Peter's blog

The Heritage Foundation, a behemoth of right-wing marketing muscle, wasted no time in pledging to stop the Obama administration from advancing progressive policies on health care, the environment, the courts. After eight years of backing the Bush administration, NOW they’re encouraging people to read the Constitution?

Click here to see more of Heritage's email.

As we’ve noted, the organizers of a massive stadium rally pushing the anti-gay initiative in California have snagged for the stage the biggest name in the Religious Right universe. No, not Sarah Palin, but James Dobson of Focus on the Family. One benefit might be to draw media attention from the event’s organizer, Lou Engle. He’s far less well-known than Dobson, and organizers might prefer to keep it that way.

Engle is an unabashed “dominionist” – someone who thinks the church, under the leadership of modern-day apostles like him, should rule over government and other institutions of society. He thinks of himself as a John the Baptist who badgers Christian teens to adopt a radical lifestyle of fasting and prayer that will bring God’s intercession against gays, liberal judges, and the like. And his style – screaming at the top of his lungs and rapidly rocking back and forth – is a sharp contrast with Dobson’s polished media-star demeanor.

A new report by People For the American Way Foundation documents some of his other charms, which include:

• praying for God to “terrorize” judges until they fall like stars from the sky>
• believing that the appearance of the goddess Minerva on California’s state seal is a sign of demonic domination over the state by the “Jezebel spirit”
• suggesting that marriage equality is Satanic and legal abortion spells America’s doom>

Though, given Prop. 8 leaders’ tendency to describe their campaign in apocalyptic terms, and the increasingly shrill and panicky proclamations of doom from the Right over the prospect of an Obama presidency, Dobson and Engle are likely to feel right at home in each other’s company.

The American Family Association’s One News Now is a “news” service in the same way that Fox is “fair and balanced.”  Remember, One News Now is the outfit that published stories about “Tyson Homosexual” because they were so opposed to using the word “gay.”  ONN’s “Daily News Briefs” have become a one-stop shop of wing-nuttery. Today it was also a victim of bad timing

Club for Growth, the radically anti-tax and anti-government organization, has often targeted Republican incumbents it deems insufficiently devoted to its free-market fundamentalism. But Politico points out that its endorsement may not be such a great thing for candidates these days.

It couldn't have been a nicer Saturday for Democrat Frank Kratovil, up on stage playing blues guitar for an oyster-slurping, beer-drinking crowd on the water in Queen Anne's County, Md.

 When he's done with his set, reporters from CQ, Politico and the New Republic are waiting to talk with the man who may be the next member of Congress from Maryland's 1st District.

This isn't what the Club for Growth had in mind.

Back in February, the conservative PAC helped knock off moderate Republican Rep. Wayne Gilchrest in the GOP primary here, in the hopes of installing a more conservative Republican in his place.

But it may not work out that way. With less than a month to go before Election Day, Kratovil is running neck and neck with the Club for Growth-backed GOP nominee, Maryland state Sen. Andy Harris, in a district that's about as red as they come.

And with voters worried about their retirement accounts and suddenly suspicious of the free-market economics espoused by the Club for Growth, Kratovil is using the Club for Growth's support of Harris as a way to bludgeon him.

 "We need to stop listening to those people, like my opponent and his million-dollar backers, the Club for Growth, who believe in no regulation," Kratovil says.

For Club for Growth-backed candidates across the country, this is sounding like a familiar story.

Politico reports that Rep. Tim Walberg, elected in 2006 after defeating moderate GOPer Joe Schwarz in a Club for Growth backed primary challenge, is now seeing the Club's backing used as a major line of attack from his opponent. And it's forcing the GOP to spend money to defend what were once considered safe seats:

Still, the club's investment in GOP efforts may end up costing the party more than it saves it, forcing the National Republican Congressional Committee to spend money in what might have been forget-about-'em races if more moderate Republicans were on the ballot.

