“The Mantle Of Sanctimony”: Christian Fundamentalism Is Weakening Force In Politics
In the waning days of March, a scandal has engulfed the Alabama State Capitol as Gov. Robert Bentley fired his top cop, who then turned around and accused the governor of having had an extramarital affair. The controversy engines hit high gear with the release of a salacious audiotape, in which the governor is overheard telling his listener how much he loves her and enjoys touching her breasts.
For all the inevitable handwringing and headlines, though, the accusations of Bentley’s romantic dalliance with a staffer — long-rumored in Alabama political circles and seemingly confirmed when his wife of 50 years filed for divorce in 2015 — are unlikely to damage his political standing. Nothing to see here, folks.
Except this: The disgrace of Bentley — a churchgoing, Bible-thumping moralist — is just one more gaping hole in the mantle of sanctimony that has afforded the Christian right a special place in American politics for the last 40 years. Though you will still occasionally hear rhetoric from the campaign trail that purports to espouse Christian values, fundamentalist Christianity — at least as a potent voting bloc — is pretty much a spent force in GOP politics.
If you have any doubt about that, just survey the current GOP presidential field, which is led by the narcissistic, non-Scriptural, thrice-married hedonist Donald Trump. Ted Cruz bet his presidential run on his bona fides as a true believer in the fundamentalist strain of Christianity, which emphasizes church attendance, public prayer and a narrow-minded moral code (at least for public consumption). But in primary contests so far, Trump has at least held his own with conservative churchgoers.
That’s the only thing about Trump’s baffling rise that prompts me to say a couple of hallelujahs. I don’t mourn the passing of fundamentalist Christianity as a commanding force; its adherents have done little to advance moral or ethical values.
With a precious few exceptions, they don’t promote social justice, or work to eliminate poverty, or campaign for compassion toward the “stranger” — immigrants. Instead, they have tried to impose their mean and rigid religious beliefs on public policy, misinterpreting the U.S. Constitution and misunderstanding the civic underpinnings of a pluralistic democracy.
Their enthusiasm for Trump underscores what has always been true about that group: They have strong nationalist and authoritarian impulses; they’re xenophobes; they’re averse to social change. There is also, among some white fundamentalist Christians, a strong whiff of racism.
It helps to remember the early days of the late Jerry Falwell, who founded the Moral Majority in 1979 and arranged a marriage of convenience with the Republican Party. As pastor of the Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia, he railed against the 1954 Supreme Court decision that desegregated public schools and denounced the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as a “Communist subversive.”
Falwell abandoned that rhetoric after he became a nationally prominent figure, but he didn’t abandon his right-wing views on race. His foray into national politics began when the federal government moved to revoke the tax-exempt status of the white-only private schools — “seg academies” — that sprang up in the wake of public school desegregation. Falwell had started his own seg academy in Virginia.
Given the animating passions of Falwell’s followers, it’s no surprise that so many conservative Christians have made a seamless transition to Trump. They had already shown themselves to be flexible on their principles, so long as their politicians continued to support the policies that were really important to them. Those include contempt for the poor, suspicion of Muslims, and a nationalist rhetoric that insists on dominance on the world stage.
Bentley has hewed closely enough to that line to make it unlikely he’ll pay any price for his alleged affair. (For the record, Bentley has stated, unconvincingly, that he has not had any “physical” relationship with the staffer.)
For example, the governor supported the state’s extremely harsh law aimed at illegal workers, even though it originally included a provision (since struck down by a federal court) making it a crime to “transport” an undocumented immigrant. Some critics pointed out that could punish a good Christian who offers an immigrant a ride to church.
Neither Bentley nor his supporters minded a bit.
By: Cynthia Tucker Haynes, Pulitzer Prize Winner for Commentary in 2007; The National Memo, March 26, 2015
“It’s Marketing, Pure And Simple”: Don’t Be Fooled — Donald Trump’s ‘Silent Majority’ Doesn’t Exist
At his rallies, Donald Trump’s supporters carry signs that read, “The Silent Majority Stands with Trump.” On Twitter, his supporters invoke the slogan to answer the candidate’s critics, such as myself, adding, “Silent No More.” Yet it’s the other part of the phrase that merits attention. Is there any sense in which Trump’s supporters constitute a majority?
Trump may indeed get to the 1,237 delegates he needs for a majority at the Republican convention. He might even get to a majority of the voters of the Republican Party, though I think that’s highly unlikely.
