Now that John McCain has made the only conceivable move he could in renouncing, rejecting, and otherwise repudiating the endorsements of John Hagee and Rod Parsley, the question remains: is Hagee suddenly toxic to all the other Republicans (and Democrats) who have cozied up to him for so many years?
As Paul points out, McCain is trying to distinguish between his seeking Hagee and Parsley's stamp of approval and Barack Obama's relationship with his personal pastor. McCain would like us to believe that he watched Hagee's Christians United for Israel and decided that this evangelical who "loved" the Jews so much (perhaps to death) would be a worthwhile political ally, but he did not realize that he could have any skeletons in his closet. (Imagine! A televangelist with skeletons in his closet!) He did not, McCain is saying, sit and listen to him for 20 years. In fact, he would have us believe, he didn't even listen to him at all, not when Hagee took to the airwaves in early 2006 with his book Jerusalem Countdown and fear- and rumor-mongered about impending nuclear war; not when he stood up in Jerry Falwell's church last year and predicted the Dome of the Rock would be swallowed in a great earthquake that God would use to awaken the "spiritually hard of hearing," among other things; not when he compared secular humanism to Nazism and feminism to witchcraft; not when he tells his followers every week to tithe to him before they pay the rent lest they steal God's money and live under God's curse, not when he was . . . well, being himself for about the past 35 years.
Hagee did not drop from the sky for McCain. The Republican Party has long been cozy with him, from George W. Bush, who got Hagee's endorsement in 2000 (in the form of a book called God's Candidate for America; he's subtle, isn't he?), to Texas Senators John Cornyn and Kay Bailey Hutchison, Sam Brownback, and others. Joe Lieberman is a strong ally who recently said that CUFI "changes the mood" when it visits Capitol Hill. (Lieberman's office has not yet responded to a couple of requests for comment on the recent Hagee revelations.)
An attempt at damage control is underway; a spokesperson for Hagee tells me this morning that he may well issue some kind of statement today. With Hagee's longstanding alliances with Jewish groups, both at the local and national level, he has no choice but to say something about his God-brought-Hitler-to-drive-the-Jews-to-the-promised land statements. Yesterday's statement, of course, blamed everything on political enemies with an anti-McCain agenda. But he's got to go further than that, as a spokesperson for Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, who called on Hagee to explain himself, put it, "if the statement was taken out of context, we'd like to see the context. If it was made in honesty and truth, he needs to explain why he made it. But it's difficult to grasp why he would make such an analogy."
But what will all these other politicians do or say in response? What will Bill Kristol, slated to speak at the CUFI summit in July, say? McCain might have washed his hands of Hagee (and Parsley) -- although he'll still pander to their followers. But will a lot of other people, who've been closer to Hagee over the years than McCain was, say anything?
--Sarah Posner
