McCain wins back the base

Jonathon Gurwitz:

John McCain is, in some ways, an accidental candidate.

Talk to delegates at the Republican National Convention this week, and many will admit that McCain was not their first choice for president. Some will even concede that he was not their second or even third choice.

Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson all outpolled him in the months leading up to the primaries. Then in January, Mike Huckabee scored a stunning victory in the Iowa caucuses with the support of evangelical Christians.

Going back to the Reagan revolution and, before it, the Roe decision, Christian conservatives have filled the grassroots ranks of the Republican Party. In the 2004 presidential election, the Pew Research Center found they were the largest single demographic group among voters for George W. Bush, constituting 35 percent of his total.

In 2004, white evangelicals supported President Bush over John Kerry 69 to 26 percent, a slight increase over Bush's large margins over Al Gore in 2000, and enough to help deliver GOP majorities in crucial battleground states like Iowa and Ohio.

Until recently, polls had been showing McCain lagging behind Bush's levels of support among Christian conservatives in both 2004 and 2000. But an August Pew survey showed McCain had solidified his lead over Barack Obama among this group by 68 to 24 percent.

That was before last month's Saddleback Civil Forum on the Presidency with Pastor Rick Warren, where McCain for the first time seriously engaged evangelical voters. And it was before he galvanized their support by selecting Sarah Palin as his running mate.

One bellwether was James Dobson, president of Focus on the Family. The influential evangelical leader said in February that he could not vote for McCain as a matter of conscience. After McCain's selection of Palin last week, Dobson told talk radio host Dennis Prager, “I would pull that lever.”

McCain may be the presidential nominee, but the buzz this week was about Palin. Far from dampening enthusiasm for the Alaska governor, news that her 17-year-old daughter was pregnant — and the perception that the media were piling on her family — only seemed to heighten her popularity.

David Barton, a former vice chairman of the Republican Party of Texas and leader of a national evangelical organization, says, “When the announcement was made, my e-mail immediately lit up with adjectives I haven't seen in a long time among evangelicals, Christians and conservatives.” He says the level of enthusiasm is greater than in 2004.

Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst provided another anecdotal tale. At a breakfast with Texas delegates Monday morning, he spoke about a discussion he had with an evangelical pastor who was on his flight to St. Paul. The pastor predicted 3 million to 5 million more Christian conservative voters would turn out for McCain because of Palin.

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What McCain has tapped into besides the cultural issues is voter displeasure with corruption. While the media is not talking about in the same way they did in 2006, voters see it and in 2008 most of the corruption is coming from the ranks of Democrats. They can't really talk about the culture of corruption because they make up most of the corrupt.

Just this week the Mayor of Detroit plead guilty in a case that was a huge embarrassment for the Obama campaign which had been endorsed by the "hip hop" mayor who used text messaging in his illicit affair. All you have to do is check the Name that party links below to see a few examples of the embedded Democrat corruption.