As of Tuesday’s primaries in Arizona and Utah, Trump had secured 37 percent of the vote of the Republican primary electorate, or roughly 7.8 million votes out of approximately 21 million.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there were 142.2 million registered voters in the country as of 2014. This means that, so far, Trump has secured the support of 6 percent of the electorate. Yes, that’s right, 6 percent. Or perhaps it would be better to focus on the two-thirds of the electorate who actually vote. In that case, it should be acknowledged that Trump has secured, well, 8 percent. Even after every state has voted in primaries , Trump’s tally will at best probably be around 10 percent of the general electorate. Of course, turnout is lower in the primaries than in the general election, but that doesn’t change the fact that Trump can’t claim a silent majority.
Yet recently, a journalist from a reputable outlet called me for an interview, and among her questions was one that began, “Given that the vast majority of Republicans support Trump . . . ”
Thanks to all the signs at his rallies, Trump’s message about a no longer silent “silent majority” has been broadcast so frequently that people have begun to believe it. It’s marketing, pure and simple.
We know that Trump really cares about the signs at his rallies because his campaign manager wades into the crowds to accost protesters with signs containing swear words, on one occasion even grabbing a protester by the collar. On ABC’s “This Week,” Trump explained, “He wanted them to take down those horrible profanity-laced signs.” He added, “When signs are put up, lifted up with tremendous profanity on them, I mean the worst profanity, and you have television cameras all over the place and people see these signs, I think maybe those people have some blame and should suffer some blame, also.”
This clear focus on the part of Trump and his campaign manager on the branding that will get onto television reveals the core of Trump’s campaign. The thesis is that a silent majority exists and that Trump will be its champion, decimating its foes. His strategy has been to secure votes by convincing people he already has them. If his thesis about a silent majority is wrong, his candidacy has no basis. Importantly, the numbers are telling us that the thesis is wrong.
Trump is little more than a celebrity who has been converting a fan base into vote share. What’s more, his celebrity is like a jet plane that’s about to run out of fuel.
Trump has been winning because he started with much greater name recognition than anyone other than the old establishment candidates. Some 20 million people watched “The Apprentice”; he began the campaign with 3.4 million Twitter followers. As an outsider in an election driven by antipathy to elites, Trump was able to clear out the other candidates with national name recognition: Jeb Bush, Chris Christie and Mike Huckabee. This left him facing candidates new to most Americans: Ted Cruz, John Kasich, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson.
Three of these relatively unknown candidates, Cruz, Kasich and Rubio, have beaten Trump soundly in all the markets small enough for a newcomer to penetrate against a celebrity. Of the 11 contests in which fewer than 200,000 people voted, Trump has lost eight. In other words, when voters get a chance to come to know the other candidates, they reject Trump.
Cruz, with his victory in Oklahoma and the draw in Missouri, has proved his ability to penetrate larger markets. This means he can beat Trump in markets where the pool of votes to capture reaches 1 million.
At this point, the challenge for both Cruz and Kasich is to penetrate the markets with pools of greater than 1 million voters. To date, Trump has captured all the contests between 1 million and 2 million, and he has done so with 38 percent of the votes. And to date, each contest with a vote pool of greater than 2 million has been won by a home-state candidate. Cruz took the biggest prize with Texas; Trump took the second-biggest with Florida (Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach gives him a high-profile second home beyond New York); and Kasich took the third in Ohio.
In other words, we don’t know yet who truly has the potential to capture the biggest remaining vote markets with no home-state favorite: California and Pennsylvania. Cruz and Kasich will benefit more than Trump from the winnowing of the field, thanks to the simple fact that, at last, many people will learn their names. In the lead-up to Super Tuesday votes on March 1, people were still having trouble pronouncing Kasich.
The Republican Party should avoid being taken in by Trump’s marketing claim to represent a silent majority and the related suggestions that his supporters might riot if the party turns away from him at a contested convention. The electorate is proving false the thesis that a silent majority stands with Trump. Yes, a determined minority stands with Trump, but that minority is likely to shrink as other candidates gain in name recognition. The party would be unwise to stake its fortunes on this determined minority.
By: Danielle Allen, Contributing Columnist, The Washington Post, March 25, 2016
“Donald Is Trumping The #NeverTrumps”: Can Ted Cruz Or John Kasich Stop The Trump Train?
Terrible tag-team, murder-suicide or surrender? Those are the options available for the ill-named, ill-executed and probably ill-fated #NeverTrump movement.
The Ides of March were unkind to retiring Sen. Marco Rubio, whose hope-not-fear, praise the lord farewell speech could just as easily have been a brief Et tu, Florida? Then fall Marco! Rubio had played Brutus to Jeb Bush, his former governor and mentor, and then it was retired reality TV star Donald Trump, who doth bestride the party like a colossus, who administered the coup de grace against Rubio in the Sunshine State.
