Richard Land

• Former McCain adviser Meg Whitman plans to run for Governor in California, while Joe Scarborough suggests he might be interested in running for the Senate from Florida.
• Elaine Donnelly says that if "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" is repealed, President Obama "will bear full responsibility for consequences that would devastate the volunteer force."
• Norm Coleman says God wants him to be in the US Senate.
• Phyllis Schlafly and Kay Bailey Hutchison are both scheduled to speak at the Denton County [Texas] Republican Party's annual Lincoln-Reagan dinner.
• You know what America needs now? A conservative answer to Doonesbury published by Richard Viguerie.
• Grover Norquist is angry that some Governors did not declare last Friday "Ronald Reagan Day" and is accusing them of putting "pusillanimous petty partisanship above patriotism."
• Finally, Richard Land responds to reports that President Obama will issue an executive order reversing President Bush's ban on federal funds for stem cell research, likening it to cannibalism:

Reduced to its basics, killing the tiniest human beings in their embryonic stage of development for the possible medical benefits of older and more developed human beings is quite simply high-tech cannibalism in which we devour our own young for the sole purpose of treating other human beings who are merely fortunate enough to be older and able to defend themselves in a way the tiniest human beings are not.

Neil Macdonald of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has a piece up on CBCNews about the Rick Warren controversy that contains an interesting nugget, not about Warren, but Richard Land:

Warren has compared gay marriage to legitimizing incest, child abuse and polygamy.

Some of his colleagues go further. Richard Land, a high official at the Southern Baptist Convention, the evangelical stream with which Saddleback Church is associated, told me once during an interview that he thinks gay sex should be illegal.

It seems that Richard Land is not just some Religious Right leader and pundit, he's also something of a renaissance man with expertise in a wide variety of area - such as predicting the course of history where, in the future, George W. Bush will be hailed as one of our greatest president:

A prominent Southern Baptist leader has compared George W. Bush to Harry Truman, another president whose approval ratings dropped to the 20s in his final months in office but is now considered one of the greatest American presidents of the 20th century.

"Just remember that you heard it here from me," Richard Land, head of the Southern Baptist Convention Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, said Dec. 6 on his weekly radio program. "He will be the Harry Truman of our time."

Commenting on reports of a debate about whether Bush would go down as one of the worst presidents in the last 50 years, Land predicted that, like Truman's, Bush's legacy will be vindicated by the long scope of history.

That includes the president's least popular decision, the 2003 invasion of Iraq. While acknowledging the entry into war was handled poorly, Land said, the 2007 troop surge has placed the U.S.-led coalition on the cusp of victory of Iraq.

In addition to making America safer, Land applauded Bush for blunting "the metastasizing of abortion" by opposing late-term abortions and research using embryonic stem cells.

But Land isn't stopping there and is likewise demonstrating a heretofore unknown scientific expertise as he explains that climate change is a total hoax:

Richard Land, head of the SBC Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, called global warming a "hoax" and a "scam" on his weekly radio program Nov. 22.

Land attributed fluctuations in global temperature to "cycles of nature that God has allowed in the cosmos" and labeled human activity "a minor contribution to global warming."

"The sunspots have faded, the solar cycle has peaked, the sun is going into a quiescent period and everybody but [former Vice President and anti-global warming activist] Al Gore is cooling off," Land said.

Of course, it is not as if Land has a particularly good track record of making predictions regarding the issues he actually does know something about, as displayed by his repeated proclamations just over a year ago that Fred Thompson was a "Southern-fried Reagan” and that "to see Fred work a crowd must be what it was like to watch Rembrandt paint,” so it is probably best to take his current declarations with a grain or two of salt.

Politico notes that even though Sarah Palin tops polls of Republican voters’ preferred pick for the party’s nominee in 2012, her support comes mainly from hard-core right-wing conservatives while her approval rating among moderates and centrists has plummeted.

What makes the article interesting is this statement from Richard Land, who was one of Palin’s earliest backers touting her candidacy way back in early August and constantly gushing about her during the campaign, suddenly suggesting that the Right doesn’t “have all their hopes and dreams vested” in her future:

The GOP intra-party debate over Palin has become a proxy for the larger question of her party's future, and conservative chieftains like Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission President Richard Land fear that attacks on Palin are at times veiled swipes at the party base.

"It would be a mistake to say that social conservatives have all their hopes and dreams vested in Sarah Palin," Land said, but he added Palin "does have the one thing you can't coach, charisma," and continues to have "star power" with conservatives.

