Radio
Focus on the Family's first radio broadcast of the new year -- a rehash of Dobson's pre-election vision of an apocalyptic Obama presidency -- featured the Family Research Council's Perkins, and American Values and Christians United for Israel's Gary Bauer, imploring listeners to, in Bauer's words, "resist" the allegedly liberal incursions of the new Obama administration. "We cannot go to sleep," added Perkins, as the pair rattled off a litany of anticipated Obama transgressions, from the Freedom of Choice Act (which is unlikely to be introduced) to the specious arguments about federally protected LGBT rights infringing on the free-speech rights of pastors, to the reinstitution of the Fairness Doctrine, also not a likely Democratic legislative aim.
Although the more socially moderate wing of the evangelical movement claims ascendancy and influence over the Obama administration, it represents a much smaller number of evangelicals than the conservative wing represented by Perkins. Michael Lindsay, professor of sociology at Rice University and an expert on evangelical elites, tells me that the National Association of Evangelicals will likely be steered in a more conservative direction after ousting Richard Cizik, its chief lobbyist who admitted voting for Obama. "I would bet on a politically engaged conservative" to replace Cizik. "I've often thought someone like Tony Perkins might be asked to serve. The board will definitely opt for someone who will not have any possibility of leaning left," Lindsay says. Contact me at tapthefundamentalist at gmail dot com.
