Last summer, McCain appeared at an Aspen Institute discussion, where he tripped over himself trying to explain his position on science in science classes, saying intelligent design creationism does and does not belong in public schools. A former McCain aide acknowledged, “[H]is heart isn’t in this stuff…. But he has to pretend [that it is], and he’s not a good enough actor to pull it off. He just can’t fake it well enough.”
I think that’s right. I’ve never met McCain, but my sense is that the 2000 McCain was much closer to his real beliefs than the current model. When he denounced religious right leaders as “agents of intolerance,” he seemed to mean it. When McCain denounced himself for making the comments, he didn’t.
The senator just doesn’t seem to much care about the religious right, but he tried running for president once while keeping the Dobson crowd at arm’s distance, and learned that his campaign would have to suck up a lot more the second time around.
That is, at least publicly. Behind closed doors, it’s another story.
Two former aides hired to spearhead religious outreach for presidential candidate John McCain say that they were virtually ignored by the campaign and that McCain’s top campaign strategists are intent on winning votes of religious voters without having to develop serious ties to faith communities. The aides, who were fired in early April after roughly three months on the job, said the campaign staff declined to return scores of their phone calls and E-mail messages, denied them access to leaders of the McCain campaign, and pressed them to collect church directories — a controversial tactic — as the centerpiece of a strategy to woo “values” voters.
“In the end, you came away with the strong sense that they had contempt for the faith-based community,” says Marlene Elwell, one of those fired staffers. Elwell, a prominent Christian-right activist, was hired by McCain in December 2005 to be national director of his “Americans of Faith” coalition. “The way we were being treated it was as if we had leprosy.”
I don’t imagine skeptical religious right voters are going to care for this.
What’s more, the other fired staffer, Judy Haynes — a former top Christian Coalition official hired to work under Elwell — said in a separate interview that the McCain team exhibited “a contempt for Christians.”
“It’s an attitude about the Christian community that they don’t like to have to do [outreach] but that they need to do it,” Haynes said, referring to the McCain campaign’s religious outreach plan. “Like, if we can get what we want without having to get too close [to religious people] and not make a big display, we’ll do it.”
Well, yes, that’s exactly what the McCain campaign wants to do. They don’t actually like the fundamentalist base. They’re only pretending.
It reminds me of an incident in March in which reporters asked McCain about the distribution of taxpayer-subsidized condoms in Africa to fight the transmission of HIV. It led to “a long series of awkward pauses, glances up to the ceiling and the image of one of Mr. McCain’s aides, standing off to the back, urgently motioning his press secretary to come to Mr. McCain’s side.” The senator wouldn’t even respond to a question about whether condoms stop the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. (McCain eventually said, “I have to find out what my position was.”)
How long can Team McCain keep up the charade that it cares what the religious right base really thinks?