Kathleen Parker
Orlando Sentinel
October 8, 2007

Evangelical Christians never had it so good, but they seem not to know it. Instead of supporting the candidate who most shares their values – Mitt Romney – they seem hell-bent for the proverbial cliff.

Meeting recently in Salt Lake City, conservative Christian leaders almost unanimously approved a resolution to support a third-party candidate if neither major party nominates someone who is pro-life.

To their credit, these leaders are unwilling to sacrifice conviction for political expediency, but they may be creating their own worst nightmare by dividing the party and making a Democratic victory more likely.

James Dobson, founder and chairman of Focus on the Family, explained in a New York Times op-ed Thursday that Christian leaders believe any presidential candidate has to commit to traditional moral values, including the sanctity of human life, the institution of marriage and other pro-family principles.

Minimally, that means anti-Roe v. Wade, no same-sex marriage, no government funding for destruction of human life at any stage and no pro-sex education. These weren’t controversial ideas a generation ago, but today they can make or break a candidate in a party whose political base is 30 percent evangelical Christian.

Perfection is a tough standard, and hardly anyone is just right. John McCain has a perfect pro-life record, but he supports federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. He also doesn’t support the Federal Marriage Amendment, or FMA, which conservatives believe is necessary to protect marriage as between a man and a woman.

Under the radar, some conservative leaders say that McCain has contempt for pro-lifers, which perhaps explains his inability to successfully woo social conservatives.

Fred Thompson, upon whom many had pinned their hopes, has turned out to be a disappointment, not to mention a cure for insomnia. In Iowa recently, Thompson had to prompt his audience – their faces masks of ennui – to applaud. Freight trains have sparked more animation.

Thompson also doesn’t support the FMA, which last week prompted one of his key campaign consultants, Bill Wichterman, to walk out. Wichterman, who previously served as conservative outreach director for former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., had been considered an important “get” for Thompson.

And then there’s Mike Huckabee. If Dobson really meant what he said in his op-ed – that winnability shouldn’t be the deciding factor in supporting a candidate – then Huckabee should be receiving bouquets of Ben Franklins with his morning beignets. A southern Baptist preacher, the former Arkansas governor is a human checklist of conservative values, as well as being personable, likable and funny.

What Huckabee doesn’t have is the golden coffer, which means that electability is, in fact, a Christian concern.

That leaves just one person – Romney – as the obvious pick for the values party. If anything, the golly-gee guy is too perfect. Nary a follicle out of place, he’s never enjoyed a caffeine buzz nor awakened to the rare tortures of having been overserved.

His resume otherwise has perfect creases. As governor of Massachusetts, he fought same-sex unions and embryonic cloning. He’s pro-life, even if he was previously pro-choice. As a businessman, he made a personal fortune and bailed out the Olympics. He’s even got a beautiful, first-ladylike wife, who thus far has not demanded cell phone reassurances of unfaltering love during her husband’s stump speeches.

The only hitch: He’s a cultist. Or so some Christians think. Even though Romney shares their belief in Jesus Christ as God, other doctrinal differences tied to his Mormon beliefs apparently cause deep conflicts for evangelicals.

The crafters of push polls are no doubt working overtime, especially in South Carolina, where nobody goes broke baiting fear and phobia. If they could convince racist voters in 2000 that McCain’s adopted Indian child was African-American, they won’t have much trouble advancing the idea that Romney is a closet polygamist – despite the fact that he’s the only leading Republican candidate who has had just one wife.

Ultimately, Christian leaders (some of whom make off-the-record, supportive calls to Romney, I’m told) most likely will back the Mormon. But their actions meantime have hurt Romney as he tries to close the deal nationally.

If they were smarter, they’d embrace Romney as the one who can beat Hillary because he, more than anyone else, unites all wings of the party – economic, security and social.

If.

By KAREN TUMULTY

Barack Obama has just about everything going for him. At a time when the country is cranky and in the mood for a change, his is a fresh, attractive face and an inspirational message. Wherever he goes, the Illinois Senator draws huge, adoring crowds. He is raising money faster than any Democrat ever has–and from more people, including some 75,000 new donors just since June. He is building a top-notch, disciplined campaign organization, right down to the county level. His campaign has 31 offices in Iowa alone and claims this is twice as many as anyone else. What’s more, his chief opponent is one of the most polarizing figures in politics. So it seems only fair to ask: Why is Obama’s candidacy still idling?

It has been more than seven months since Obama declared his presidential candidacy, evoking Abraham Lincoln in a soaring speech on the grounds of the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Ill. But up to this point, there have been few signs that he poses a serious threat to Hillary Clinton. Her lead in national polls has solidified in the double digits, and her sure-footed campaign for the Democratic nomination is starting to take on the sheen of inevitability. Obama remains well behind her everywhere but in Iowa, site of the first presidential contest, where the two are locked in a tight race with former Senator John Edwards. And while both are looking to break a historic barrier–his of race, hers of gender–Obama’s is proving to be the more delicate challenge, as shown by questions over his response to the Jena 6 racial controversy in Louisiana.