It seems likely that Grover Norquist's expressed desire to shrink government to the size that he could "drown it in the bathtub" doesn't resonate too well with voters who see the financial meltdown draining their retirement plans as the result of a little too much "magic of the marketplace" and not enough oversight or regulation.

In addition . the group played a key role in funding conservative Rep. Steve Pearce in his New Mexico Senate primary victory against Rep. Heather Wilson. Wilson was viewed as the more electable Republican against Democrat Tom Udall; with Pearce as the nominee, the GOP has written off the seat.

Bishop Harry Jackson, the Religious Right’s most visible African American spokesman, who has recently been shilling for an Astroturf campaign accusing environmentalists of waging a “war against the poor” got back basics when he kicked off this year’s Values Voter summit with a breakfast touting his High Impact Leadership Coalition, pushing his books, and asking for financial support for his anti-gay road tour in Florida to push a constitutional ban on same-sex couples getting married.

But Jackson also had his eye on a bigger prize – “We’re in a time of crisis when the Christians have to determine the course of the nation.” This isn’t a new theme for Jackson. At previous events he has called for activists to bring about “the rule and reign of the Cross” to America. Jackson was introduced by one of his associate pastors, who had sounded the same theme, saying, “now is the moment in history when Black and White churches in America must come together to direct the affairs of our nation.” It’s clear that electing the McCain-Palin ticket is an important step – the warm-up speaker was the chair of African Americans for McCain in Illinois who was promoting a new magazine for Black conservatives that pitches a David Barton-esque view of the Republican Party as the champion of Black America.

Jackson has adopted McCain’s audacious claim to be an outsider seeking change even thought Republicans have controlled the White House for the past eight years. Jackson was so eager to distance himself from the people he helped put into power that he engaged in some overt Bush-bashing, chastising the president and Karl Rove for selling out Christians by not forcing passage of the anti-gay Federal Marriage Amendment.

Jackson claimed that the series of hurricanes and tropical storms, the bad economy, and the war in Iraq are all part of God’s plan to create such hard times in America that people will turn to the church. “God is setting the state for our voice to be heard once again,” he said. “If they’re not going to listen to us in good times, it may take bad times to set that platform.” While joking that he didn’t want to sound like Rev. Jeremiah Wright, he said Wright raised an interesting question – is America, or should America, be under God’s judgment? Jackson said that if Christians, who he said have been playing defense for too long, would go on the offense and count on God’s help to overcome the nation’s sins, there’s still time to avoid that wrath. (Unless, I guess, you’re in the path of one of those stage-setting hurricanes.)

Jackson also told of being confronted in a Boston Market by a gay activist who confronted him about his role on an anti-gay conference call in California, which People For the American Way Foundation documented. “We have spies that are working against us; even in this meeting there may be some spies.” Jackson urged attendees to join in the 40 days of prayer and fasting that evangelical Christians in California have planned seeking God’s help in passing Proposition 8, and suggested it could also balance the fasting and prayers that Muslims all over the world are doing during Ramadan – “there is spiritual warfare going on.”

A group of national Religious Right leaders used a press conference held in Washington the day before The Call – a “non-political” youth prayer rally on the mall – to talk about the event and to denounce Sen. Barack Obama and criticize Christians who are considering voting for him.

Lou Engle, the increasingly visible organizer of similar rallies around the country said the event was designed to mobilize young Christians around ending abortion. Immediately after saying the event was not political, and was not about endorsing a candidate, he launched into an attack on Sen. Obama’s pro-choice record and implicitly questioned the candidate’s faith, describing politicians “who say they’re Christian.” Engle, who is also actively backing anti-gay ballot initiatives on marriage, called pro-choice and pro-equality efforts “false justice movements.”

