Posts on Richard Viguerie

Sarah Posner sends a dispatch from inside the most recent Council for National Policy gathering, the secretive right-wing umbrella group that vowed to bolt the GOP if Rudy Giuliani was the nominee and whose members wept tears of joy when John McCain tapped Sarah Palin as his running mate:

While the CNP was trying to look to the future last week, it seemed hopelessly enamored of its aging leaders. When I arrived to meet Warren Smith, the conservative evangelical activist and journalist who had invited me to chat, we ambled past anti-evolutionist Ken Ham, who was holding court to a small but rapt audience in the hallway; eyed Left Behind author and CNP co-founder Tim LaHaye, who was shuffling in and out of the "CNP Networking Room;" caught a glimpse of Rick Santorum, who since being booted out of his Senate seat has led the charge against "radical Islam" from his perch at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center; and spotted the religious right's anti-feminism doyenne Phyllis Schlafly, 84, who had earlier that day delivered a speech to the CNP Youth Council on how to "find your place in the conservative movement."

…

Although the CNP's meetings are closed to the press, Smith filled me in on some details: Conservative direct-mail entrepreneur Richard Viguerie, a patriarch of the modern conservative movement, rallied the troops by pointing to prior comebacks, from Reagan to Gingrich to Bush. Viguerie, Smith told me, "is saying that we need to fight for conservative ideas and conservative values and not worry about who embraces them." Smith added that the group talked "about changing the culture, entertainment, media, TV" -- a longtime goal of the religious right's dominionism that it seeks to achieve by taking over social, cultural, and government institutions, much like religious-right figures are now plotting their new takeover of the Republican National Committee.

"What I'm hearing is that there is no loyalty to the Republican Party," said Smith, meaning no loyalty to the party as constituted but loyalty to one purged of insufficiently conservative members. "What Richard Viguerie talks about is not a third party but a third wave. Basically there needs to be a flowering of grass-roots conservative activism and local groups, local PACs. He's basically saying you've got a Republican county commissioner in Buzzard's Breath, Texas, and he's not a conservative? Run a conservative against him."

…

[A]ctivist and radio host Janet Porter, an early Huckabee backer in the 2008 campaign, told me she favored either Palin or Huckabee in 2012. Porter is straight out of the wing of the movement that is all frothing ideology, and no stone-cold strategy. That explains her ongoing fixation with the long-debunked lie that Barack Obama does not have a U.S. birth certificate, and her attempt to stop the electoral college from voting next month in the formality that will officially make him president.

Porter insists that Obama has not produced a U.S. birth certificate (he has) and that he was actually born in Kenya (he was born in Hawaii). She claims to be awaiting the results of the lawsuits filed by attorney Philip J. Berg, whose effort to halt the presidential election because of the alleged question of Obama's U.S. citizenship was rebuffed by the United States Supreme Court.

When I asked Porter about the mood around the CNP meeting, she said, "My mood is more upbeat than those who don't actually know these cases are being filed and that there's actually still a chance to maintain the freedom that we have. We're not going away. Win or lose, whether this goes through, whether it amounts to anything, we just believe that [for] something this important we need the answers. And we're going to fight for freedom, and we're going to use whatever freedom we have until it's taken away with the efforts of hate crimes, ENDA, fairness doctrine, wiping out all the pro-life legislation. Everything's on the line."

My skepticism showed, I suspect. "I think this might be a little more newsworthy than you think," she insisted and handed me a flyer about her effort that read: "Not extreme. Not fringe. Just Constitutional."

As Tony Perkins explained to James Dobson’s audience earlier this week, the Religious Right is thrilled with John McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate not only because Palin is everything they have been praying for, but because it demonstrates, for once, that McCain “can listen.” 

And not only will McCain “listen” to the Right, he will respond accordingly to their screams and threats – at least that is how Richard Viguerie sees it:

Conservatives who refused to fall in line behind the Republican Party--who maintained their independence, at the price of being ridiculed as "cranky" or "impossible to please"--are the ones responsible for John McCain's brilliant, game-changing selection of Sarah Palin, Richard A. Viguerie said.

"Those who backed John McCain as the 'lesser of two evils' did no favors to themselves, their movement, or to Senator McCain," said Viguerie, chairman of ConservativeHQ.com. "He needed to know what conservatives really thought, and he needed to know what had to be done to get conservatives enthusiastically on board his campaign.

"As we know now, what he had to do was pick Sarah Palin," he said.

