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Taking on the untouchables
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Feb. 29, 2000 | Whether McCain's brave gambit proves shrewd or suicidal will depend entirely on the turnout of primary voters. If his call to repudiate intolerance drives unusually high percentages of normally lethargic voters to the polls, he may score victories even in states where the religious right remains strong. If not, he will be overwhelmed by the reaction of outraged fundamentalists from Savannah to San Diego. Certainly the followers of Robertson and his longtime rival Jerry Falwell have been dispirited since their hopes of driving President Clinton from office were thwarted in 1999. Their power in national elections has been declining steadily from the zenith of 1994, when the Christian Coalition and allied groups played a critical role in the Republican takeover of Congress. Extremists like Robertson remain highly influential within the party, however, and may well be motivated to renew their activism to meet the threat represented by McCain. Joe Conason Joe Conason's column appears in Salon News every other Tuesday.
For the past decade Robertson's legions have been trying with considerable success to take over the GOP. A favorite inside joke of the movement asks "How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time." Now a presidential contender is telling them to put down their forks. In his attack on the religious right as "divisive" and "un-American," McCain seems to understand a nasty little secret -- that the conservative fundamentalists are really a small minority, whose power waxes or wanes in inverse proportion to political participation by the secularized majority. Their electoral strategy has always been based on that realization, and has been executed most successfully in low-turnout contests for school boards, county commissions and party leadership posts. That was the strategic vision of the early leaders of the Christian Coalition, as explained by them at closed conferences I attended in 1991 and 1992. In those days, the religious right was regarded by most of the media as virtually defunct following the demise of Falwell's Moral Majority and the Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart scandals. (The editor of the New Republic told me in 1992 that he wasn't interested in an article about the Christian Coalition because they were "irrelevant.") Media pundits and Washington reporters, who have never really understood the religious right, tend to either underestimate or overestimate the movement's power at various times. Historically, it has been both a conspiratorial, leadership-dominated faction and a broadly based religious counterculture, neither of which are easily penetrated by secular journalists. So when Falwell and Bakker fell, many analysts assumed that the movement itself was dead.
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