Republican Gomorrah

by Max Blumenthal

  With the stain of a cynical smear campaign tarnishing McCain’s once stately image, members of his inner circle turned on Palin, accusing her of “going rogue.” “She is a diva,” said one top McCain advisor. “She takes no advice from anyone.” The advisor added, “She’s now positioning herself for her own future. Of course, this is bad for John.” Another staffer, who had been privy to discussions of religion and politics with Palin, flatly described her as “a whack job.”

  Still, the neocons remained loyal. Michael Goldfarb, a Weekly Standard editor who went to work in McCain’s communications department, invited suspicion from fellow staffers for the “manic zeal” he displayed on Palin’s behalf. Randy Scheunemann, a neoconservative foreign policy hand, was fired during the last week of the campaign for “positioning himself with Palin at the expense of John McCain’s campaign message,” according to an aide. McCain loyalists suspected him of leaking damaging information to Bill Kristol, Palin’s original cheerleader. For his part, on October 5, Kristol published in his New York Times column an interview with Palin in which she criticized McCain for refusing to attack Obama for his association with Jeremiah Wright—a tactic McCain had foresworn months earlier.

  “To tell you the truth, Bill,” Palin told Kristol, “I don’t know why that association isn’t discussed more, because those were appalling things that that pastor had said about our great country, and to have sat in the pews for 20 years and listened to that—with, I don’t know, a sense of condoning it, I guess, because he didn’t get up and leave—to me, that does say something about character. But, you know, I guess that would be a John McCain call on whether he wants to bring that up.” A week later, Kristol publicized information leaked to him from inside the campaign about the growing rancor among McCain’s aides and then concluded, “Fire the campaign.” The message was a mess indeed.

  A close McCain advisor complained to Scott Horton, a human rights lawyer and my colleague at the online site TheDailyBeast.com, that Palin’s neocon backers were positioning her to run for president in 2012, and were doing so at McCain’s expense. “In the last six weeks there was a remarkable echo,” the aide said. “You could listen to arguments made by folks inside of the campaign who were close to Bill Kristol and then open up the New York Times and read them in Kristol’s columns. It was ‘set Sarah free,’ coupled with an agenda designed to appeal to the religious right and the more raucous elements of the party. They got their way often enough, and we started noticing that at many of the Palin functions it was nonstop ‘Sarah, Sarah,’ while John McCain all but vanished. Were they trying to get McCain elected in 2008, or to help Palin on the way to the Republican nomination in 2012? You can’t get yourself into a situation in which anyone can credibly ask that question.”

  With the campaign entering its final stages, Palin phoned in to the Focus on the Family studio for an interview aired on October 22 with James Dobson, an acknowledged hero of hers. “You have been on the forefront of all of this good for all of these years and your reward will be in heaven,” Palin greeted Dobson. “If it were not for you so many of us would be missing the boat in terms of life and of ethics.” “I’m just trying to serve the Lord like you are,” Dobson humbly replied. Now in her element, Palin could unburden herself in the coded language familiar to her Pentecostal subculture.

  When Dobson revealed to Palin how he summoned prayers at the National Day of Prayer for her election victory, she spoke in the special Third Wave vocabulary: “It is that intercession that is so needed. I can feel that strength that is provided through our prayer warriors across this nation.” Palin touted herself as “a hardcore pro-lifer” and then falsely assured Dobson’s listeners that McCain “absolutely” supported a federal gay marriage ban (he voted repeatedly against it) and a ban on federal funding for stem cell research (his position was exactly the opposite). At the end of the interview, Dobson turned to his audience, reminding them in voice brimming with indignation that Palin’s difficulties had nothing to do with her own performance on the campaign trail. “There is hostility to Sarah Palin because she is an unabashed Christian,” Dobson yelped. “That’s who she is!”

  Finally, Dobson pleaded aloud, directing his airwaves heavenward: “We’re rather boldly asking for a miracle with regard to the election this year.”