Bishop Harry Jackson, the most visible African American Religious Right spokesman, wasn’t coy about his political message for the day: if Sen. McCain chooses a pro-abortion vice president he will give the election to Obama. Jackson called it “tantamount to political suicide.” Jackson also returned to his standard denunciation of abortion as “black genocide” and “pandemic extermination.” Jackson said that America needs God’s favor, and that this year’s election – an important “expression of desire” for the people of God – will basically let God know whether we deserve it.

The Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins said that it’s right for evangelicals to offer solutions on issues like AIDS, fiscal policy, and racial reconciliation, but that doesn’t mean all issues are equal. He said young evangelicals are more fervently anti-abortion than their parents, and that waning evangelical support for the Republican Party was a reflection of how poorly the party functioned in power, not a sign of reduced commitment.

Asked about Sen. Obama’s outreach to evangelical voters, Jackson said he thought it was good to be considered a swing vote, and hoped that it could push both parties closer to evangelical concerns. Engle was less enthusiastic, denouncing Obama’s record on abortion issues in graphic terms and warning young evangelicals that if they compromised on abortion, history would stand in judgment of them the way it stands in judgment on churches’ silence on slavery.

Former presidential candidate and long-shot VP possibility Mike Huckabee said the purpose of the event was “not political at all.” Huckabee, like Engle, cited Martin Luther King, Jr. as a role model, saying it took “not a politician but a preacher” to remind the country of the evils of racism. During Q&A, Huckabee said he’d support McCain no matter who he chose as VP, but he thought a pro-choice running mate would hurt McCain by draining enthusiasm and intensity from his evangelical supporters.

When Pat Robertson endorsed Rudy Giuliani for president last month, many on the far Right were outraged. Randall Terry, a militant anti-abortion activist, was crushed that the religious-right icon would side with “Beelzebronx”:

Is Pat Robertson so terrified of Hillary that he will betray the Right to Life, Marriage, Self-defense, and The Church Herself as long as a fellow Republican snatches power? Rudy may wade through the blood of the innocent to reach the throne; he may be a stench in the nostrils of Angels – and the nostrils of devils for that matter – but at least Rudy is a stench that comes from the GOP stable – and he's not Hillary. Is this the conviction we expect from Christian Leaders?

Terry, known for his aggressive clinic protests in the 1980s and 1990s, issued a clarion call for pro-life activists to turn those tactics on the D.C. bureau of Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network. Here are a few highlights:

Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee recently took a shot at rival Mitt Romney for having changed his political positions:"I think people should judge Mitt Romney on his record. Is he consistent? Does he say and believe the things now that he said and believed before? That's what ought to be the criteria.”

When confronted over the weekend by his 1992 comments about people infected with HIV calling on the federal government to “take steps that would isolate the carriers of this plague,” Huckabee said, "The one thing I feel like is important to note is that you stick by what you said" and that while he might say things differently today, “I don’t run from it, don’t recant from it.”

That concern about consistency apparently didn’t extend to his much more recent position on federal government policy toward Cuba. In fact, it only took a couple of hours for him to reverse course when it looked like his previous position might cost him some votes, according to a Miami Herald story about the GOP candidate debate hosted by television network Univisión:

Although the candidates kept it polite on stage, Fred Thompson's campaign circulated press clippings from 2002 in which Huckabee called for an end to the trade embargo with Cuba. In a letter to President Bush, Huckabee wrote at the time: ``U.S. policy on Cuba has not accomplished its stated goal of toppling the Castro regime and instead has provided Castro with a convenient excuse for his own failed system of government.''

That stance is bound to rile many Cuban Americans in Miami-Dade, who believe that the embargo helps undermine Fidel Castro's repressive regime.

Huckabee is certain to face questions about the embargo at a Monday morning press conference in Miami, where he is expecting an endorsement from Florida House Speaker Marco Rubio, one of the most prominent Cuban-American Republicans in the state.

Caught off guard, Huckabee's campaign said two hours after the debate that he had since changed his position on the embargo after consulting with Cuban-American leaders. ''He's committed to vetoing any legislation that lifts sanctions on Cuba,'' said Huckabee spokeswoman Alice Stewart.