Now Land has a long history of trying to portray himself as more of a pundit than a Religious Right hack and setting himself up as perhaps a more sensible alternative to the likes of James Dobson.  In that capacity, he often serves as a moderately reliable bellwether of the Right’s views on political issues, such as his early adoration of Fred Thompson which then quickly evaporated when it was clear that his campaign was going nowhere or his lukewarm support of John McCain’s candidacy that was kicked into overdrive by his choice of Palin as his running mate.

So it is interesting to see Land start backing away ever-so-slowly from the idea that Palin represents the future of the Religious Right movement in American politics, presumably out of concern that Palin’s future itself might be rather limited, as Ed Rollins points out:

Ed Rollins, who ran presidential bids for Republicans including Ronald Reagan and Huckabee, argued that "independents are something she can focus on later."

In the end, though, Rollins expects that Palin "will be very similar to [Dan] Quayle."

"When he started to run, [Quayle] got nowhere," Rollins said. "The potential is there [for Palin] but out of 10 weeks she had two good weeks." For the 2012 race, "she's now not starting at the top but starting at the bottom," he said, adding that Palin would have to campaign for years in Iowa and New Hampshire to mount a viable campaign.

I had been working on this post throughout the day, but before I actually got around to writing it I found that David Waters of the Post's "On Faith" blog had already pretty much written it, so I figure I'll just link to that and highlight this bit:

Officials at James Dobson's Focus on the Family seem to agree. They chose to focus on the success of Tuesday's anti-gay marriage ballot initiatives in Arizona, California and Florida. "A tremendous night for the cause of righteousness," senior vice president Tom Minnery said on Focus's CitizenLink webcast.

Southern Baptist leader Richard Land told Christianity Today that "Evangelicals did their part. The exit polling is showing that there's no drop-off among evangelicals. The 2006 elections showed us that evangelicals can't win elections by themselves. If indeed the three marriage initiatives win, it will show that the values voters were not the ones who lost this election. If evangelicals are sad about the election, I'm going to say, 'Do you have faith in God? Is your faith in God or in government?'"

That is the title of this good piece by NPR's Barbara Bradley Hagerty on how John McCain managed to go from reviled enemy of the Religious Right to panderer extraordinaire in just eight years.

Hagerty recounts who McCain openly attacked the Right with his "agents of intolerance" remark back in 2000 and how despite Gary Bauer's efforts to help him adjust the tone and direction of the attack, there was no confusion on the part of Religious Right leaders regarding what he meant: 

"It was very hurtful," recalls Richard Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. "When you attack two of their leaders — and those two people were much more important leaders in 2000 than they are today – well, it damaged McCain with a lot of the grassroots."

And then McCain only compounded the problem this year when he sought the support of John Hagee and Rod Parsley only to reject them when he was forced to answer for their views, something that Richard Land points out only went to show how clueless McCain is about the GOP's right-wing base:

Land says the controversy showed how little McCain knew the constituency he was trying to woo. "Both of these guys hold positions which anyone who knows evangelical life well would know would be problematic for someone running for national office," Land says. "I think McCain and his advisers just didn't know the lay of the land."

The interesting thing about this, which Land doesn't mention, is the fact the Right was not mad at McCain for seeking the support of Hagee and Parsley because they held crazy views unrepresentative of the movement, but because he refused to defend them and their views when they came under attack and ultimately dropped them alltogether. 

But then McCain finally got his act together, started courting them, saying the things they wanted to hear, and finally gave them the VP nominee they had been dreaming of:

In May, McCain began to court the evangelical leaders he had once disdained, with the help of Bauer, his friend and religious insider. All summer, McCain met privately with leaders and stressed his credentials that he is strongly pro-life, anti-same-sex marriage, a religious conservative by record if not by countenance.

Then he threw the first of two punches.

On Aug. 16, McCain and his Democratic rival Sen. Barack Obama agreed to be questioned, separately, by Rick Warren, pastor of Saddleback Church in Southern California. During the televised forum, McCain served up short, definitive answers, just as this evangelical audience wanted it.

...

Bauer was sitting in the front row.

"Even before the event was over during little breaks for TV," he recalls, "people were patting me on the shoulder, saying, 'Oh my gosh, Gary, he's so much better than I thought he would be. This is wonderful!'"

Two weeks later, McCain delivered his knock-out punch to Obama's hopes for winning traditional evangelicals when he announced Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate.

At that moment, some 250 evangelical leaders were meeting in Minneapolis. Land, who was there, says they jumped to their feet and cheered.