  Only a miracle could have saved McCain, especially from his running mate. Days before election night, 59 percent of voters surveyed for a New York Times/CBS poll said Palin was unqualified to serve as vice president. One-third of those polled said McCain’s selection was a major factor influencing whom they would vote for, and nearly all of them planned to vote for Obama. The Obama campaign’s final ad—its closing argument—flashed the phrase, “His choice?” on the screen before an image appeared of Palin winking at the camera during the vice presidential debate, an iconic moment that perfectly captured her insouciant charm.

  On election night, Virginia and North Carolina, which had voted overwhelmingly Republican since President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, fell to Obama. The Democrats cut deep into Republican territory with Senate victories in Virginia, North Carolina, and Palin’s home state, where her approval rating had plunged over 15 points since she began her campaign with McCain. (A year earlier, Council for National Policy co-founder Woody Jenkins lost a special congressional election to a Democrat, Don Cazayoux, in one of the most heavily Republican districts in the country.) The last Republican House member from New England, Representative Chris Shays of Connecticut, was defeated as well.

  Obama’s coalition was formidable, comprising dramatically increased levels of support from white men in every region of the country except the Deep South and in parts of Appalachia. These depopulated, economically depressed, and heavily evangelical regions were now the siege towers of the Republicans’ shattered electoral fortress. Was that all that was left of the “real America”?

  COLLATERAL DAMAGE

  On the day after Obama’s victory, a sense of gloom descended on San Francisco’s Castro District. After bearing the brunt of anti-gay crusades for the past eight years, residents of the gay boulevard should have been celebrating Obama’s victory. Instead, they fashioned signs reading, “No More Mister Nice Gay” and donned the whistle-alert necklaces pioneered by the assassinated gay city council member Harvey Milk during an epidemic of anti-gay violence in the 1970s, preparing to take to the streets for a night of angry demonstrations. Proposition 8, a ballot measure banning same-sex marriage in California, had passed by a narrow margin.

  For the movement, ensuring Prop 8’s passage was an important consolation once the impending defeat of McCain and Palin became apparent. Not one state ballot measure to ban same-sex marriage had ever been defeated. Prop 8’s failure in the country’s most populous state would have turned the tide of the decades-long culture war, creating a beachhead for gay rights campaigns in other states. “This vote on whether we stop the gay-marriage juggernaut in California is Armageddon,” Charles Colson told the New York Times. Tony Perkins echoed Colson’s doomsday warning. “It’s more important than the presidential election,” Perkins said of Prop 8. “We will not survive [as a nation] if we lose the institution of marriage.”

  With so much on the line, movement backers across the country assembled a massive war chest for Prop 8. Much of the money came from deep-pocketed donors such as the Utah-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and Focus on the Family, which injected $500,000 into the effort. Prop 8 also received a $450,000 boost from Blackwater matriarch Elsa Broekhuizen Prince.

  While these funders received enormous media scrutiny, the involvement of Howard F. Ahmanson Jr., who donated $900,000 to Prop 8 through his unincorporated business entity, Fieldstead and Co., went unnoticed up to election day. For the reclusive Ahmanson, the measure was one more step toward his goal of “the total integration of biblical law into our lives.”

  Not everyone in Dobson’s Colorado Springs mountain kingdom was in a celebratory mood after the hist
oric Prop 8 victory. After pumping enough money into Prop 8 to cover the average annual salary of nineteen Coloradans, Focus on the Family initiated a round of massive layoffs, sending a full 20 percent of its workforce out in the cold just in time for Christmas. Days later, Focus released an online video urging its members to declare “Merry Tossmas,” imploring them to trash department store catalogues that used the putatively anti-Christian phrase “Happy Holidays.”

  Down in Orange County, “America’s Pastor” Rick Warren had delivered a purpose-driven message in October to the 22,000 parishioners of his Saddleback mega-church and his millions of followers: “Here’s an interesting thing: there are about 2 percent of Americans [who] are homosexual, gay, lesbian people,” Warren said in an Internet video posted on his website. “We should not let 2 percent of the population determine—to change—a definition of marriage that has been supported by every single culture and every single religion for 5,000 years. This is not even just a Christian issue. It is a humanitarian and human issue, that God created marriage for the purpose of family, love and procreation. I urge you to support Proposition 8 and to pass that on.”