…

[Credit goes to] conservatives, especially religious conservatives, who "went nuclear" in their criticism in the past couple of weeks before the announcement upon hearing that the pick might be Joe Lieberman, Tom Ridge, or someone nearly as disastrous for the McCain campaign and the Republican Party. ("Those of us who spoke up strongly were roundly criticized by some conservatives," Viguerie noted.) It was our firestorm that stopped that catastrophe from coming to pass.

"Across this country, conservatives and Republicans at every level let John McCain know what he needed to do to get them fired up and excited and ready to go door-to-door and make phone calls and do all the things that have to be done. They told him, and he listened, and his selection of Sarah Palin has completely turned his campaign around … [T]hose conservatives who held to their principles are the men and women 'in the arena' who can claim their own share of John McCain and Sarah Palin's triumph last night."

So that is why Religious Right leaders - who, until last week, were nearly unanimously unenthusiastic about McCain - are now full-throated supporters:  because they stared him down and won and now know that he can be bullied and intimidated into doing their bidding.  

Quite a maverick.

In less than a week, one-term Alaska Governor Sarah Palin has gone from a complete unknown to savior of the Republican Party.  From the moment she was announced as John McCain's vice presidential pick, the Right has been gushing nonstop, heaping praise upon her, and proclaiming her the answer to all of their prayers.

And so it doesn't really come as much of a surprise that, after days of non-stop Palin hagiography, the Right is starting to run out of ways to express its adulation and that all that was left was to pay her the greatest compliment they know by christening her "the next Ronald Reagan":

"A week ago, conservatives and most Republicans were down-in-the-dumps, listless, unengaged. That lack of enthusiasm is a thing of the past. Tonight, thanks to Senator McCain and Governor Palin, conservatives and Republicans are fired up as they have not been since Ronald Reagan was president," he said.

"Sarah Palin is the next Ronald Reagan," Viguerie, the Chairman of ConservativeHQ.com, said.

"In less than a week, Governor Sarah has captured the heart and soul of this convention, the Republican Party, and the conservative movement. She brings together social conservatives, and economic conservatives and libertarians, and people who are fed up with the Culture of Corruption that infests our nation's politics," he said.

"From this moment forward, there's no limit on where Sarah Palin might go," Viguerie concluded.

This is especially remarkable considering that Viguerie has, in recent years, been not only a militant critic of John McCain but the GOP in general - just a few months ago he was demanding the wholesale resignation of the Republican Party's leadership for destroying the GOP's reputation and having "failed - or outright betrayed - the conservative voters who put them in their positions."

How prevelant is this idea becoming?  Even Michael Reagan is making it:

I've been trying to convince my fellow conservatives that they have been wasting their time in a fruitless quest for a new Ronald Reagan to emerge and lead our party and our nation. I insisted that we'd never see his like again because he was one of a kind.

I was wrong!

Wednesday night I watched the Republican National Convention on television and there, before my very eyes, I saw my Dad reborn; only this time he's a she.

One of the standard defenses John McCain’s surrogates deliver when the topic of his faith comes up is that while he is “deeply faithful,” he is also “a very private man”  who doesn’t like to discuss it in public – something that has been a source of great consternation to the Religious Right.

But McCain has been trying to appease them by working it into his addresses to right-wing conferences, but he hasn’t been particularly successful:

McCain, an Episcopalian who attends a Baptist church in Phoenix, turned to a well-worn tale of the guard he met when he was a prisoner of war in North Vietnam. The man once loosened the ropes binding McCain, and later shared his Christian faith with McCain by silently sketching a cross in the prison yard with his sandal.

The story played well in an ad before the New Hampshire primary, but it was deeply disappointing to many at the New Orleans gathering, conservative activist Richard Viguerie recalled.

“He blew that question off by telling us about the faith of his jailer,” said Viguerie. “It was very obvious to those three or four hundred conservative leaders there… . The vast, vast majority of them were either sitting on the sidelines or unenthusiastic about his impending nomination and he didn’t move a single person.”

Presumably, Viguerie and others on the Right won’t be particularly impressed with McCain’ new essay in Time magazine in which he again recounts this story:

My father would have been surprised to know what unlikely forms God's mercy could take. In prison, my captors would tie my arms behind my back and then loop the rope around my neck and ankles so that my head was pulled down between my knees. I was often left like that throughout the night. One night a guard came into my cell. He put his finger to his lips signaling for me to be quiet and then loosened my ropes to relieve my pain. The next morning, when his shift ended, the guard returned and retightened the ropes, never saying a word to me.

