Beverly LaHaye

Despite the fact that Beverly LaHaye founded Concerned Women for America back in 1979 and is therefore an influential and powerful leader of the Religious Right, she doesn't seem to generate very much press, which is too bad since she is fond of saying things like "Christian values should dominate our government. The test of those values is the Bible. Politicians who do not use the Bible to guide their public and private lives do not belong in office."

But just because she doesn't generate much press doesn't mean she isn't a sought after speaker.  Yesterday she addressed "a crowd of at least 100 people Monday during a dinner at the Lubbock Memorial Civic Center" (at the Southern Baptist of Texas 2009 Annual Convention) where she shared her insights and urged those in attendance to "stand up against the wiles of the devil" and save America:

She called for the reintroduction of God into the day-to-day functions of American politics, where she said the framers originally intended him to be as they created the country more than 200 years ago.

The United States began tilting into moral decline in the 1970s, and faced further "crumbling" of families and social structures in the future without conservative Christian outcry, she said.

She repeatedly encouraged the audience to "stand up against the wiles of the devil" and join their Christian faith and with activism.

"It's time for Christian men and women to stand up for righteousness," LaHaye said.

It is hard to overstate the shockwave that John McCain sent through the GOP’s right-wing base with his comments earlier this week that he would not rule out the possibility of naming a pro-choice running mate (though not a pro-gay one, of course).

Right-wing leaders were quick to denounce the statement, with Tony Perkins telling the Washington Times yesterday that “if he picks a pro-choice running mate, I don't see how he can win this race."  And today, Phyllis Schlafly weighed in, calling it a “mistake,” and others obviously share that assessment:

"If Tom Ridge is on the ticket, I will not be voting Republican," Home School Legal Defense Association President Mike Farris said told The Washington Times. He thought for a moment, then added: "I won't be voting Democratic either."

The widely influential founder and chairman of the American Family Association Chairman, Donald P. Wildmon, said a Ridge pick would be a "disaster for Republicans."

Concerned Women for America Chairman Beverly LaHaye said "many will walk" away from the Republican ticket if it includes a pro-choice vice president.

Elsewhere, state-based right-wing leaders, many of whom have had personal meetings with McCain, are likewise making their displeasure known: 

“It absolutely floored me,” said Phil Burress, head of the Ohio-based Citizens for Community Values. “It would doom him in Ohio.”

Burress emailed about a dozen “pro-family leaders” he knows outside Ohio and forwarded it to three McCain aides tasked with Christian conservative outreach.

“That choice will end his bid for the presidency and spell defeat for other Republican candidates,” Burress wrote in the message.

He and other Ohio conservatives met privately with McCain in June, and while the nominee didn’t promise them an anti-abortion rights running mate, his staff said they could “almost guarantee” that would be the case, Burress recalled.

Now, Burress said, “he’s not even sure [Christian conservatives] would vote for him let alone work for him if he picked a pro-abortion running mate.”

James Muffett, head of Michigan’s Citizens for Traditional Values, met with McCain along with a handful of other Michigan-based social conservatives Wednesday night.

…

To select a running mate who supports abortion rights would be “wrong-headed, short-sighted, fracture the Republican Party and not allow us to capitalize on the Democratic Party’s fracture right now,” Muffett argued.

“If he does that, it makes our job 100 times harder. It would dampen enthusiasm at a time when evangelicals are looking for ways to gin up enthusiasm.”

McCain, Muffett said, got that message in their meeting.

“Some people in the movement say it would be the kiss of death. He heard that in the room last night.”

Predictably, Gary Bauer - one of McCain’s earliest right-wing supporters who seems to only show up when the candidate does something to anger Bauer’s right-wing allies - appeared on the scene to assure them that there was nothing to worry about:

Gary Bauer, founder of the Campaign for Working Families, said he isn't worried.

"I’m confident that at the end of the day, the running mate will be pro-life," he told Family News in Focus.

