Changing priorities on the right

Robert Tracinski:

Wednesday's newspapers carried two headlines so improbable that they almost made me spit out my coffee. The first: "French President Says America 'Can Count on France'." The second: "Pat Robertson Endorses Giuliani."

The two headlines seem equally unlikely. We haven't been able to count on the French since about 1918, and it was far from obvious that a champion of "family values" and a leader of the religious right would endorse the candidacy for president of a twice-divorced, pro-abortion-rights semi-lapsed Catholic.

Robertson's endorsement is a tectonic shift, not just in the Republican race for the presidential nomination, but in the party's very identity and agenda.

The significance of this announcement is not the direct effect of Robertson's endorsement. Robertson is an aging figure whose heyday was in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and he has lost influence in the past decade thanks to a series of public pronouncements that came across as, well, nutty. Most notoriously, just after the September 11 terrorist attacks he declared them to be God's punishment of America for our sinful secular ways--an opinion that came a little too close to the religious outlook of our enemies. So Robertson may no longer move the votes of millions, if he ever did. But his approval of Giuliani has a profound symbolic significance, because it shows what is possible in the coming election year.

Robertson's endorsement is a test case that provides a "proof of concept"--as engineers call it--for the whole theory behind the Giuliani candidacy.

Rudy Giuliani's candidacy is based on the premise that the abortion "litmus test" is over. It can be argued that Giuliani has changed his economic convictions to suit the Republican "base," adopting tax-cutting, privatizing, small-government policies that he had not supported earlier in his career. But he has pointedly refused to change his convictions about key religious issues like a woman's right to an abortion and civil unions for homosexual couples. How, then, does he expect to win the nomination?

The whole theory behind Giuliani's campaign is that religious Republican voters will regard the War on Terrorism--and, secondarily, Giuliani's pro-free-market platform--as more important than a ban on abortion or on "gay marriage." And when it comes to those tertiary "social agenda" issues, the Giuliani campaign assumed that it could satisfy conservatives with nothing more than a promise to appoint "strict constructionist" judges to the federal courts.

And all of this is precisely what Robertson said in his endorsement....

I have argued that Giuliani's candidacy is a test of the priorities of the right. And there you have the priority list: Islamic terrorism first, small government second, judges third.

And if this is how Pat Robertson looks at the election, how many other religious voters will do the same?

That's why this endorsement is so significant: it is a precise and thorough validation of the premise behind Giuliani's candidacy.

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He goes on to point out, what is suggested in the post immediately below that Giuliani is not only the leading candidate, he is also the top second choice for most Republican voters and has a new poll to back it up. Right now the biggest threat to his nomination is a smart campaign by Romney in the early primary states. Whether Romney can overcome his weakness in the nationwide polls by winning the first few contest is the main question for Republicans at this point.