And its unlikely they’ll be any more moved by the recent email sent out by his campaign’s Americans of Faith team obtained by The Brody File which consists of excerpts from his book “Faith of My Fathers” and, once again, includes the same account:  

After one difficult interrogation, I was left in the interrogation room for the night, tied in ropes. A gun guard, whom I had noticed before but had never spoken to, was working the night shift, 10:00 p.m. to 4 a.m. A short time after the interrogators had left me to ponder my bad attitude for the evening, this guard entered the room and silently, without looking at or smiling at me, loosened the ropes, and then he left me alone. A few minutes before his shift ended, he returned and tightened up the ropes... One Christmas, a few months after the gun guard had inexplicably come to my assistance during my long night in the interrogation room, I was standing in the dirt courtyard when I saw him approach me. He walked up and stood silently next to me. Again, he didn't smile or look at me. He just stared at the ground in front of us. After a few moments had passed he rather nonchalantly used his sandaled foot to draw a cross in the dirt. We both stood wordlessly looking at the cross until, after a minute or two, he rubbed it out and walked away. I saw my good Samaritan often after the Christmas when we venerated the cross together. But he never said a word to me nor gave the slightest signal that he acknowledged my humanity. (Pages 227-228)

It is obvious that McCain is aware that the Religious Right expects him to openly discuss his personal faith on the campaign trail and it is equally obvious that he is reluctant to do so.  Yet he continues to try to win them over, primarily by recounting this one episode in particular – an episode which is obviously significant to him – even though it is abundantly clear that, to the Right, this tale of compassion and kindness woefully fails to meet the faith commitments they demand from their candidates.

Richard Viguerie is not happy about the current state of the GOP: "The Republican Party must have new leadership, or conservatives will continue to withhold support, and the Party will crash in flames in November ... Accordingly, Republican Party leaders must resign. Leaders in the White House, the Congress, and the Republican National Committee and its affiliates, along with most Republican leaders at the state level, have failed – or outright betrayed – the conservative voters who put them in their positions. The result is that the Republican Party's brand has become a negative to an extent greater than in the Watergate era, perhaps even worse than in the days of Herbert Hoover."

As he was listing off his right-wing promises to the audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference, John McCain said he would continue to “seek the counsel of my fellow conservatives.” For Human Events editor Jed Babbin, that isn’t enough: “This is vintage McCain. He promises to hear, not to listen. He promises to seek counsel, but not to respect it. … That is less than we require of our leaders. We require them to adhere to our basic principles, and that those principles be the basis for their decisions.”

Take heart, Mr. Babbin: McCain has all but secured the Republican nomination, and yet he is still reaching out to the fringe:

The Brody File has been talking to some influential social conservative leaders around the country and they tell me that they've been talking to John McCain for months. As a matter of fact, one leader told me John McCain called him after Super Tuesday this week. While details of the phone call remain secret, I can tell you that McCain was reaching out to this particular leader and emphasizing the common ground he has with social conservatives on the life issue, judges and defeating Islamic fascists.

Another social conservative leader told me McCain called him to discuss specifics on social conservative causes. I'm told McCain wanted to be more up to speed on the issues that are important to social conservatives. This leader told me that McCain hasn't been focused on their issues before so he's trying to become more aware of all the details.

Still, we can expect right-wing leaders to keep leveling demands at their presumptive candidate, following the principle that the squeaky wheel gets the grease. McCain needs them, they say: "He cannot rely on some Democrats and a lot of independents to become president of the United States," Tom DeLay said. "He's got to have a base, and hopefully he will understand that."

 “To get the enthusiastic support of conservatives – support he must have, to win – Senator McCain must make his case with deeds, not just words," said Richard Viguerie. Ralph Reed, no friend of McCain’s, put it this way:

"This is fired-up Democratic Party, and it is not enough to simply define the differences between the parties," said Reed, who advised McCain to "choose a running mate with street cred on the right" and devote his nominating convention and fall campaign to "striking conservative themes."

What kind of “conservative themes”? How about judges: While McCain has already bent over backwards to the Right on Supreme Court nominations, with a cooing letter to the Federalist Society this week and his promise at CPAC to appoint judges like Roberts and Alito—Quin Hillyer of Confirm Them wants even more:

McCain pledged to appoint judges like Roberts and Alito. Great. I am a fan of both. But I am even more of a fan of Scalia, and even more than that a fan of Clarence Thomas. I would have been happier if McCain, speaking to this conservative audience, had forthrightly said he would appoint judges like Clarence Thomas.

