FRCAction

In its most recent “Washington Update,” the Family Research Council appears to be trying to call out John McCain on the fact that his website just isn’t religious enough:

A quick tour through the candidates' official websites may do more to predict who our next president will be than months of polling data. On one nominee's site, visitors can select from featured articles called, "When Faith Is Front and Center," "Reconciling Faith and Politics," and "Strengthening Families." In another section, they can scroll through the priority issues of "ethics," "faith," and "family" and read excerpts from speeches, watch video clips, and peruse editorials devoted entirely to this senator's religious conviction. If you attributed that content to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), guess again. The site belongs to Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), whose party is vying for the "values void" created by the GOP's near-silence on its core issues. Unlike Obama's site, McCain's homepage is dedicated to "energy security," "global competitiveness," and "Iraq." Nowhere is faith or family referenced. With the exception of a blurb on human dignity, found on the bottom half of his issues menu, McCain's commitment to and record on social values are glaringly absent … Is it any wonder then that the gap of support between McCain and Obama is shrinking in the religious community? As of Friday, McCain was leading by only five percent among those who said that religion is an important aspect of their everyday life. The GOP's silence on marriage, particularly at this critical juncture in California, is deafening.

Oddly, if you actually bother to compare the two candidate’s websites, they don’t seem nearly as different as FRC makes them out to be.

Obama does have a “Faith” page consisting mostly of a link to a speech he delivered to Call to Renewal's Building a Covenant for a New America Conference in 2006 and a link to a document entitled “Barack's Faith Principles. Other articles FRC cites look to be run-of-the-mill campaign issues - concerns about the issues such as “Ethics” and “Family” certainly are not unique to the so-called “Values Voters” FRC claims to represent and the "When Faith Is Front and Center” article they cite is basically a link to an op-ed by Obama supporter Douglas Kmiec.  

It’s not clear why FRC is so high on Obama’s website relative to McCain’s. FRC praises Obama for having a “Family” page even though it contains proposals for a bunch of things FRC loathes, such as providing a living wage and universal healthcare. On McCain’s site, what FRC dismisses as a “blurb” is actually a long “values” page dedicated to Human Dignity and the Sanctity of Life which is chalk full of the issues FRC and its ilk care about and even starts off by pledging to overturn Roe v. Wade which, for groups like FRC, has long been its top political priority:

John McCain believes Roe v. Wade is a flawed decision that must be overturned, and as president he will nominate judges who understand that courts should not be in the business of legislating from the bench.

The page goes on to set out McCain’s views on the importance of protecting marriage, protecting children from internet pornography, and restricting stem-cell research. It concludes with a declaration that “decency, human compassion, self-sacrifice and the defense of innocent life are at the core of John McCain's value system and will be the guiding principles of a McCain Presidency."

McCain’s website also contains articles such as “John McCain: Keeping Faith, On His Own Terms” as well as others about his efforts to reach out to the GOP’s conservative Christian base and even the text of his remarks to FRC’s own Values Voter Summit.

FRC’s one-sided review of the websites seems to be an exercise in pressuring McCain into publicly discussing his faith more openly. As FRC’s Tony Perkins explained back in February:

“[McCain] must make social conservatives feel that he, No. 1, understands their issues; No. 2, believes in their issues; and No. 3, will advance them as president.”

Apparently, the only way McCain can do that, despite all the pandering he has already done, is to spend a lot more time talking about religion in a manner that FRC deems acceptable.

Former state legislator Woody Jenkins won the Republican nomination Saturday for the special election to replace Louisiana Rep. Richard Baker, who retired this year to become a lobbyist. During Jenkins’s unsuccessful U.S. Senate campaigns in 1978, 1980, and 1996, he received his strongest support from far-right groups such as the Christian Coalition, Americans for Life League, and the Christian Action Network, and this run is no different: He’s received endorsements from James Dobson, Paul Weyrich, Tim LaHaye, and Family Research Council Action, as well as the Club for Growth’s PAC.

While it’s unusual to see FRC Action making an outright endorsement of a candidate, it should be no surprise, as FRC President Tony Perkins managed Jenkins’s 1996 Senate campaign. Many will recall that Perkins gained some notoriety for his role in buying Ku Klux Klansman David Duke’s phone bank list for Jenkins’s campaign and attempting to cover up the payment.

But what’s not commonly known is that Jenkins helped found the Council for National Policy in 1981, serving as its first executive director. “One day before the end of this century, the Council will be so influential that no president, regardless of party or philosophy, will be able to ignore us or our concerns or shut us out of the highest levels of government,” claimed Jenkins. For the past year, at least, Republican candidates for president have been hard pressed to ignore the secretive Religious Right gathering’s finicky vetting of candidates and its brief threat to ditch the GOP entirely. Even after he won, John McCain felt he had to go back before the council and plead for their grudging support.