Mitt Romney’s speech on religious liberty and the role his faith would play in his presidency – the long-discussed “JFK speech” -- included some Kennedy-esque rhetoric about the fundamental importance of religious liberty, but it was a far cry from JFK’s ringing endorsement of church-state separation.

The timing of Romney’s speech, as former Arkansas governor and Baptist minister Mike Huckabee overtook Romney in Iowa polling, seemed to make it clear that Romney’s target audience was the conservative evangelicals who play a major role in Republican primaries. Many of those voters have told pollsters that they’re reluctant to vote for a Mormon, and they have little patience for arguments that church-state separation is good for religious liberty.

After months of dithering about whether to make a major speech about his Mormon faith, GOP presidential contender Mitt Romney is scheduled to address “Faith in America” at the George H. W. Bush presidential library Thursday night. John F. Kennedy’s famous speech (video | transcript) to protestant ministers in Houston is often cited as the precedent. But Romney’s no J.F.K. and this will have to be a much different speech.

Kennedy was the Democratic nominee pledging to Americans his support for “absolute” separation of church and state, promising that his Catholicism would not dictate his policy positions, and urging Americans to rise above religious intolerance and promote an ideal of brotherhood.

Romney is in a dramatically different situation. He’s in a heated primary race, losing conservative evangelical Christian voters to Mike Huckabee, and walking a tightrope. He can’t make JFK’s appeal to church-state separation, because he’s trying to get support from people who think church-state separation is, in Pat Robertson’s phrase, a “lie of the left.” Ditto for an appeal to religious tolerance, not a high priority for the “Christian nation” crowd.

So Romney’s more likely to try to convince Religious Right voters that they should care less about the theology of Mormonism and more about his pledge to support Religious Right policy priorities down the line: criminalization of abortion, opposition to equality for gay people, a dismantling of the wall separating church and state -- and judges who agree. That’s been enough to win the support of some high-profile Religious Right leaders, including Paul Weyrich, Lou Sheldon and Jay Sekulow.

But as Huckabee surges, Romney finds himself in a bit of a box, partly of his own making. Given the power of Religious Right voters in the GOP primary, and the de facto religious test many of them apply to the presidency, Romney has stressed the importance of electing a person of faith. But when he has tried to assure Religious Right voters that he is a follower of Christ, he has drawn stern warnings from people like the Southern Baptists’ Richard Land, because many evangelicals view Mormonism as a cult. According to Pew polls, more than a third of white evangelicals, and more than 4 in 10 of evangelicals who attend church weekly, say they’re less likely to vote for a candidate who is Mormon. Says Land, “When he goes around and says Jesus Christ is my Lord and savior, he ticks off at least half the evangelicals.”

Mike Huckabee, in many ways the dream candidate for Religious Right voters, isn’t trying to make things any easier for Romney. While deflecting opportunities to comment directly on whether or not Mormons are Christians, Huckabee has encouraged others to ask Romney. “If we’re going to ask me about my faith, let’s ask all the candidates about theirs,” he suggests. “Now as you noticed, I’m not hesitant or reluctant to talk about mine.”

Of course, the whole conversation tells us how far the Religious Right and its GOP allies are from the vision espoused by John F. Kennedy. In October, a prominent Dallas minister Robert Jeffress, speaking of Romney, said, “It’s a little hypocritical for the last eight years to be talking about how important it is for us to elect a Christian president and then turn around and endorse a non-Christian,” he said. “Christian conservatives are going to have to decide whether having a Christian president is really important or not.”

The Religious Right’s long public war on church-state separation and religious pluralism has been cheered on by Republican officials as long as it has been a weapon against Democratic candidates. But it’s not as much fun for them when the target is one of the GOP’s top contenders.

