Robertson/Giuliani Duo Bids Farewell to Conservative Influence

[Janett_Reno]

Robertson/Giuliani Duo Bids Farewell to Conservative Influence

http://news.yahoo.com/s/huffpost/200...mz6jH0Wk8e6sgF

Yesterday's announcement that Pat Robertson is endorsing Rudy Giuliani is a big moment in modern political history. It signals the beginning of the end of the power that social conservatives have held over Republican Presidential candidates for many years.

Giuliani's camp is spinning the endorsement as a proof of Giuliani's conservatism. Maybe those living in the bubble of Giuliani-land believe that, but the grassroots conservatives aren't buying it. At the recent conservative mega-conference, Value Voters Summit, Giuliani took a pathetic 1.8 percent in the straw poll at the conclusion of the event. That was several spots behind 'undecided' and only a couple spots ahead of Barack Obama.

These people represented the folks that work year after year to elect conservative Republicans. Giulaini isn't their man.
In addition, James Dobson of Focus on the Family and Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, have teamed up with other prominent social conservatives and pledged to 'seriously consider' backing a third party candidate if the Republican party nominates a candidate that supports choice.

This division among he conservative movement is a good sign. For years, they've been unyielding in their right-wing ideology. Now that their guy, George W. Bush, has soured the American electorate on the conservative agenda, they see their long fought for power on the brink of extinction.

Further, Robertson's Christian Coalition organization endorsed Giuliani's opponent in his 1993 campaign for mayor of New York City. They cited issues such as abortion and gay rights as reasons not to support the Republican.

In an act of desperation, Robertson is willing to throw his values out the window to hop on the train of the perceived front-runner. Combined with the shifting positions of Giuliani, this new duo has more flip flops than Miami Beach on a summer afternoon.

Looking forward to 2008, the right wing surely won't be happy about this. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, but I'm looking forward to all of the pandering that the Republican nominee will have to do to try to achieve some semblance of a winning coalition in the general election.

In the meantime, let's hope the Democratic candidates will run positive campaigns that are about the future, so that when our nominee is decided, we will not be divided. That is the only way we will lose.


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One poster has brought these things up in what this article says. Will all conservatives sell out their faith and values and morals like Pat Robertson has done? We will see. To say Rudy is a conservative, is a joke. Pat Robertson must really be getting old and forget what he says yesterday or a few years ago. Then it was also talked about in this forum, the Republicans need to run on issues and not let's hate Hillary and win. Good luck on the hate race, because you will not beat her on saying we hate Hillary and forget the issues. The last line of this article says, the Democrats need to run a positive campaign about the future, where the party won't be divided, like the Republican party is divided.

You can't fool all the American public and many know Rudy is not a conservative.

[Janett_Reno]

Rudy, the chosen one
The fracturing of the American evangelist movement

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/com...cle2835953.ece

So it's over. There we all were, thinking that the US presidential campaign was really just starting. That in the course of the next few months real voters in primary elections would determine who would be the Democratic and Republican candidates. That, in exactly a year from now, Americans would then pick the winner.

What fools we were! How could we ignore the possibility that God would simply short-circuit the process and pick the president Himself? Now, as he is wont to do, the Almighty has mocked our pretensions. This week, through His principal representative on Earth, He has spoken and He has chosen Rudolph Giuliani.

On Wednesday Pat Robertson, perhaps the best known of America's televangelists, endorsed Mr Giuliani, the former Mayor of New York, as the Republican nominee for president. It was stunning news for a number of reasons. Mr Robertson and his like have made a passionate cause - and a handy living - out of denouncing politicians with Mr Giuliani's political views. The “church” he leads, generally thought of as having outsized influence in the Republican Party, is fervently anti-abortion, anti-homosexual, pro-traditional family values.

But Mr Giuliani is trying to become the first Republican since 1973 to run for the presidency while openly supporting abortion. He has markedly liberal views on gay rights and a colourful personal history to boot. He has been married three times, and once cohabited (or co-cohabited) with a gay couple.

But on Wednesday Mr Robertson insisted that what mattered was that Mr Giuliani had demonstrated, through his leadership of New York in the tragedy of 9/11, that he was the man best equipped to lead the nation. “To me, the overriding issue before the American people is the defence of our population from the bloodlust of Islamic terrorists,” he said.