What can voters expect from Jenkins? The Weekly Standard wrote in 1996 that he was “best known for leading the 1990 fight to pass what would have been the nation’s most restrictive abortion law and for occasionally bringing a plastic fetus onto the floor of the legislature.”

The Swamp notes that Rudy Giuliani and Mike Huckabee have suddenly started saying nice things about one another, with Giuliani saying that Huckabee makes him laugh and that he has “great respect for him” while Huckabee appeared to defend Giuliani’s anti-abortion claims.    

It is not surprising that Giuliani would be making nice with Huckabee, considering that Huckabee is a becoming increasingly popular with the right-wing base Giuliani so desperately needs to win over, having come out on top at the Values Voter Debate in Florida, which Giuliani blatantly snubbed, and having “won” the straw poll at the Values Voter Summit, where Giuliani came in second to last.  Perhaps Giuliani is recognizing that, in the words of Rich Lowry, Huckabee could be a “natural fit” as his vice presidential candidate should he win the GOP nomination. 

But it is odd that Huckabee would return the favor, considering that elsewhere he is criticizing Sam Brownback for even thinking of supporting Giuliani:

During a lunch with reporters on Tuesday in which a confident Huckabee insisted he can win the GOP nomination and general election, the former governor said that he reached out to Brownback the day the senator withdrew from the race and that he wants Brownback’s support.

“It makes perfect sense. It’s a good fit for a lot of Sen. Brownback’s supporters,” Huckabee said. “I would be shocked if he endorsed Mayor Giuliani.”

Huckabee said he would be surprised because on the issues Brownback was so “adamant” about during his failed presidential run, namely abortion rights, Brownback and Giuliani are “at opposite ends of the political spectrum.”

Huckabee also refused to say definitively that he would support whoever the eventually GOP nominee is, calling that a hypothetical question. He did say he would have trouble supporting the candidacy of Rep. Ron Paul (Texas) in the unlikely event the insurgent candidate won the nomination.

Huckabee is clearly feeling confident about his chances in light of his increased fundraising and rise in the polls - so much so that he is amping up his criticism of those right-wing leaders who have so far refused to back him:  

Huckabee continued to dismiss the criticisms of social conservative leaders like Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council and Gary Bauer of American Values. The conservative leaders have said in recent weeks that Huckabee lacks the foreign policy credentials to win their support or that of the American people.

“They would never have gotten behind Ronald Reagan,” Huckabee said, adding that some past presidents like Reagan who were originally thought to be novices on foreign policy emerged as heroes in that arena because they had “character and clear convictions.”

This is not the first time Huckabee has gone after the Religious Right’s political leaders over this, but this is a pretty hard hitting criticism … after all, saying they wouldn’t have supported Reagan is the political equivalent of calling them Pharisees.   

Cloistered away in a not-so-secret meeting during the Council for National Policy conference in Utah last month, a who’s who of right-wing leaders, led by Focus on the Family’s James Dobson, emerged to issue a not-so-subtle message to the Republican Party:  if frontrunner Rudy Giuliani gets the nomination, we’re gone.  The threat alone was enough to prompt Giuliani to rethink his plans and suddenly decide to appear at this weekend’s “Values Voter Summit,” convened by Dobson’s allies at the Family Research Council.

With just over a year to go before the next presidential election, the Republican Party faithful are in some disarray, with wails of discontent over the field of primary contenders deemed insufficiently committed to advancing the “social conservative” agenda, or insufficiently willing to talk about their faith, or insufficiently likely to make it through the primaries.  While the campaigns of Fred Thompson, Mitt Romney, and Mike Huckabee have managed to pick off a few leaders and activists here and there, the only thing keeping the Right even somewhat unified at this point is Rudy Giuliani’s lack of anti-gay, anti-choice credentials and the threat of what his candidacy would mean for their influence within the party.  

The resolution drafted in Salt Lake City says that if “the Republican Party nominates a pro-abortion candidate we will consider running a third-party candidate” – but who exactly is “the Republican Party”?  It’s not as if RNC strategists pick the nominee.  That’s up to the voters who participate in GOP primaries and caucuses.

So in essence, the Right is not so much threatening “the Republican Party” as it is Republican Party voters and trying to blackmail them by saying that if they think Giuliani, as his campaign likes to point out, is “the only Republican candidate that can beat” Hillary Clinton, they had better think again -- because he can’t do that if anywhere from a quarter to a half of their activists refuse to vote for him.     