"The first appointment in a supposed McCain admin is who he picked for vice president," Land says. "And he picked someone who is a rock star among pro-lifers, Catholic and Protestant. There's not a pro-life activist in the country who didn't know exactly who Sarah Palin was before John McCain ever picked her as his vice president."

And that is how John McCain shed his pariah status among Evangelicals - by completely caving to their demands. 

For some reason during this election cycle, we seem to be seeing at lot of Religious Right leaders taking clear stances in favor of Republican candiates yet insisting that they are not "endorsing" anyone. 

It started back during the primary, when Richard Land could barely contain his excitement over Fred Thompson's campaign and was among his most vocal supporters but whenever the issue came up, Land insisted that he didn't endrose candidates. 

James Dobson did the same thing when he announced that, with John McCain's decision to name Sarah Palin as his running mate, he would now "pull the lever for John McCain." Yet, simultaneously, Dobson was also insisting that he was "not endorsing John McCain ... I just don’t endorse presidential candidates and I don’t see myself doing that this time." Apparently announcing on a national radio program heard by millions of people that he will vote for McCain is somehow different than "endorsing" him.  

And now we have Jerry Falwell Jr. pulling the same rhetorical trick.  After refusing to allow those attending a Barack Obama rally in Lynchburg to use a parking lot owned by Liberty University citing tax restrictions, Falwell turned around a few weeks later and hosted an McCain campaing event on campus. On top of that, he recently unveiled a massive voter registration drive in an effort to help deliver the state of Virginia for McCain in November with hopes that Liberty will "go down in history as the college that elected a president."

And yet here he is pretending that he is not actively backing McCain:

The Rev. Jonathan Falwell said he will concentrate on preaching the Gospel at Thomas Road Baptist Church, where his father once left no doubt about his support for Republican candidates. Jerry Falwell gained national attention for backing politicians, starting with Ronald Reagan.

“I don’t intend to endorse anyone,” Jonathan Falwell said. “I don’t think it’s my role to be telling anyone who to vote for.”

It is even more unbelievable considering that, in the same article, The News & Advance reports this:

In a video posted in early August by France 24, an international news and current affairs television channel, Falwell indicated a preference for John McCain a month before the Republican National Convention.

“He is a person I can get behind and support and look at and see where he can really do some good things for our country,” Falwell said of McCain, “and so while he may not be the 100 percent perfect person, you know, none of us are and we just have to work with what God gave us,” Falwell said.

If there is a logical difference between right-wing leaders publicly declaring their support of McCain and "endorsing" them, we'd love to hear it.

Ezra Klein predicts that John McCain will choose Joe Lieberman as his running mate and explains his reasoning:

For the Republicans, however, 2008 can't be [about] mobilization. Their half is too small. Their brand is too damaged. And they recognized that when they chose John McCain -- who's not a base mobilizing evangelical conservative anyway -- as their nominee … [Lieberman] lets McCain telegraph an ideological ambiguity and shift towards a policy agenda that's about process, about "reaching across party lines and getting things done," rather than about sops to the conservative base.

That may very well be true, but for this strategy to work one has to assume that the McCain camp would be willing to sacrifice nearly the entire Religious Right base in an effort to win support of moderates and independents because, as the Right has made abundantly clear, their now tepid support for McCain hinges almost entirely on his choice of running mate.  

Just last week, we were noting how the Right was nearly unanimous in their opposition to Lieberman and that, while they were just starting to warm up to McCain, their efforts at mobilizing their grassroots activists on his behalf came to a screeching halt when he suggested that he was open to the idea of naming a pro-choice running mate.  

Right-wing activists have been battling one another over whom best fills the McCain campaign’s need to appease the base for weeks now, a battle that continues even to this day:

Among those doing some soul-searching this week is Betty Kanavel, who lives in the tiny Monroe County town of Ida and will vote for no one who isn't anti-abortion. She would like McCain to pick Mike Huckabee, the charismatic preacher and former Arkansas governor who finished third in Michigan's primary.

The 56-year-old Kanavel, who works part-time at her church, also is concerned over Romney's religion.

"I probably shouldn't go there, but I will anyway: The Mormon religion is totally not the Bible," Kanavel said, adding: "It's very hard, but if he's the choice, OK. He is a good man."

