The FundamentaList: This week in the religious right:

[Joanne98]

This week in the religious right: Duping conservative evangelicals is easier than using a computer, Huckabee on TV, and Hagee angers his flock by moving to the center.

Sarah Posner | July 16, 2008 |

1. McCain and the Religious Right.

How easy is it to play the religious right? So easy even John McCain can do it.

For weeks after McCain clinched his party's nomination, all we heard from the religious-right leadership was what an unsatisfactory candidate he was. He was insufficiently in favor of "life" because he perhaps thought stem-cell research was a good idea. His campaign-finance legislation trampled on the free-speech rights of anti-abortion groups. He was opposed to a federal constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, even though he thinks it's just fine for states to amend their own constitutions. His story about the Vietcong prison guard drawing a cross in the sand was nice and all, but couldn't he talk about Jesus more? He threw John Hagee and Rod Parsley under the bus. He waited too long to visit Billy Graham. You know, all that stuff that really matters for being president during the worst economic, military, and foreign-policy crises of our lifetimes.

Back when we pondered the possibility of a cross-dressing former mayor of New York, a non-church-attending Hollywood actor, a Mormon from Sodom, or a Southern Baptist minister with a hick name as the Republican nominee, the religious right was threatening rebellion by forming a third party. But then the Democratic primary turnout made Republicans look as old and tired as their eventual nominee. The religious right woke up to the reality that sinking the GOP was not exactly the best path to continued political relevancy.

After McCain clinched the nomination, the religious-right leadership slowly realized they had to play the game -- but they ended up getting played by McCain. Religious-right leaders acted publicly as if they were withholding judgment until McCain gave them something -- and oh, that something was not much: perfunctory support for the California gay marriage ban and a pledge to clone John Roberts and Samuel Alito for any Supreme Court appointments. That's it. No prayer sessions, no random citations of Bible verses, no evangelical code words embedded in speeches, and not a single rhetorical bone about Christian nationhood. Even his recently retooled campaign slogan, "Reform, Prosperity, Peace," abandoned religious-right buzzwords like "values," "family," and "faith."

The religious-right leadership has no choice in the general election but McCain, and McCain has known that all along. Religious-right leaders' ambition to take over Washington has now been scaled back to stopping Obama, and it's not even clear they can do that.

2. Huckabee's Triple Threat.

The religious right has made a lot of noise about The Only Acceptable Running Mate for McCain, Mike Huckabee, even as McCain's short list apparently doesn't include him. But now it has become clear that Huckabee is more interested in the television studio than in the West Wing -- at least for now.

On his blog this week, Huckabee revealed that he was traveling to New York for discussions with Fox News about hosting his own television program. Earlier in the week he was in Iowa, the state that gave him the first victory of his presidential campaign. While there, he raised money for the Iowa Family PAC, which is in a tizzy about "homosexual activists" funding campaigns in the state, and the possibility, as Huckabee put it, that Iowa "is in danger of becoming the next California in the same-sex marriage 'hit parade.'" He campaigned for McCain at the Iowa Republican Party Convention and then embarked on a bipartisan trip to Rwanda with Cindy McCain.

So imagine this: Huckabee gets his own Fox News show while running a political action committee supporting Republican candidates and actively campaigning for the Republican nominee. He has a book coming out in the fall about his campaign and the future of conservatism and hasn't ruled out running for president again. So from his perspective, why would he want to be chained to McCain when he can get free advertising for himself?

3. Criticism is Leading CUFI to Alienate Core Supporters.

http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_fundamentalist_071608