It took awhile, but every one of the four leading Republican presidential hopefuls who skipped the “Values Voter Debate” in Florida have now agreed to attend the upcoming “Values Voter Summit” in Washington, DC being sponsored by the Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, American Values, and others. 

In early September, Mitt Romney agreed to attend and, a short while later, so did John McCain.   Fred Thompson held off – at least until a message from James Dobson blasting him as unacceptable to the Religious Right made its way into the press, and then the Thompson campaign suddenly got the message and quickly agreed to attend as well.  

Still, a few weeks went by with Rudy Giuliani being the only candidate refusing to attend – until again Dobson and his right-wing allies lashed out, announcing that they would consider abandoning the Republican Party if Giuliani gets the nomination, with Dobson taking to the pages of the New York Times to explain that “If neither of the two major political parties nominates an individual who pledges himself or herself to the sanctity of human life, we will join others in voting for a minor-party candidate.”

And guess what happened? 

Giuliani has now announced that he too will be attending the FRC/FOF event. 

It is quite a testament to the influence of James Dobson that despite having publicly savaged McCain, Giuliani, and Thompson, these candidates are tripping over themselves to attend an event that is scheduled to culminate with a “Family, Faith and Freedom Gala Dinner Honoring Dr. James Dobson.”   

Several months ago we noted that Richard Land was trying to position himself as a key player within the Religious Right hierarchy and had been publicly challenging James Dobson on a variety of fronts, including immigration, global warming and, most importantly, the candidacy of Fred Thompson.

From the get-go, Land has been a vocal advocate of Thompson, issuing fawning praise of him at every opportunity – so it must have come as a rude surprise when, last week, Dobson weighed in and declared Thompson unacceptable:

In a private e-mail obtained Wednesday by The Associated Press, Dobson accuses the former Tennessee senator and actor of being weak on the campaign trail and wrong on issues dear to social conservatives.

"Isn't Thompson the candidate who is opposed to a Constitutional amendment to protect marriage, believes there should be 50 different definitions of marriage in the U.S., favors McCain-Feingold, won't talk at all about what he believes, and can't speak his way out of a paper bag on the campaign trail?" Dobson wrote. "He has no passion, no zeal and no apparent 'want to.' And yet he is apparently the Great Hope that burns in the breasts of many conservative Christians? Well, not for me, my brothers. Not for me!"

Obviously, this didn’t sit well with Land, so it is not surprising that he has decided to strike back, reaching out to CBN’s David Brody to defend Thompson and blast Dobson:

“I’ve received phone calls and emails from Southern Baptists about Senator Thompson. They are all furious at Doctor Dobson. They just feel that first of all there was a mischaracterizing of his positions. Do I wish that he supported the marriage protection amendment? Of course I do.  To say that he is for 50 different views of marriage in 50 different states is a gross mischaracterization of his position. Secondly, do I wish that he attended church every Sunday? As a Baptist pastor, of course I do. But does that make him a person of unbelief? That’s harsh and unwarranted.”

Land defends Thompson’s opposition to a marriage amendment by claiming that Thompson is simply so principled that he will not jettison his staunch “federalist” convictions for political gain, before winding it up by proclaiming that Thompson is “one of us”: 

“Fred Thompson grew up in a very modest means in a small town in America just like Ronald Reagan grew up in very modest means in a small town in Illinois. You acquire not only an understanding of but a respect for everyday folk when you come from the background that you don’t get otherwise and people sense it. That this is a guy who respects me, a guy who understands that we are the backbone of this country, we are the salt of the Earth and he not only understands us, he’s one of us. He’s a successful one of us but he’s one of us and they trust a guy like that. They give a guy like that a larger margin of error. Nobody gets everything right but its core values. My assessment is that this guy is a whole much like Reagan including his Teflon quality. The press has been beating up with him for these types of gaffes and he continues to climb in the polls.”

It is exceedingly rare that anyone on the Right dares to criticize Dobson, much less do so publicly.  In fact, the last people to do so ended up getting booted out of the movement.  

This sort of high-profile fight cannot be helping the Right as it struggles to figure out how to maintain its influence going into the 2008 election.  But at least it ought to make the upcoming Values Voter Summit all the more interesting, since both Land and Dobson are going to be there.  

As we’ve chronicled several times over the last few weeks, the “Values Voter Presidential Debate” is scheduled for September 17 in Florida.  Featuring a variety of right-wing leaders, the event is designed to give Republican presidential candidates an opportunity to directly address the concerns of, and answer questions from, figures like Phyllis Schlafly, Don Wildmon, Paul Weyrich, Roy Moore, Janet Folger, and Rick Scarborough.

