Deep Concern for John McCain: Failure to Win Conservatives

Howard Fineman writes:

Looking closely at the NBC exit polls from Virginia, I see numbers that will make delightful reading for the Barack Obama campaign--and a cause for deep concern in John McCain's camp. Obama, the figures show, is expanding the demographic reach of his surging Democratic candidacy, while McCain is hemmed in by his increasingly glaring failure to win over conservatives and evangelical Christians.

Fashionable to Deride Evangelical Christians

NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF writes:

At a New York or Los Angeles cocktail party, few would dare make a pejorative comment about Barack Obama’s race or Hillary Clinton’s sex. Yet it would be easy to get away with deriding Mike Huckabee’s religious faith...

Liberals believe deeply in tolerance and over the last century have led the battles against prejudices of all kinds, but we have a blind spot about Christian evangelicals. They constitute one of the few minorities that, on the American coasts or university campuses, it remains fashionable to mock.

Scorning people for their faith is intrinsically repugnant, and in this case it also betrays a profound misunderstanding of how far evangelicals have moved over the last decade. Today, conservative Christian churches do superb work on poverty, AIDS, sex trafficking, climate change, prison abuses, malaria and genocide in Darfur.

Bleeding-heart liberals could accomplish far more if they reached out to build common cause with bleeding-heart conservatives.

The Values Voter

In the Autumn 2007 issue of The Wilson Quarterly, Jon A. Shields in his essay "In Praise of the Values Voter," writes that a great political irony is how successful the Christian Right has been "at fulfilling liberal thinkers' hope for American democracy." Compared to the organizations built by Liberals (e.g. Common Cause, Environmental Defense, NARAL Pro-Choice America), those built by the Christian Right (e.g. Operation Rescue, the Christian Coalition, Concerned Women of America) have been more than checkbook activists; they have been engaged in civil action.

Some political scientists have argued "that religious groups 'distort' American politics by focusing on abortion rather than 'the least advantaged.' While this may strike some as a perfectly reasonable argument, it assumes that the human embryo has no moral status. If this assumption is wrong, if the fetus does have a claim to protection, it is precisely 'the least advantaged' that the right-to-life movement is defending."

Shields goes on to state that most Americans falsely believe that Roe vs. Wade is more restrictive of abortion than it actually is. He writes that 80% of Americans think abortion is not available during all nine months of pregnancy. This 'mass legal illiteracy' causes Americans to support keeping Roe vs. Wade intact.

He also verifies that most conservative Christians who are activists "quietly labor to engage those who disagree with them in a civil and reasonable way" and are trying to overcome the "long shadow of fundamentalists such as Jerry Falwell and Randy Terry..."