That reduced the GOP field to three finalists, only one of whom – Trump – has a clear and realistic path to an acceptance speech on the final night of the GOP convention in Cleveland. In addition to Florida, he picked up wins in Illinois and North Carolina and was in a tight battle for Missouri.
The one place he fell clearly short was in Ohio, where the popular, two-term governor – John Kasich – held serve and survived the kind of existential test that took Rubio down. But, as I argued last week would be the case, dopey Don won for losing: Kasich’s victory “guarantees at least two not-Trumps remain in the field … with Kasich and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz splitting the non-Trump portion of the pie.”
Do you want more happy news, Trump-ists? Savor this: Per The Washington Post’s Matea Gold and Anu Narayanswamy, the two states that have gotten seen the biggest anti-Trump independent expenditure efforts thus far (or at least through March 13, when the latest Federal Election Commission records were available to them) were Florida, where at least $15.7 million was spent, and Illinois, where another $5.3 million was poured in. Guess in which two states Trump ran up the biggest margins Tuesday night? That’s right – the Sunshine State and the Land of Lincoln, both places where Trump scored double-digit wins.
So where does that leave team #NeverTrump? With a series of unappealing options. In spite of Kasich’s win, this is arguably a two-man race now between Trump and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who is the only other candidate anywhere near the real estate tycoon in terms of delegates. But Cruz faces a number of problems, starting with his own alienating personality and approach to politics. The non-Trump GOP may yet coalesce around him, but it’ll do so holding its collective nose. Anyone who hadn’t made a virtue of accumulating enemies in Washington would already have the not-Trump field to himself by now.
And the time it took to winnow the field can be marked off in the Southern states and more heavily religious electorates that have cast their ballots already. Here’s where the campaign trail leads for Republicans: the Arizona primary and Utah caucus next week; Wisconsin two weeks later and New York two weeks after that; and then a week later most of the remaining Northeastern states: Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island.
Where does Cruz notch his next victory? Trump’s going to be strong in Arizona, with former Gov. Jan Brewer and immigration nut Sheriff Joe Arpaio in his corner. Maybe the freshman Texas senator can score a victory in Utah but the map looks bleak after that. Can he go oh-for-April and survive until Indiana on May 3?
As FiveThirtyEight’s Carl Bialik observed Tuesday night, polls show that Trump is stronger vis a vis Cruz in states that haven’t voted yet:
Trump led Cruz by 17 points in places with votes on or before March 15, according to data provided by the online-polling company SurveyMonkey, based on its interviews of 8,624 Republican registered voters from Feb. 29 to March 6. But Trump’s lead expanded to 24 points in places that vote later.
In a hypothetical head-to-head against Cruz, Trump led by 1 point in places that had voted by today, but by 8 points everywhere else. As our delegate tracker indicates, Cruz needed a lead over Trump by now to be on track for a majority of delegates, because the voting gets tougher for him from here.
And that brings us back to Kasich. Appearing on CNN after winning the Buckeye State, the governor was spouting some fairly high octane spin: “I may go to the convention before this is over with more delegates than anybody else,” he said. “There’s 1,000 yet to pick.” Here’s the thing: Even if Kasich – who has less delegates than the dear-departed Rubio – wins those 1,000 or so delegates, he won’t get to the 1,237 needed for the nomination. And the guy whose first win in 31 tries just came in his home state isn’t poised to win the next 1,000 delegates anyway.
At this point Kasich’s sole hope – and arguably sole purpose – is to deny Trump delegates where Cruz is ill-equipped to do so. It’s the carve-up-the-map strategy offered last month by 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney. Former George W. Bush strategist Karl Rove laid it out on Fox Tuesday night: “Look at the contests coming up: We have bunch of Western states where Ted Cruz is probably likely to do well,” he said. “But we’ve got a lot of Northeastern states where he hasn’t been doing well where he hasn’t been doing well where John Kasich has done well. So you’ve got Cruz who could cover you know Utah and Arizona and Montana [on June 7] and you could have Kasich who could challenge Trump in places like Connecticut and Delaware. … It gets us to an even more contested convention. In chaos is opportunity for the little guy.”
This is what we’ve come to: Rove is trying to chart a path into chaos for his party in the hopes of benefiting the GOP establishment, or the “little guy” as he puts it. This is, by the way, the third of the five stages of Trump: the first two are the convictions that he could be stopped before or during the primaries and the third is the hope of a convention battle.