Of course, McCain voted in favor of confirming Thomas. (He wasn’t in the Senate yet for Scalia’s confirmation. However, he was among a minority of senators to vote for Robert Bork the following year.) But, as he will find out, the Right’s appetite for pandering can be bottomless.

As the Conservative Political Action Conference convenes today in Washington, the Right Wing is in a rut, divided over the Republican presidential candidates. CPAC is always a time when the “conservative movement” pays homage to Ronald Reagan, who spoke at the event 12 times since 1974; last year, candidates fell over themselves to see who could invoke Reagan’s name the most, even as graying activists warned of a decline in adherence to Reaganology.

The focus this year will be on John McCain, who managed to defy a number of talk radio hosts and emerge the frontrunner in last night’s elections. McCain had to pull out from last year’s CPAC in the face of a hostile reception, but he’s spent the interim brown-nosing the far right, and it’s no surprise that this time he’s planning to drum up late support by emphasizing his right-wing credentials and channeling the Reagan spirit: Human Events editor Jed Babbin reports that “McCain has prepared a video featuring President Ronald Reagan to make the introduction.”

Babbin warns that this would “backfire”:

Very few of the 2008 CPAC crowd will see McCain as the successor to Reagan and Reagan’s principles.  McCain has sacrificed conservatives’ fundamental beliefs throughout his Senate career.  If McCain uses this introduction, the boos will be very loud.

McCain faces a real quandary.  If he fails at CPAC -- and doesn’t win the CPAC straw poll (he finished dead last in 2007) -- the word will be out that the conservatives are off his team this year. 

But at this point, given the likelihood that McCain will win the Republican nomination, it’s the CPAC crowd that faces the quandary: If they pan him again, but GOP voters select him anyway, then what kind of influence do these activists really have?

“My assessment is that at this moment in time it is Fred Thompson's race to lose,” said Richard Land, Southern Baptist Convention political leader, back in July. “It may be a convergence of the right man, in the right place and at the right time. I have never seen anything like this grassroots swell for Thompson.”

Needless to say, the swelling went down—after a disappointing “last stand” in the South Carolina primary, Thompson put an end to his presidential campaign. Thompson joined the race late, but in spite of that fact that he was going after the same voters as all the other Republican candidates, he started off with strong polling, thanks to the gushing support from Land, Tony Perkins, Gary Bauer, and other high-profile figures. Given Thompson’s lackluster campaign—in which the candidate developed a reputation for laziness and boring speeches—it seems likely that his run was propped up more by these big-name supporters than by the grassroots.

We haven’t heard from Land yet, but Bauer had some strong words for his former boss, James Dobson—who came out early against Thompson, even saying he “doesn’t think [Thompson’s] a Christian”—and others who failed to recognize the hidden beauty of the senator-turned-actor:

Gary Bauer says Thompson was the victim of identity politics during his White House bid. … "He was a good candidate with a great record on the life issue and on other issues we care about," says Bauer, "and I'm saddened that some leaders of our movement attacked him and treated him as if he were the enemy when he is much, much better than most of the candidates who have a chance of getting the nomination." …

"I ran into a lot of Christians out there as I traveled around the country who were for Mike Huckabee, first and foremost, because they saw him as an evangelical like them -- and I understand the appeal to that because I am an evangelical Christian," says the conservative leader. "But I kept reminding people, 'So is Jimmy Carter. Bill Clinton sang in the choir in his church in Arkansas.'"

He adds "it's nice to know that somebody shares our values, [but] it's not enough that that be the justification to support them."

Given Thompson’s extra-special treatment from some well-established religious-right leaders, Bauer’s complaint that the establishment blackballed Thompson rings a little hollow—especially in as much as it echoes that of Mike Huckabee and his supporters, who say leaders like Bauer have been unfairly dismissing him as a real candidate. (“‘Richard Land swoons for Fred Thompson,’’ Huckabee said last month. ‘‘I don’t know what that’s about. For reasons I don’t fully understand, some of these Washington-based people forget why they are there.’’)

But at least one old-guard movement figure is happy to see Thompson out: “Thompson snoozed through the campaign the same way he snoozed through his Senate career. … He did little and left even less of a mark,” crowed Richard Viguerie, who never liked Thompson.