Unfortunately for the organizers of the event, not one of the four top GOP candidates is willing to be seen with them:

The festivities, however, look likely to go off without a marquee name. Queried yesterday by The New York Sun, the McCain campaign cited a scheduling conflict. "We are not attending," a spokeswoman for Mr. McCain, Brooke Buchanan, replied by e-mail. "It's the last day of the No Surrender tour — we will be in South Carolina."

Likewise, the Romney campaign's Florida spokeswoman, Gail Gitcho, told the Sun that the former Massachusetts governor had "declined due to a scheduling conflict."

Mr. Thompson's press office also is citing "another event on his calendar that day."

The Giuliani camp didn't even bother with the scheduling-conflict ruse, providing the Sun with the text of a letter the former mayor's campaign manager, Michael DuHaime, sent to the debate's organizers on Friday. "Thank you for your kind invitation for Mayor Giuliani to attend a presidential debate hosted by Values Voters," Mr. DuHaime wrote. "Unfortunately Mayor Giuliani will be unable to accept your invitation."

Undoubtedly, that snub is not sitting well with them – and it is probably only being made worse by this:

Today FRC Action announced that GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney will speak in a prime-time slot at the Washington Briefing 2007: Values Voter Summit on Friday evening, October 19.

So Romney is willing to show up at a “values voters” event hosted by the Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, American Values and others that features the likes of Tony Perkins, James Dobson, Gary Bauer, Robert Knight, and Richard Land but won’t have anything to do with the other Values Voter folks?  

It seems as if Romney is willing to accept an invitation to speak to right-wing leaders and activists but is unwilling to actually take questions from them.  While FRC and FOF tend to be considered more “reputable” right-wing groups than the Eagle Forum or Vision America, there is, in actuality, no substantive difference between the views, rhetoric, or mission of these groups.  In fact, several of the participants in the Values Voter Debate are also participating in FRC’s Values Voter Summit, including Star Parker, Bobby Schindler, and Phyllis Schlafly.

So why is it that Romney is willing to pander to the Right at the Values Voter Summit, but is unwilling to actually answer questions from them at the Values Voter Debate? 

Could it be because, while they want their support, they hope to achieve it in a way that allows them to avoid publicly pandering to them by answering questions such as “Do you believe the Ten Commandments should be posted on public property?" or “Do you believe that homosexuality is a sin?”

Wayne Slater, writing in The Dallas Morning News, says that while Rudy Giuliani might not be much liked by the Republican Party’s social conservative, right-wing base, he might not be totally unacceptable either, especially if they are faced with the prospect of Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee:

As the most powerful movement in American politics for several decades, conservative Christians insisted that above all else, their candidates adhere to their positions on social issues, particularly abortion and gay marriage. But as their movement changes, many are placing the fight against Islamic extremism at the top of the list as well.

For the last several years, the “fight against Islamic extremism” has never been a key issue for the Right.  While it has been an issue they’ve mentioned occasionally, its importance has always paled in comparison to their primary goals of fighting for restrictions on abortion, passing a federal marriage amendment, and controlling the federal judiciary.  As a matter of fact, the issue of terrorism was nowhere to be seen on last year’s Congressional scorecard [PDF] put together by the Family Research Council and Focus on the Family, which claimed to be a “compilation of significant votes representing a cross section of issues affecting the family.”

So what could explain this relatively sudden rise in the importance of national security issues and terrorism for the Right?

The Family Research Council was not overly-impressed with the President’s latest State of the Union address, complaining that President Bush “failed to challenge the new majority to advance core family and cultural issues”:

[T]he President failed to challenge the new majority to advance core family and cultural issues, issues that many in the new majority campaigned on last year. These same issues will motivate pro-family Americans to rally around an administration that needs support.

"With two years left in the Bush Presidency, the stakes for families couldn't be higher. What will become of the culture of life, the defense of marriage, and permanent family-friendly tax policies?

Mr. President, fight for the American family and American families will stand with you!"

The FRC was so unimpressed with the President’s speech that FRC’s Tony Perkins released his own video response in which he warned that “today we have the most anti-family leadership in Congress that Washington has seen in over a decade,” saying the “stakes for the American family could not be higher”:

It seems as if FRC is sticking with its delusion that Republicans merely need to dedicate themselves to advancing the right-wing agenda in order to win the support of the American people.  

And if FRC is going to keep making this argument, then we’ll just have to keep reminding them of the uncomfortable truth: