Posts on Campaign for Working Families

In this CQ article about how much members of Congress raised for their respective PAC in August is this odd little nugget:

With little time left before the Nov. 4 election, lawmakers whose PACs had the largest amounts of cash on hand include Alabama Republican Sen. Richard C. Shelby with more than $2.3 million; Gary Bauer, a social conservative activist who bid for the 2000 Republican presidential nomination, with $1.6 million; and House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer , a Maryland Democrat, with $1.4 million.

When the Family Research Council announced its own PAC a little over a week ago, they budgeted $250,000 - and they are among the biggest, most influential right-wing groups in the nation.  So how has Bauer, who heads the relatively unknown American Values and hasn't run for office in eight years, managed to pull in more than five times that amount for his PAC? 

Discussing Alexandra Pelosi’s recent documentary “Friends of God,” veteran religious-right activist and Republican campaigner Gary Bauer identifies the crux of his disagreement in Pelosi’s suggestion that, beyond the wedge issues of abortion and gay rights, liberals and conservative Christians may find they have common ground. According to Bauer, “evangelicals will never be able to ‘move past’ abortion”:

Pelosi's answer exemplifies a belief gaining popularity in the mainstream media: that if evangelicals would only look beyond "wedge issues" like abortion and same-sex marriage, some common ground might be found.

This view suggests that these are merely a few among a laundry list of important public policy questions. But, for the vast majority of evangelicals, the right to life and the definition of marriage are fundamentally and inescapably moral theological issues. Take the right to life, whose importance is rooted in the Christian belief that all human beings are made in the image and likeness of God. The centrality of the human person to the Christian worldview helps evangelicals think about and prioritize every political issue that arises, with those policies and laws that pose the gravest threat to human life placed at the top of the agenda. It also helps explain why evangelicals will never be able to "move past" abortion, as Pelosi and many others on the Left hope. The same can be said for issues relating to marriage, family and, of course, the role of religion in public life.

But while these issues keep activists like Bauer in business, they are not the issues that Evangelicals use to determine how they vote. According to the Center for American Values in Public Life’s American Values Survey, just 19 percent of Evangelicals chose abortion and same-sex marriage as the kinds of issues “most important in the United States today.” In contrast, 77 percent cited poverty and affordable health care.

Fully half of the twenty GOP incumbents who lost their seats in the House on Tuesday received either a 100% ranking from the joint Family Research Council Action/Focus on the Family Action voter guide or the endorsement of Gary Bauer’s Campaign for Working Families – and five of the losers received both.

At the same time, five of the six GOP senators who lost their re-election bids received both a 100% ranking form FRC/FOF and a CWF endorsement (the exception being Rhode Island Senator Lincoln Chafee.)

But fresh off the thumpin’ the Republicans took in last week’s election, right-wing leaders such as James Dobson, Tony Perkins, and Gary Bauer are frantically trying to spin the results to claim that the loss can be attributed to the fact that the GOP abandoned its base and inevitably suffered the consequences.

As Focus on the Family’s James Dobson complained

They consistently ignored the constituency that put them in power until it was late in the game and then frantically tried to catch up at the last minute. In 2004, conservative voters handed them a 10-seat majority in the Senate and a 29-seat edge in the House. And what did they do with their power? Very little that Values Voters care about.

Writing in the National Review, the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins made a similar point

In the end, voters had grown tired of a party whose lapses in judgment were overshadowed only by its lapse of belief in core values. When conservatives realized that Republicans had abandoned their ideology, they ultimately abandoned the GOP.

The idea seems to be to convince themselves and the rest of the country that Republicans lost 28 seats in the House and 6 in the Senate because they were insufficiently committed to the Right’s agenda.

Unfortunately for Bauer, Dobson and Perkins, their own voter guide (PDF) and list of endorsements suggests otherwise.

Gary Bauer, Brent Bozell, and CWA cite anti-gay marriage amendments. Rod Parsley, FRC, and Focus on the Family also applaud amendments.

Former presidential candidate and FRC head goes to web sites, asserts left “consumed by its hatred of all things conservative and religious.”