But this is a debate that has raged over Mike Huckabee vs. Mitt Romney and is rooted in the fact that both are, at least nominally, pro-life.  Lieberman, for all his faults, is ostensibly pro-choice - a fact that will not be easily glossed over by the Religious Right: 

Let us be clear on this. Our values and our respect for the Constitution make clear that women must have the right to choose—and we will continue to fight for that right

When McCain floated the idea of a pro-choice running mate a few weeks ago, the Right went completely off the rails and leaders like Richard Land have been taking every opportunity to make absolutely clear just what such a decision would mean to McCain's campaign: 

If he picks a pro-life running mate, it will really cement evangelical support. If he picks a pro-choice running mate it will give oxygen to all those doubts, and deflate the momentum that has been building.

As James Dobson explained last month when he announced that he was changing his position from “never” to “maybe” on McCain, his support hinged in large part on McCain’s choice of running mate:

I don't even know who his vice-presidential candidate will be. You know he could very well choose a pro-abortion candidate and it would not be unlike him to do that because he seems to enjoy a frustrating conservatives on occasions. But as of this moment, I have to take into account the fact that Senator John McCain has voted pro-life
consistently and that's a fact.

In case that wasn’t clear enough, FOF’s Tom Minnery recently told the San Francisco Chronicle that Dobson is essentially waiting to see who McCain picks before officially endorsing him:

"Admittedly, for a lot of us, McCain is an acquired taste," said Tom Minnery, who leads the government and public policy division for Focus on the Family.

But if McCain chooses a strong social conservative for his running mate, Focus on the Family's leader, James Dobson - whose conservative radio broadcasts are heard by 200 million people worldwide - could endorse him.

"We'll wait to see who his vice president is before embracing him," Minnery said.

If the McCain campaign decides that a pro-choice running mate is what the campaign needs, it’ll be because it has concluded that he can with without the Right or, more likely, that the Right will put aside its principles because they have no alternative but to support the campaign regardless of his running mate.  But the Right is in no mood to be insulted in this manner.  As it stands now, McCain’s support from the right-wing base is tenuous at best and will likely collapse completely were he to fill out his ticket with a pro-choice candidate.

As Dobson explained it, McCain has a history of going “out of his way to stick his thumb in the eyes” of the Religious Right – and choosing a pro-choice running mate would be the ultimate poke in the eye to the Right; one that would make it nearly impossible for them to support him.

Just yesterday we were noting the Right’s repeated warnings to John McCain not to pick Mitt Romney as his running and their incessant clamoring for him to pick Mike Huckabee.  Now it looks like Huckabee himself is getting into the act:

"I think a lot of people, not just social conservatives, but a lot of the Republicans I know are not necessarily comfortable with Romney," Huckabee told CBSNews.com. "But it has nothing to do with religion. It has everything to do with inconsistencies in positions he's held, and that's it."

In our earlier post on this, we cited Tony Perkin’s advice that McCain needed to pick a running mate who is “strong where he is weak” and had a “record of delivering” on the issues that matter to the Right and speculated that McCain’s statement yesterday that he wasn’t ruling out the possibility of naming a pro-choice running mate, possibly Tom Ridge, was not going to go over well with the Right.

And it hasn’t:

But social-conservative leaders say a pro-choice nominee would cripple Mr. McCain politically with the Republican Party base.

"I think McCain has to have a running mate that clearly connects with social conservatives in the party," said Family Research Council President Tony Perkins. "That is where he is lacking. So if he picks a pro-choice running mate, I don't see how he can win this race."

Asked whether social and religious conservatives would walk away from Mr. McCain if he picks Mr. Ridge or some other pro-choice running mate, Mr. Perkins said, "I'm not going to say people will stay home, but there is a core of voters whose level of enthusiasm influences people further from the core.

"So if McCain picks a pro-choice running mate, the strength of turnout on Election Day is not going to be there for him," Mr. Perkins said.

Considering that the Right’s support for McCain is tepid at best and hinges almost entirely on his choice of running-mate, McCain can hardly afford to pick someone like Ridge.  In fact, just last week, Richard Land told CBS that Ridge would be an unmitigated “catastrophe,” so it’s not as if McCain hasn’t been warned.

And just in case McCain needs any more advice on picking a running mate, Rick Santorum is there to give it to him:

If the Republican victory strategy is to disqualify Obama, McCain can't do anything that would disqualify himself in the minds of these less-than-ideological voters prepared to shift his way. As such, McCain's vice presidential pick has to be a nonevent, something of a yawner.

McCain needs someone who isn't going to upset the essential conservative base of the Republican Party, but will not raise red flags to moderates who have disqualified, or are ready to disqualify, Obama.

...

Better for John McCain to be safe than sorry.