McCain has a solid pro-life voting record on abortion issues and has promised to appoint "strict constructionists" to the Supreme Court.

John McCain's courting of Religious Right leaders and activists started off badly, culminating in the Rod Parsley/John Hagee debacle back in May, but since then, the campaign seems to have regained its footing and subsequent lower-profile efforts have been startlingly effective:

As we noted a few weeks ago, McCain quietly met with a handful of right-wing leaders at which he was pressured to start talking more in public about the issues they care about and, as if to signal that he heard the message loud and clear, announced the next day that he supported the anti-gay California Marriage Amendment. From that point, things began to pick up and just last week, he secured the support of a bevy of right-wing activists like Mat Staver, Tim and Beverly LaHaye, Phyllis Schlafly, Rick Scarborough, and David Barton.

Just last week we were noting how the Right, even though not traditionally supportive of McCain, was working diligently to remind its supporters that the future of the Supreme Court is at stake in the next election. It seems that the McCain campaign has been playing up that angle in its outreach efforts as well:

Mr. Burress said he, Eagle Forum President Phyllis Schlafly, former interior secretary and Christian Coalition leader Donald P. Hodel, WallBuilders founder David Barton, Liberty Council counsel Mathew Staver and others have been moved to work for the election of Mr. McCain.

He cited mostly their trust in several McCain promises - to make judicial appointments that will resemble that of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Antonin Scalia, to "get serious" on abortion and same-sex marriage, and to push values issues in general.

It looks like this is a coordinated message that the McCain campaign and its surrogates are committed to spreading far and wide:

A pro-family activist and former presidential candidate says people of faith cannot afford to endure four years of Barack Obama in hopes that he will be defeated in 2012. Gary Bauer says it's all about the Supreme Court.

...

But Bauer, who is chairman of American Values, says the American public cannot afford to wait four years. "Today we're only one vote away from having a pro-life, pro-family majority in the Supreme Court," he observes. "If Barack Obama is elected, that opportunity will lost, I believe, for several decades."

CNSNews reports that Sen. Fred Thompson brought that message to the National Right to Life Committee's annual convention last week and that it was well-received:

The 2008 presidential election is "foremost about the United States Supreme Court," the president of the National Right to Life Committee said at the group's annual convention Thursday.

"It's not the economy, stupid," said Dr. Wanda Franz, referencing President Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign slogan. "No, for us, it's the Supreme Court."

...

"It is absolutely vital to have a court that is on the right side," said Gregg Trude, executive director of Montana Right to Life.

"We are very hopeful that the next Supreme Court vacancy is filled by someone who believes what the Constitution says and believes that it is the role of judges to interpret the law and not to make the law," Lauinger said.

So popular is the message, in fact, that McCain himself made sure to work it into his own remarks at the NRLC convention:

I will look for accomplished men and women, with a proven record of excellence in the law, and a proven commitment, to strictly interpreting the Constitution of the United States. I will look for people in the cast of John Roberts, Sam Alito, my friend the late William Rehnquist, jurists of the highest caliber who know their own minds, and know the law, and know the difference. I have been pro-life, my entire public career.

Last week, there was speculation swirling that John McCain was considering choosing one-time presidential rival Mike Huckabee as his vice-presidential running mate and over the weekend, Huckabee himself made it abundantly clear that he really, really wants this job:

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee said yesterday he’d like to be John McCain’s running mate.

“There’s no one I would rather be on a ticket with than John McCain,” said Huckabee, who was a stronger than expected challenger against McCain for the Republican presidential nomination.

“All during the campaign when I was his rival, not a running mate, there was no one who was more complimentary of him publicly and privately. . . . I still wanted to win, but if I couldn’t, John McCain was always the guy I would have supported and have now supported.”

