McCain rejects and repudiates Rod Parsley
“I didn’t endorse him”?
Maybe by some narrow political term-of-art definition of ‘endorse,’ that would be true, but in everyday, colloquial speech, calling someone “one of the truly great leaders in America, a moral compass, a spiritual guide” would constitute an endorsement of the person.
And in everyday colloquial speech, I can only regard McCain’s claim that he didn’t endorse Parsley as a “lie.”
I see this issue as more important as a diagnostic cue than as a problem in and of itself.
McCain actively and tenaciously pursued this endorsement during his toadying up to the Religious Right frame of the primary season. He relished it, standing on stage and praising Hagee.
Hagee didn’t go on a Wright-like concert tour; these positions were there to be vetted early on. McCain had to know before courting the endorsement that Hagee had some views that he personally strongly disagreed with. Yet he then courted Hagee and highlighted him. Now he throws him under the bus.
No the Hagee association won’t hurt him nor will the disassociation harm him significantly in and of itself but what does that process signify?
Did McCain’s team just have no idea what they were choosing to pursue and embace? Were they that bad at vetting? I doubt it.
Did “straight talk” McCain feel that toadying up to those he had previously derided was required for the primary season but not so much now? Did he think he could both toady up to the Religious Right and sell himself to the middle packaged as a maverick?
I think that McCain is going to have a hard time balancing his desire to fight for the middle, for the independents and the swing voters of both stripes, with his tactical need to satisfy the base. This episode of dogged endorsement pursuit and then vigorous distancing is of little import in and of itself, but it is a significant indicator that McCain’s team has yet to decide what balance they want to aim for. Tactically it opens up a line of attack for Team Obama: keep McCain off balance between the two and force him to strike contradictory poses as he attempts to satisfy both sides; by so doing attack that perception of him as a maverick and reveal him as the flip-flopping toady that he has become.
That accounts for the sideways gravity I’ve been feeling lately, apparently.
It’s not a non-issue, but it’s a marginal one. McCain is forced to deal with the fact, again, that his most reliable base, the christian fundamentalist voter, is sometimes at strong odds with the independent and moderate voter that he has been trying to court with his ‘maverick’ image routine.
He’s going to have to reconcile it somehow. Frankly, I’d like to see him tell the religious right “Go ahead, complain. Who else are you ever going to vote for? You guys vote all the time and I’m your only real choice.”
There actually are more versions of CZ- some just based on the Abrahamic promise “I will bless those who bless your descendents”, others based on a postmillenial hope, that once Israel is restored as a nation, they will realize that Jesus is Messiah & will lead the rest of the world in coming to Christian/Messianic faith. It’s just that the Rapturist version has gotten way more press & a lot more zealous followers. I used to be a Rapturist CZ, now I’m more of a Abe-Promise & Post-Mil one. Even worse, I also hold that somehow the Christian world, which has mostly been Euro-American but may soon become predominantly Asian-African-South American, holds “Joseph’s Birthright”, while the Jews hold “Judah’s Birthright”, and that the Jewish acceptance of Jesus will fulfill the prophecies of the restoration of Judah and Israel
I see two ways in which this can be problematic for McCain’s chances.
The first is that it’s just one more thing adding to the steady chipping away at turning McCain’s “straight talker” mantra from an accepted truth to a sarcastic cut, in voters’ minds.
The second is the prospect of weak turnout from conservative evangelicals. In 2004, one thing that pushed Bush over the top was an incredibly effective turnout machine. One forgets that Kerry’s 59 million votes were an increase of nearly 10% over what Gore and Nader got, combined, in 2000; the reason why the election wasn’t a Kerry win, or a squeaker for Bush, was that Bush went from 50.46 million votes in 2000 to just over 62 million in 2004.
Turnout’s not going to be a big problem on the Dem side this year, as the primaries have demonstrated. Enthusiasm’s going to be at least as high for Obama as it was for Kerry. But one thing a good turnout machine requires is organization, including a lot of local footsoldiers.
Obama’s organization is already in fine fettle, due to the extended primary season. All he needs to do is keep it intact during the summer, then put it into high gear after Labor Day. But McCain’s problem is that the evangelical churches have provided the organizational footsoldiers for the GOP effort in past years. Those people will surely vote for McCain this year, but many of them won’t feel sufficiently invested in him to be part of his political operation. So there will be fewer people to do the job of squeezing every last vote out of people who would probably vote for McCain if they voted, but can’t be relied on to get to the polls if nobody nudges them the day before, makes sure they have a ride to the polls, and all that.
Those people’s votes are the ones that McCain will lose a fair number of, the more daylight he puts between himself and the Religious Right.
I think McCain’s handler’s watched the results from West Virginia this week and saw that if white voters preferred Clinton that much over Obama, he safely had a lock on them in the general election, so he needed to start courting the middle of the road, and his rejection of Hagee would be a start in that direction.