Evangelical for Mitt.org
Posted on 05/27/2007 4:28:23 AM PDT by 50mm
Many evangelical Republican voters who love to loathe Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton might deem the comment you are about to read as heretical.
But Lori Viars doesn't care. She sees Republican presidential front-runner Rudy Giuliani as a greater threat to the values of conservative Christians who underpin the GOP than Clinton or any other Democrat running for president.
"He's a card-carrying liberal, and conservatives, particularly evangelical conservatives, are not going to vote for him," Viars said. "Rudy, being pro-abortion, pro-gay marriage, is a deal-breaker for me. I will not vote for him, even against Hillary."
Viars is not just another face in the Republican rank and file. She is a board member of the Warren County Republican Party and executive director of Family First, a pro-family political action committee.
Although many Republicans don't share Viars' disdain for Giuliani, the thrice-married former mayor of New York City, her sentiment punctuates a broader dilemma for the political future of the conservative Christian movement: Who will lead it?
With President Bush, the evangelical-in-chief, leaving the White House in 19 months, conservative Christians are desperately searching for a new standard-bearer -- and they're not finding him among the three GOP poll leaders: Giuliani, Sen. John McCain of Arizona and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.
"What I'm hearing from most people, the party activists, is they are really not excited about any of the candidates at this point," said Sandy Barber, chairwoman of the Fulton County Republican Party in northwestern Ohio.
Downstate, John Becker, a member of the Clermont County and state Republican central committees, said that unless a viable alternative emerges -- he and Barber mentioned former Sen. Fred Thompson of Tennessee -- evangelical Christians might sit out the 2008 presidential election.
"I personally will vote for the most conservative candidate, and I will support Giuliani if it's between him and -- pick any Democrat," Becker said. "But there are large numbers of people who are friends of mine who will just not be motivated to vote. They'll stay home and hurt the Republican cause."
State Rep. Kevin DeWine of Fairborn, deputy chairman of the Ohio Republican Party, called evangelical Christians a loyal and "potent voting bloc" for the GOP and said he hoped they would not reject Giuliani or the others on the basis of one or two issues.
"At the end of the day, a Rudy Giuliani or a John McCain is better-suited to lead this country than Hillary Clinton," DeWine said.
Ever since the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority, galvanized conservative Christians into a political force that eventually adopted the Republican Party, the religious right's influence on the nation's political and social agenda has grown.
But after possibly reaching the zenith of its power in the 2004 presidential election, the movement is in flux as its adherents debate shifting priorities and some of its activists rally around new religious leaders.
"I get the sense that this is a transition period for a lot of people," said Mark Caleb Smith, director of the Center for Political Studies at Cedarville University in southwestern Ohio and a self-described evangelical Christian.
"You have the rise of the evangelical left, and so we have some competition within Christianity over party loyalty, which is relatively new."
With the passing of Falwell and the aging of popular leaders such as Dr. James Dobson and the Rev. Pat Robertson, a new generation of evangelical leaders is on the rise, including the Rev. Rod Parsley of the World Harvest Church in Columbus and moderates such as the Revs. Rick Warren and Jim Wallis.
While abortion and same-sex marriage remain linchpin issues for these emerging leaders, they often highlight other problems, including global warming, AIDS and world hunger.
"There's quite a debate in the evangelical community about what the agenda should be," said John Green, a University of Akron political scientist and expert on religion and politics.
"Depending on who wins this debate over priorities, the movement could look a lot different. In a lot of ways, this movement has always been driven more by issues than personalities. But when it comes to presidential politics, the issues and personalities have been very closely connected."
Lee Shaffer, finance director of the Victory Christian Fellowship in Fremont and former chairman of the Sandusky County GOP, said advancing the Christian conservative agenda will be difficult without supportive officeholders.
"I'd like to think the evangelical movement as a whole is more issue-oriented, however, you have to have the right people in the right places in order to accomplish anything," Shaffer said.
Without a viable presidential candidate whom evangelical Christians can support, their clout could be diminished next year, Cedarville's Smith said.
"With no reasonable standard-bearer, I think that's a potential problem for Christian conservatives," Smith said.
"There is a lot of tension in the Republican Party between social conservatives and fiscal conservatives. You could be looking at a pretty nasty argument over the future of the party. The nomination is a good litmus test. If a guy like Giuliani gets nominated and Christian conservatives don't vote for him, then that will have implications for the future of the Republican Party."
The Rev. John A. Hays, senior pastor of the Jersey Baptist Church near Pataskala, said that with Bush leaving office after 2008, "politically the future doesn't look bright" for the evangelical movement, "because we don't have many candidates who look like they can be elected who share the values we hold."
Even so, Hays said opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage will continue to bind evangelicals into a potent political force.
"Even though it doesn't look very positive for a conservative evangelical in the office of the president, my hope is that once this next president is in office, we as evangelicals will be greater motivated and energized to try to do all we can to see that our shared Christian values are highly regarded, as they have been under President Bush."
Come on, Fred, the water’s fine. Time to jump in...
Fred.
Run, Fred, run.
GOP is in trouble if evangelicals cant figure out conservative Christians like Hunter and Tancredo are running.
Need to get out of this mentality that Hunter, Tancredo, and others “Cant win”.....that media spin is nonsense. The GOP is toast if it gets hung up on John Mitt McCainiani
“I will not vote for him, even against Hillary.”
Another case of RDS.
It is time for Fred.
All 2 of them ? It’s time for Fred, not for Fraud.
Bush had credentials the evangelicals were tripping over themselves to praise. I don't hear them praising him now.
They will support the candidate who spouts the rhetoric they want to hear, again, he will disappoint them, again, and they will withhold support in the midterms, again, giving the Democrats more wins, again, and then the evangelicals will complain about what the dems do when in power, again.
And they will absolve themselves of any responsibility, again.
I partially agree with this, but I think the implications are not only for the Republican party. I don't like it, but if this happens, we may see a new political constelation in the future, where the fiscal conservatives make a coalition with the social liberals, and the social conservatives make a coalition with fiscal liberals. There will always be a combination of those, of course.
Truth be told, I think there are 6 of them.
There is nothing fiscally conservative about a social liberal, everybody becomes responsible for funding the actions of everyone else. One need not look any further than health care, or social security, what great social liberal programs they have evolved into.
The Democrats have been trying that trick for years. Unfortunately, their most successful one was Jimmy Jones.
No, there's a lot of tension between social-fiscal Conservatives and phony liberal turds pretending to be the former. And, btw, there is no such thing as being a social liberal/fiscal Conservative, a media invention. If you're a lib on the social end, you MUST be liberal fiscally, too, or how else would you pay for the crackpot liberal big gubmint schemes ?
Wow. At this rate, he might get up to 9 by the end of the year. Nice having a diverse campaign. ;-)
Great minds... ;-)
The Republicans just need to be non-offensive, especially when compared to whomever the dims run with. For example, a pro-life conservative should do well as a way for the evangelicals to vote against Hillary.
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