Obama is not the first thoughtful Democrat to capture the fancy of the party’s upscale élites, convincing them he represents a new direction for their party. There was Gary Hart in 1984, Bill Bradley in 2000 and Howard Dean four years ago. But the outcome has always been the same when these phenomena have come up against more conventional rivals who appeal more explicitly to the populist voters that make up the Democratic Party’s base. So while the Obama brand has a certain cachet–celebrities like Halle Berry have been photographed around Los Angeles wearing Obama T shirts–Obama the candidate is having a hard time breaking out.

Part of the problem lies with Obama’s low-key speaking delivery, an approach that surprises listeners who know him best (and often only) from his roof-raising keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. “His style is so cerebral and so cool that it just doesn’t appeal to a wide segment of the Democratic Party,” says an adviser to a rival campaign. “They want to like him, but he just isn’t connecting with them.” And Obama has had a harder time cultivating a down-home image than his opponents. A few weeks ago, he skipped a candidate forum sponsored by aarp in Iowa–a state where 64% of those who attended the Democratic caucuses in 2004 are over 50–to appear at a fund raiser in Atlanta with R&B recording star Usher. Afterward, Des Moines Register columnist David Yepsen wrote: “There wasn’t a big winner of Thursday night’s debate among the Democratic presidential candidates, but there was a clear loser–Barack Obama.” At a rural-issues forum on a farm outside Adel, Iowa, Obama sympathized with the plight of farmers this way: “Anybody gone into Whole Foods lately and seen what they charge for arugula?” (That high-end grocery store chain doesn’t have any locations in Iowa.)

The Obama campaign has staked a lot on Iowa. “I don’t think the national polls will move at all until Iowa, absent some seismic event,” says Obama campaign manager David Plouffe. Obama’s advisers say he doesn’t have to win there, just beat expectations. In 1972, Iowa gave George McGovern a big boost in momentum, even though he finished 13 points behind Edmund Muskie. And Georgia’s obscure former Governor went from “Jimmy Who?” to front runner in 1976 on the strength of coming in 9 points behind “Uncommitted.”

Putting so much on the outcome of a single state is a big gamble, however, and there are plenty of Democrats who argue privately that the Illinois Senator is making a mistake by holding himself above the fray and praying for Clinton to slip. “He’s got to go out there and take this from her,” says a prominent strategist who is not affiliated with any candidate. “His is a subtle and nuanced campaign, and this is not a subtle and nuanced business.” Going on the attack against Clinton, however, would undercut Obama’s claim to be a different kind of politician. And in a multicandidate race, it might simply create an opening for Edwards.

That’s why the campaign pledges that Obama will resist the inevitable calls of the political class for more conflict and will engage in what his chief political strategist, David Axelrod, euphemistically calls the “vigorous comparative processes” on its own timetable and in its own way. “There is a bloodlust out there. People want us to eviscerate her, if for nothing else than the sport of it,” says Axelrod. “But how we draw the distinction is important, and we’re not going to get pushed into gratuitous exchanges to satisfy the peanut-gallery pundits.”

And then, of course, there is the biggest unknowable: What will black voters, the Democratic Party’s most loyal constituency, do when forced to choose between their longstanding allegiance to the Clintons and the prospect of seeing the first African American in the White House? Pollsters say black voters appear deeply divided, with Obama winning among younger and male African-Americans and Clinton running stronger among older African-American women. But pollsters also say that could change if Obama’s overall prospects improve.

At the same time, those voters hold their breath when Obama is asked to comment on something like the Jena 6 case. He walks a fine line, demonstrating that he is connected to the African-American community without appearing to have an agenda driven by that constituency. “Race is not just an issue in the back of the minds of white voters,” says longtime Democratic activist Donna Brazile, an African American who was Al Gore’s 2000 campaign manager. “It really is a concern with black voters. They’re worried about whether the country is ready for a black President. They’re pessimistic … He has the electability problem with black voters too.”

The Obama campaign says it isn’t worried. “We’ve tried to pace this thing the right way and keep our blinders on,” says Axelrod, fully embracing the hoary horse-race metaphor. “We’re pursuing a strategy that aims at doing well in Iowa and going on from there.” And lately Obama seems to have shifted into a different gear, one that suggests some urgency to gain ground. His debate performances have gotten sharper. He has a new, edgier stump speech that pounds harder at his theme of change and attempts to paint Clinton as what his strategists call a quasi-incumbent. Obama is embracing a more populist approach. His speech to Service Employees International Union members helped persuade them to hold off on an expected endorsement of Edwards.