Randall Terry, founder of Operation Rescue and veteran of extremist anti-abortion protests and federal prison, had a new target this week – his old friend Pat Robertson. While many Religious Right figures slammed Robertson for his endorsement of Rudy Giuliani, Terry’s was in its own rhetorical league, blasting Robertson for having been “seduced” by Giuliani’s “hypocritical and seductive evil.”

So we looked for a high-energy event when Terry announced he would protest outside the Washington, D.C. bureau of Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network on Saturday. A Friday release announced a move from the originally planned protest at CBN headquarters in Virginia beach “because a number of young people and college students in the DC area wanted to participate.”

The Saturday gala honoring Focus on the Family founder James Dobson started with a hint at the controversy over the announcement of Mitt Romney as the straw poll’s winner. Only the overall results had been announced to attendees earlier in the day. It was at a subsequent news conference that FRC distributed documents making clear that Huckabee won by a large margin among people who voted in person, and in the hours since Huckabee partisans were grumbling. FRC’s Chuck Donovan promised that everyone would get a detailed vote accounting as they left the event.

When Dobson took the stage he claimed that the media had been telling everybody that the pro-family and pro-life movements are dying, and to the media still in attendance, said, “Welcome to the morgue.” Dobson also complained about media reports of a closed-door meeting of conservative religious leaders at which Dobson and more than 40 others pledged that if neither party nominated a pro-life candidate they would vote for a minor party candidate, kicking off weeks of controversy and infighting. Dobson said reports that the group would try to create a third party were wrong, saying he agrees with Gary Bauer that a third-party would be political suicide and would limit the ability to influence the GOP.

Immediately after Tony Perkins announced the result of the FRC Action straw poll, in which Mitt Romney edged Mike Huckabee by 30 votes out of 5,775 cast, Huckabee boosters cried foul – and reporters peppered Perkins with questions about the legitimacy of the poll.

Turns out that Huckabee won a majority of the votes cast in person at the Values Voter Summit, 51 percent, and Romney only took 10 percent. Some unknown number of votes were cast online by people who also attended. But other votes were cast anytime online between August and Saturday. That’s how Ron Paul showed up in third place with 865 votes even though he was picked by only 25 in-person voters.

Huckabee’s clear victory in the in-person vote wasn’t much of a surprise if you experienced the rapturous reception Huckabee received on Saturday morning. Huckabee’s speech was non-stop Religious Right prime red meat and he had people cheering and hollering throughout.

Former presidential candidate Gary Bauer ended the night with a combative speech, telling attendees that they were Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Hillary Clinton’s worst nightmare. He mocked the media for predicting the demise of the Religious Right. “I say to my reporter friends, we are only now beginning to fight. You haven’t seen anything yet.”

Bauer called terrorism “the central fact of our age," in what could be seen as an appeal for voters not to abandon Giuliani if he is the GOP nominee. He left people with a troubling image of Homeland Security vans driving around U.S. neighborhoods every night scanning for radiation to try to prevent the destruction of an American city by dirty bomb. But, he warned, “Unless the Lord watches over the city, the watchman stands guard in vain. Unless the United States rediscovers the God of Abraham…we are in trouble.”

Phyllis Schlafly, who has been fighting feminism and liberalism for decades, still appears on 460 radio stations daily. She said she is “still shopping” for a candidate and she made it clear it wouldn’t be easy to win her vote. She had a very long list of demands for any presidential candidate – not only prolife but willing to make a series of pledges (veto Freedom of choice act, veto stem cell research, ban cloning, keep GOP anti-choid plank); not just pro-traditional marriage, but promising to sign legislation banning judges from finding the Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional.

Among the many other topics to which she would demand purity from candidates: The rights of parents in public school to keep their kids from learning about homosexuality or Islam. Judges who will stand up against the organized campaign to banish God, the Ten Commandments, and the Pledge of Allegiance from public schools. Reject the kind of comprehensive immigration reform George W. Bush advocated – what she called the Bush-Kennedy amnesty. Back English as our official language.