What made this doubly extraordinary was what Mr Robertson said about New York the day after the 9/11 attacks. They had happened, he said, as divine retribution for America's slide into permissiveness and, along with his fellow televangelist Jerry Falwell, he blamed abortionists and feminists for what had happened.

Yet here he was this week, telling the world that the man whose personal morals and public policies had been partly responsible for incurring the Divine Wrath was now the man best equipped to deal with it. It was a little like hearing that God had chosen not only to spare Gomorrah from destruction, but had picked its rather camp mayor as the next Moses.

What really matters is that Mr Robertson is known not just for his influence over ordinary American voters but for his direct connection with God. Back in the 1980s he told his audience that his prayers had ensured that Hurricane Gloria had avoided the lavish headquarters of his Christian Broadcasting Network. Ten years later, in 1995, he led them in prayer again to ask God to save them from Hurricane Felix. Sure enough, Felix veered away and lo! Mr Robertson's studios were spared once more. Spooky.

So if Mr Robertson's efforts can steer a hurricane or two, it should be a small matter to direct the Almighty to hand the election to Mr Giuliani.

Assuming, with some trepidation, that Mr Robertson's endorsement does not in fact mean that God has just fingered Mr Giuliani, what are we to make of it? The general view is that the endorsement is a big deal for the former mayor.

It certainly helps him to overcome what had always been deemed his largest weakness in the Republican primary - his apparent unpopularity with Christian conservatives. That may be true but the endorsement says a lot more about the state of the Christian evangelical movement.

For Mr Robertson it is akin to a last gasp in the political arena. His increasingly ridiculous utterances (he said that Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Prime Minister, had been struck down with a stroke because of his decision to hand the Gaza Strip to the Palestinians) have made him something of an embarrassment to more serious and honest religious people. He has been unmasked as the snake-oil salesman and political hack that he is and his influence is certainly much smaller than it was.

But that also tells us much about the changed nature of political Christianity in America. It was always a neat fiction put about by the godless media that evangelicals were like some giant army of automatons who could be programmed to march to the voting booths, Bibles aloft, ready to vote for God's way exactly as defined by their preachers.

There was always more diversity than that, but these days the diversity is startling. Evangelicals are fracturing. The most influential leaders now are no longer men like Mr Robertson and the recently departed Mr Falwell. They are people like Rick Warren, who has gently steered a rapidly increasing flock away from the old stereotypes of wrath-of-God righteousness against abortion and gays, and towards the loftiest tenets of the Christian faith. These groups emphasise social activism to alleviate suffering, compassion for Aids victims, assistance to overcome Third World poverty. They haven't decided abortion is right after all, but they have decided it is not the only imperative for a Christian.

The Robertson endorsement, then, may help Mr Giuliani among some evangelicals but, as irony would have it, it may hurt among others. And it may in the end say more about the former mayor than he intended.

Despite his brave performance on 9/11, there have always been doubts about Mr Giuliani that go way beyond his personal views or behaviour. Many of those who worked with him in his pre-9/11 career came to regard him as troublingly obsessive, possessed of a mean streak, with wildly authoritarian and even megalomanic tendencies. Just this week, as Republicans debated the morality and efficacy of authorising torture techniques in the interrogation of terrorist suspects, Mr Giuliani suggested to an interviewer that, while he was a prosecutor in New York, he had somehow used similar techniques to extract testimony from Mafia members.

All this might lead one to conclude that, in some really quite important respects, Mr Giuliani is essentially unhinged. And for those who believe that, Mr Robertson's shocking endorsement may not be such a surprise after all.

[Dirkadirkastan]

You forgot to mention Giuliani's lisp, which is the real reason Hilary is guaranteed to win.

[Janett_Reno]

I have to agree on this, that lisp is in the mix also.

[chumdawg]

So if Mr Robertson's efforts can steer a hurricane or two, it should be a small matter to direct the Almighty to hand the election to Mr Giuliani.

What part of this did you not understand?

[Janett_Reno]

I think Pat Robertson has bit off more than he can chew backing someone, what he says he does not stand for. Richard Land and James Dobson knows this.