  On December 17, several weeks after demonstrators surrounded Warren’s church to protest his support for Prop 8, Obama announced that the pastor would deliver the inaugural invocation, a prestigious honor that virtually consolidated his image as the national minister, heir to the Reverend Billy Graham. As outrage from progressive Obama supporters gathered, Warren quietly scrubbed a statement from his website that read, “[S]omeone unwilling to repent of their homosexual lifestyle would not be accepted as a member at Saddleback Church.” He also excised declarations banning unmarried couples from his pews and an anti-evolution statement that humans and Brontosauruses once frolicked together like the Flintstones.

  At the same time, Warren embarked on a rambling media offensive, claiming, “I happen to love gays” at a gathering of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, then he compared homosexuality to incest and pedophilia in an interview with MSNBC.

  Obama’s senior political adviser David Axelrod leapt to Warren’s defense, suggesting, during an appearance on Meet the Press, that criticism of Warren’s homophobic politics sowed disunity. “You have a conservative evangelical pastor who’s coming to participate in the inauguration of a progressive president,” Axelrod said. “This is a healthy thing and a good thing for our country.” He added, “We gotta get beyond this sorta politics where . . . we’re each on the jagged edge of a great divide, shaking our fists at each other.” The Rick Warren prayer moment would go on as scheduled.

  Despite Obama’s effort to court white evangelicals, he failed to make any inroads. Exit polls showed that Obama earned the votes of only 29 percent of whites who attended church once a week—the same percentage that John Kerry won in 2004—and just 29 percent of white evangelicals, a gain of merely three points despite the Democrats’ nationwide gains in nearly every other demographic group.

  Amy Sullivan, the Time columnist who had signaled that Obama would win record levels of evangelicals’ support, concluded in the face of the poor results, “Democrats will need to invest more time to court [young evangelicals] and ask for their votes.” But would that constituency ever join the Obama majority? Would the Christian right ever lose its hold?

  Looking at the election from the bottom up, the exit poll numbers reflected the completion of the movement’s takeover of the Republican Party. In the age of Obama, the movement’s impact on public policy would be weaker than at any time since before Reagan entered the White House, but its stranglehold on the party’s agenda would be even tighter. And with Obama’s inauguration approaching, there were signs that the movement planned to impel the GOP toward the confrontational posture it assumed during the Clinton era, when it leveraged anti-liberal resentment to ramp up donations and recruit new “prayer warriors” for the battles ahead.

  When the national economic catastrophe deepened at the beginning of the Obama era, the movement welcomed a new chance to leverage crisis into opportunity. At Mars Hill Church in Seattle, hipster pastor Mark Driscoll grew his congregation by 1,000 members in a year, stirring financially desperate audiences with visions of the all-powerful “Ultimate Fighting Jesus.” Pastor John Hagee released his book Financial Armageddon just in time for the banking crash, assuring his flock how the dire economic situation was merely a harbinger of Christ’s return. According to David Beckworth, an assistant professor of economics at Texas State University, the growth rate of evangelical churches spiked by 50 percent during each recession cycle between 1968 and 2004. With the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression growing more calamitous by the day, the entrepreneurs of personal crisis celebrated ideal market conditions for their next great crusade.

  EPILOGUE

  THE ANOINTING

  On January 7, second-term Republican Representative Paul Broun of Georgia and two friends prayed over a door. It wasn’t just any door, but the entranceway beneath the Capitol that president-elect Obama would pass through as he walked onto the inaugural stage to take the oath of office. “I hope and pray that as God stirs the heart of our new president that President Obama will listen and will heed God’s direction,” Broun proclaimed, while an officer of the Capitol Police stood on the other side of the door, keeping watch over the inaugural stage with his back turned to the ceremony under way on the other side.

  Joining Broun were two notorious figures from the abortion wars of the 1990s, the Reverend Rob Schenck and the Reverend Patrick Mahoney. Together, the activists had helped Randall Terry lead the anti-abortion front Operation Rescue from its strategy of “direct confrontation” to its spiraling descent into assassinations and clinic bombings. “There’s going to be people wounded,” Mahoney declared at a 1993 rally. “It’s about whose will shall rule on this planet, God’s or man’s.” Schenck, the Francis Schaeffer acolyte, was arrested over a dozen times outside abortion clinics and was detained twice for threats against President Clinton, including the notorious incident in which he dangled an aborted fetus in his face. Now the two were back, and with unfettered access to a heavily secured area of the Capitol building.

