“How Evangelical Leaders Blew It”
After fooling around with additions to, and comments about, John’s post below, I’m left with little time to post much. Instead, I’ll toss in this link to Ed Morrissey’s post today. The title says it all:
How Evangelical Leaders Blew It
When reading posts like Ed’s, I like to keep asking myself this question: How did we wind up in a situation where a candidate who consistently pulled no more than 35% of the Republican primary vote became the GOP nominee?
My answer: Because the conservative vote was split. Why was it split? There are several reasons, but the primary one, by the time Super Tuesday rolled around, was that a large enough chunk of the Evangelical vote flocked to Huckabee to deny Romney the votes he needed to beat McCain.
Much of what Ed says is addressed in our earlier post, but I like these ‘graphs:
The problem the Religious Right had in this primary was the hang-up over religion, which their movement had avoided for most of its period of influence. In the end, their leaders couldn’t see past religion to policy, and that left Romney twisting in the wind.
The evangelical leadership didn’t make that mistake with Ronald Reagan or George H. W. Bush. Neither man expressed any personal enthusiasm as evangelicals; Reagan had been divorced once on top of that. Yet the evangelicals supported them enthusiastically for their agendas, not for their particular churching.
Sigh. Not exactly a new point for our readers here, but one very much worth re-making and remembering.
And this:
Now Dobson wants to compound his error and that of his movement by petulantly sitting out the 2008 election. He’s free to do so, of course, but he’s losing credibility by the day. We’re not electing a Pope or a Minister-in-Chief. James Dobson and the evangelical movement used to understand that, and their failure to remember it makes them an unreliable coalition partner for Republicans.
That is the outcome John has been worrying about for months on this very blog. By overplaying their hand, Dobson and Co. may well end up as spectators to the game. That hurts everyone who cares about the issues the Evangelical bloc cares about.
John Chimes In: Could not agree more with the idea that Evangelicals have become “an unreliable coalition partner for Republicans.” And, as long as we fail to face facts, we are going to find ourselves on the outside looking in. Two things need to happen.
One, we have to decode our own code. This piece is a good example. The guy argues that Gilgoff, who wrote the article that underlies Morrisey’s comments, is wrong because he personally is not a bigot. He may not be, I have no reason to question his veracity, but he does appeal to the arguments that the Vanderbilt study showed were often code for “Mormon.” I remain convinced that for every person that cast an anti-Mormon vote, there was another that cast a “for like me” without ever putting thought to Mitt Romney’s personal religion. Evangelicals need to learn to rise above this kind of identity thinking.
Secondly, Evangelicals need some serious lessons on faith, politics, and what they are trying to accomplish. Rush Limbaugh commented yesterday that no one teaches conservatism any more and he noted that was something Reagan always did, every speech. He is right “conservatism” has been reduced to label without definition, or with a very amorphous definition, not unlike “Christian.”
This is hard work and it is grass roots level stuff. Not much glory, but lots of guts.
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2 Responses to ““How Evangelical Leaders Blew It””
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JLFuller on 19 Feb 2008 at 6:19 am #
A former bishop of mine advised once that it is better to be trusted than loved. If so, and I believe it is, then Dobson et al have compounded their plight. They wanted to preserve their image more than they wanted to be effective. It is the classic “I want to look good rather than do good” conundrum. Mankind has had to face this particular inner demon since God placed us here. Only this time, the sideline squatters have made it plain where their hearts really are. Despite their carefully crafted and maintained image of trustworthiness and loyalty we see them for what they really are. One of the LDS General authorities, I forget which one, suggests that what we have become is more important than what we have done. Lowell used the term priestcraft in another post when he described what Dobson had become. It can be fairly applied to others as well.
coltakashi on 19 Feb 2008 at 1:12 pm #
The purpose of political parties is to unite voters and candidates to political office in order to ensure that their common goals are implemented in government policy and law. A winning political party requires sufficient broadness in goals in order to collect a potential majority of voters, while not becoming so broad ideologically that no one’s goals are actually achieved.
Voters who decide to support a candidate who does not satisfy a broad coalition of goals within the party are undermining the ability of the party to win a majority, which is a prerequisite to achieving any other goal. To concentrate support on a candidate with narrow appeal is the same as running a third party in the general election. All you can achieve is to frustrate election of other candidates with other goals besides the narrow one you have chosen as your sole concern. Neither your own goal nor the goals of others in your party will be achieved, because you have not won a majority.
If the supporters of Mike Huckabee did so out of a narrow focus, without regard for the needs of other voters in the party, they can hardly expect that the other voters, whose goals were frustrated in this process, would be rallying to support their narrow candidate, who does NOT offer achievement of the other voters’ distinct goals.
Huckabee points out that John McCain has previously had problems getting broad support in the party, like Huckabee. The fact that Romney has endorsed McCain and other leaders in the party are coalescing in support changes this equation. But what if McCain continued only being supported by the third of Republicans closest to Democratic positions on issues? What if, instead of a strong Romney, there were just, besides Huckabee and McCain, a covey of favorite son candidates in each state who were collecting votes because other voters didn’t like either McCain or Huckabee? Could McCain’s supporters be criticized in the same way?
Possibly so. The difference could be on a policy like immigration, that has so much polarity among Republicans. A Republican Hispanic candidate who strongly opposed illegal immigration could make a run at a candidacy based mainly on that one issue because his own race would neutralize the normal criticism that those opposing illegal immigration are racist. So you could have factions based on factors other than religion. The real test would be, is the candidate leading a faction willing to ultimately unite the party, perhaps with some kind of deal on his issue of concern in return for his throwing support to the eventual nominee? Or is he going to insist on that one goal taking precedence over all others, so much so that he is willing to walk out of the convention and split the party? It would be a suicidal gesture, politically, because the splinter candidate would not achieve his own goal, and would undermine the achievement of all other party goals.
Huckabee has to decide if he is headed to a faction that would destroy all chances of a Republican presidency, or a reconciliation that will throw the votes of his supporters to candidates who don’t have the same priorities that he does. As long as he persists in his campaign, he appears to be making a threat to do a walkout. He appears to not appreciate that the strength of being supported by a large minority of Republican voters is in their being part of a potential majority of Republican voters. If they did not have that coalition, they could never hope to achieve any of their own special goals. To be a minority faction outside the context of a potential to forge a winning majority in the party and the world, is to be a powerless minority faction.