On Thursday's Op/Ed page of The New York Times Dr. James Dobson relayed the minutes of a meeting of “pro-Family leaders” that took place in Salt Lake City the previous Saturday. Those assembled, according to Dobson, unanimously agreed that “if neither of the two major political parties nominates an individual who pledges himself or herself to the sanctity of human life, we will join others in voting for a minor-party candidate.”
This bold declaration (aimed solely and squarely at one major political party) invites endless speculation. I will limit myself to four random observations.
First: Dobson's threat could be seen as a total, what-I've-actually-got-here-is-a-pair-of-Jacks bluff meant to wrench as many concessions as possible from the first-tier of Republican presidential contenders -- Rudy Giuliani in particular. Dobson, in this reading, is helpfully encouraging the candidates to ask themselves the following questions: 1) What might it be like running against Hillary Clinton without the support of a constituency that accounted for 40 percent of George W. Bush’s vote in 2004? and, 2) What steps might I take in order to avoid that scenario?
Second: Did John McCain know in advance that this Utah ultimatum was in the works? If so, does this account for what I referred to as his “lurch to the (Christian) Right”? Sen. McCain is Christing-up so dramatically as to have whipped the nation’s punditry into a frenzy. (Dobson, incidentally, has expressed a consistent antipathy for McCain and stated that he would not vote for him “under any circumstances.” Come to think of it, he has also doubted whether Fred Thompson was actually a Christian, but that's a different story).
Third: In his essay, Dobson challenged the contention made by the “secular media” that the “Conservative Christian movement is hopelessly fractured and internally antagonistic.” A point I have been making in previous posts is that the movement need not be “hopelessly fractured” for it to be losing political clout.
Let us imagine that the Democrats in 2008 galvanize their base of Mainline Protestants, Latino Catholics, and Jews (a development observed in the 2006 mid-term elections). Let us imagine that they improve upon Kerry’s astonishing failures among non-Latino Catholics. If they can pull this off--and nothing suggests that this is a daunting task--then they will not need to win the White Evangelical vote. They will simply need to make sure that it is not as absurdly tilted toward the GOP as it was in 2004.
Of course, the possibility exists that Dobson and his colleagues are not bluffing. If they do abandon the Republicans then they will surely induce a Blue-state rapture: the return of a Democrat to the White House in triumph and in glory and the relegation of the once-mighty White Evangelicals to the hellish oblivion of third-party politics.
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