Obama’s advisers argue that his strengths aren’t necessarily going to show up in the polls. Campaign manager Plouffe says the younger voters who are being drawn to Obama are less likely to register in surveys of likely voters because they have cell phones, aren’t home much in the early evening when pollsters call, and aren’t on the lists of those who have voted in primaries or attended caucuses. Even political veterans are impressed with what they are seeing of Obama’s operation on the ground. In South Carolina, an early-primary state where 30% of the population is black, his young volunteers are out knocking on doors every weekend. “It is a new crowd,” says former South Carolina Democratic chairman Donald Fowler, “and it is the most methodical voter-canvassing project I have ever seen in South Carolina.”

Still, Clinton holds a commanding lead in South Carolina and probably will continue to do so–absent “an exogenous factor that intervenes to shake things up, a significant mistake or a revelation,” says Fowler. The question for Obama: Does he wait for such an eventuality–or make one happen?

By Joe Klein

A long time ago, when the Soviet Union was beginning to shatter, a Russian friend cracked a joke, and I doubled up laughing on a snowy street in Moscow. “I wish I could smile the way you Americans do,” he said. I asked why he couldn’t. He said he’d been trained by his parents never to show emotions in public. A stray smile could be misinterpreted, could mean the Gulag. I realized then that my reaction to his joke had been a political statement–a reflexive demonstration of my freedom. I thought about that when the laughter began at Columbia University on Sept. 24. I wondered how quickly it took Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to realize they were laughing at him, not with him, after his blithe assertion that there are no homosexuals in Iran. He gazed out into the audience, bemused. He could understand those who found him reprehensible; he courted their disapproval, thrived on it. But to be found ridiculous? How devastating. How delightfully Western.

Ahmadinejad’s appearance was a small but telling moment in the rolling overhyped crisis that is George W. Bush’s so-called war on terrorism. The Iranian President’s words had no practical, only symbolic, global import. He has very little real power in Iran, none over foreign policy or the nuclear program. He has no more power than his predecessor, the failed reformer Mohammed Khatami, who came to be regarded in the West and in Iran as a well-dressed cipher. Indeed, Ahmadinejad has failed in the one area where he actually does have some authority: reforming the sluggish oligopoly that is the Iranian domestic economy. There have been riots over the rising price of gasoline. His political future is shaky. And yet this strange little man who brings to mind Peter Sellers more readily than Adolf Hitler–Sellers playing one of his brilliantly befogged simpletons–occasioned a classic, free-range American outrage festival, in which everyone, even Hillary Clinton, happily granted him exactly the opprobrium he desired.

Of course, Ahmadinejad is no simpleton. He knows precisely how to exploit one of the few powers he does possess, the power to offend. He gains status in Iran and in the Islamic world by sticking his thumb in the giant’s eye. His Holocaust denial is a flagrant ploy–the easiest way to get a rise out of the Jewish community and, inevitably, U.S. politicians. Clearly, he benefits from his falsely inflated prominence. But who else does?

Well, at the top of the list are our old friends the neoconservatives, the folks who provided the intellectual rationale for Bush’s war in Iraq, many of whom are now itching for a war with Iran. Norman Podhoretz, the neocon paterfamilias, has written a trifle called World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism and loves to posit Ahmadinejad and Osama bin Laden–a far more dangerous character–as the heirs to Hitler and Stalin. “They follow the path of fascism, Nazism and totalitarianism,” he writes. This is incendiary foolishness. Terrorists have the ability to wreak terrible damage intermittently, but they don’t represent an existential threat to the U.S. Ahmadinejad commands no legions–not even the Hizballah forces in Lebanon that attacked Israel in the summer of 2006–and if Podhoretz doesn’t know that, he should. Taking Ahmadinejad literally, as the neoconservatives do, is being disingenuous with lethal intent. It gives license to a conga line of politicians–especially Republicans running for President–to strut their stuff by jumping on Ahmadinejad and Columbia University and liberals in general. Mitt Romney runs an ad in which he brags that he denied the milquetoast reformer Khatami a police escort to Harvard University in 2006. Now there’s a man! The New York Daily News, owned by neoconservative Mort Zuckerman, runs the headline the evil has landed. The cable news networks hyperventilate. Even the president of Columbia University, Lee Bollinger, feels the need to demolish Ahmadinejad–elegantly, I must say–before the speech. A giant toxic bubble overwhelms the public square.

And then, there he is–and laughter is freedom’s only appropriate reaction. The bubble bursts. He denies not only the Holocaust but also homosexuality? Suddenly, it all becomes obvious: we are being played by extremists on both sides. To be sure, Iran does arm Hizballah, and it does have an active nuclear program that may or may not be proved to have hostile intent, and it is making trouble for the U.S. in Iraq, supplying weapons to our enemies. These are all problems to be addressed soberly and perhaps even, eventually, with multilateral force. But the neoconservative campaign to transform Ahmadinejad into Hitler or Stalin, to pretend that he has the ability to destroy the world, to make a hoo-ha over letting the little man speak, is a cynical attempt to plump for war. Ahmadinejad may be ridiculous, but Podhoretz–who recently spent 45 minutes with Bush arguing for more war–isn’t very funny at all.