The conventional wisdom is that picking Huckabee would go a long way toward helping McCain shore up the right-wing base that has been somewhat reluctant to support him, given that McCain’s own outreach to that community has little to show so far beyond the controversy generated by the endorsements of John Hagee and Rod Parsely.   

Considering that McCain’s own efforts to woo the Right have been such a disaster, it might behoove his campaign to think long and hard about bringing Huckabee on board because if he climbs aboard the Straight Talk Express, he’ll be bringing his own right-wing baggage along for the ride. 

By now, everyone is familiar with Huckabee’s 1992 statement that the government should have been quarantining those infected with HIV or his statement on the campaign trail that the US Constitution should be amended to meet “God's standards,” or his view that the role of government was to promote Jesus Christ,  so McCain ought to expect to be asked whether he agrees with those views.  He can probably also expect to get lots of grief from former supporters of Mitt Romney, who did not particularly appreciate Huckabee’s attempts to use his own Christian faith as a means of highlighting Romney’s Mormonism and thereby undermine his campaign efforts to reach out to right-wing voters.  

While the McCain camp might consider itself prepared to deal with these sorts of issues, it’ll have its work cut out when it tries to explain away the people who endorsed Huckabee … people like Janet Folger, for instance, who think that the marriage ruling in California is a sign of the End Times.   

Folger was an avid Huckabee supporter from the moment he won the Values Voter Debate which she organized and for which she hand-picked the choir that sang “Why Should God Bless America?,” after which she anointed him the "David among Jesse’s sons."  She went on to pen columns claiming that only Huckabee could prevent Hillary Clinton from throwing all Christians into prison and save her fantasy world from “evil queen and her dragon of slaughter.”  

For her efforts, she was tapped by Huckabee to serve as co-chair of his Faith and Values Coalition, so McCain can look forward to answering questions about whether he agree with her efforts to pray for bad weather to keep voter turnout down, her statements that supporting Barack Obama is like supporting Nazis, and the front-group she launched to attack both Mitt Romney and McCain himself.

And McCain can also look forward to answering questions about Rick Scarborough who, like Folger, served on Huckabee’s Faith and Family Values Coalition.  Scarborough, a self-described “Christocrat” heads Vision America and, when he’s not out palling around with Alan Keys, has a penchant for suggesting that evangelical leaders are dying off because the nation has turned its back on God, suggesting that Christians will have "the blood of martyrs on [their] hands"if they don't oppose hate crimes legislation, blaming "the church" for just standing by and allowing the election of "unrighteous leaders" in 2006, saying that opponents of the War in Iraq are committing treason, organizing conferences designed to highlight the “War on Christians and Values Voters,” and penning books entitled “Liberalism Kills Kids” among other things.

In fact, McCain and Huckabee would have a difficult time explaining away pretty much the entirely of Huckabee’s Faith and Family Values Coalition, which included dozens of right-wing activists like of Don Wildmon, Mike Farris, Mat Staver, Kelly Shackelford, and Phil Burress; not to mention Huckabee’s consorting with the likes of Tim and Beverly LaHaye and Steve Hotze, who once signed a manifesto declaring:

    • A wife may work outside the home only with her husband's consent

    • "Biblical spanking" that results in "temporary or superficial bruises or welts" should not be considered a crime

    • No doctor shall provide medical service on the Sabbath

    • All disease and disability is caused by the sin of Adam and Eve

    • Medical problems are frequently caused by personal sin

And let’s not forget Huckabee’s first job working with James Robison:

Considering that the McCain campaign chalks up the Hagee and Parsley controversy to poor vetting, presumably they intend to do a better job in the future; but if they pick Huckabee, it’ll be obvious that they haven’t learned their lesson at all.  While they may think that Huckabee’s primary contribution to the McCain effort will be his ability to bring along a rabid following of extreme right-wing supporters, allowing McCain to focus on courting the general electorate, it is possible that they will instead end up spending a lot of time trying to distance themselves from controversy such blatant pandering will inevitably generate.