  The son of a Democratic state senator from the liberal college town of Athens, Georgia, Broun became born again after a string of failed marriages. He claimed his come-to-Jesus moment arrived while he was watching an NFL game, when he became entranced by a “gentleman with this big type hair wig on” holding a “John 3:16” sign. (The bewigged “gentleman” was Rollen Stewart, a Christian-right fanatic and fixture at sports events who is currently serving three consecutive sentences in jail on kidnapping charges, as well as several minor sentences for stink bomb attacks.) A medical doctor, Broun was elected in a special election in 2007 after the death of a long-time incumbent.

  Although he was only a backbencher, Broun presented himself as the future of the House Republicans. Joining other right-wing members, he opposed the emergency financial bailout, attacked any efforts at immigration reform, and sponsored a bill to protect soldiers from images of unclad women. “Our troops should not see their honor sullied so that the moguls behind magazines like Playboy and Penthouse can profit,” Broun proclaimed. His spokesman testified to his expertise as an “addictionologist” who is “familiar with the negative consequences associated with long-term exposure to pornography.” A week after Obama’s election victory, Broun took umbrage at the president-elect’s call for a national civilian security force, a proposal also backed by George W. Bush.

  Acknowledging the possibility that he might be “crazy,” Broun said that Obama had revealed himself as a radical Marxist Nazi socialist comparable to Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. “It may sound a bit crazy and off base,” Broun told an AP reporter, “but the thing is, he’s the one who proposed this national security force. I’m just trying to bring attention to the fact that we may—may not, I hope not—but we may have a problem with that type of philosophy of radical socialism or Marxism. That’s exactly what Hitler did in
Nazi Germany and it’s exactly what the Soviet Union did. When he’s proposing to have a national security force that’s answering to him, that is as strong as the U.S. military, he’s showing me signs of being Marxist.”

  After seeming to back away from his comments when he was heavily criticized, Broun announced he was “not taking back anything [he] said.” “I firmly believe that we must not fall victim to the ‘it can’t happen here’ mentality,” he declared in a press release. “I adhere to the adage ‘eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.’”

  Standing before the inaugural doorway, Broun joined Schenck and Mahoney in deep prayer. He raised his hands to the sky while Mahoney recited a prayer originally delivered by Billy Graham at Nixon’s 1969 inauguration. “For too long we have neglected thy word and ignored thy laws,” Mahoney preached. “We have sowed to the wind and are now reaping a whirlwind of crime, division, and rebellion. And now with the wages of sin staring us in the face, we remember thy words.”

  After Mahoney prayed, Schenck dipped his fingers in a jar of oil and painted several crosses on the door’s brass framing “as they did the furnishings of the tabernacle in the temple to the use of God and his word.” When Obama proceeded down the inaugural walkway thirteen days later, the crosses reflected a faint but ominous mark.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book would not have been possible without the help of many people. I have been privileged to be edited by Carl Bromley at Nation Books. He guided this book from start to finish with impeccable editorial judgment and kept me sane with his sense of humor. I am extraordinarily grateful for the friendship and unstinting support of Hamilton Fish. No one is more responsible for nurturing my journalistic endeavors. Taya Kitman, Joe Conason, Esther Kaplan, Ruth Baldwin, and everyone at the Nation Institute are great friends and indispensable colleagues. Rita Cant researched complex details of the book, providing essential background information and catching mistakes I would have missed. I look forward to her own endeavors in journalism. John Sherer from Basic Books oversaw a terrific team with confidence and professionalism. I am also grateful to Patrick Lannan and Martha Jessup from the Lannan Foundation, and to my agent, Anna Stein, who nurtured this project from its inception and offered assistance at every stage. Also thanks to Michelle Welsh-Horst at Perseus Books for her meticulous attention to detail.