So the #NeverTrump-ists and their allies – specifically the Cruz and Kasich campaigns – have to decide quickly whether the last not-Trumps can either tag-team the front-runner before he recedes entirely from their view or at least stay out of each other’s way; the alternative is to continue competing with each other in the grim game of winnowing while more contests slide inexorably past them into Trump’s column.
Because sooner is becoming later and before they know it, the #NeverTrump will be faced with its own existential test: Whether to morph into #NeverTrumpUntilHeFacesHillary.
By: Robert Schlesinger, Managing Editor for Opinion, U.S. News & World Report, March 17, 2016
“The Party May Have No Power At All”: The Republican Convention Is Looking More And More Predictable By The Day
When we first heard talk of a “brokered” or “contested” convention during the 2016 invisible primary, it was just a quadrennial amusement, mostly associated with the sheer size of the early GOP presidential field. Wouldn’t it be cool, pundits thought, if none of these jokers can get a majority and we get to see a real convention instead of an infomercial?
As the GOP field was quickly winnowed, a whole new and more serious rationale for a contested convention came into view: a convention with no “putative nominee” running the show, and moreover, with an opposition still fighting to stop the front-runner. Suddenly, a knowledge of the usually boring and not terribly significant convention rules and procedures became a very valuable commodity in Beltway chatter, and all sorts of lurid scenarios blossomed in the fevered imaginations of would-be “brokers” and their journalistic fans.
Initially, the vision was of a convention with big, brawling, unlimited deliberative powers that could do any damn thing it wanted, particularly after the legal obligation to follow primary and caucus results was impatiently sloughed off at the end of a pro forma first ballot. So party elites didn’t want Donald Trump as the nominee? No problem, so long as he didn’t come to Cleveland with a majority of delegates bound to him. And even then, maybe the elites could manipulate the rules and disappear that majority! Anything seemed possible: A Romney nomination! A Paul Ryan nomination! A heroic effort by the party’s wise leaders to turn a general-election disaster into one long snake dance to the White House!
But as the reality of a contested convention has drawn nearer, in a context where it would likely involve Donald Trump as the favorite of a plurality but not a majority of delegates, the willingness of party elites to pull off some backstage coup in Cleveland has notably abated. Earlier this week, House Speaker Paul Ryan, who would under normal procedures chair the convention, came very close to a Sherman statement (named after William Tecumseh Sherman’s 1884 disclaimer that “I will not accept if nominated and will not serve if elected”), ruling out not only himself but any other “dark horse” nominee who did not compete in the primaries:
“I’ve been really clear about this,” he said. “If you want to be president, you should run for president. We should select our nominee from among the people who are running for president. Clear and simple. So no, I am not going to be the president. I am not going to be the nominee.” He added, “I am not going to become the president through Cleveland.”
Now today a new report from NBC based on interviews with members of the RNC Rules Committee showed horror at the idea of a “dark horse” spreading rapidly among these ultra-insiders:
“Ridiculous — not happening,” said one Rules Committee member, asked about the prospect of candidates getting on the ballot who did not run this year.
“There’s no way in hell that any of these candidates — who have worked this hard and spent this much money — are going to say, ‘OK, now, for the good of the party, I’ll sit down and let’s bring back Mitt Romney,'” said the insider. “That’s a fantasy world — there’s zero chance of that happening.”
Another committee member said creating a path for a new candidate would lead to a party meltdown …
Indeed, most of the 19 Rules Committee members reached by MSNBC opposed any rule enabling new candidates to run at the convention. Only three backed a rule allowing new candidates to run.
So if it’s considered an outrageous offense to primary voters to bypass all of the candidates they’ve voted for, you have to figure at some point it could prove toxic to elevate a candidate who has been regularly defeated as well. And that could become a fatal problem for John Kasich, who is extremely likely to arrive in Cleveland in third place in pledged delegates. Is the convention really going to nominate the left-most (as perceived, anyway) candidate in the whole field after he’s lost 35 or 40 or so primaries and caucuses? It’s hard to imagine any degree of late-primary momentum that’s going to make that look any more acceptable than a Ryan or Romney nomination on a second or third ballot.
So the GOP lurches toward a convention where the only feasible outcomes are probably going to be a Donald Trump or (if he can finish a close second while denying Trump a majority) a Ted Cruz nomination. This will make some Republican Establishment types crazy. But even party elites now seem to understand that this is the wrong year to assert their power to overrule the GOP rank and file. And so, to take in vain the name of the political-science tome that is going to need a revised edition after this cycle ends, “the party” may “decide” it has no power to decide at all.
By: Ed Kilgore, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, March 18, 2016
“Inside The Doomed Conservative Dump-Trump Plot”: Plans For A Consensus 3rd Party Candidate If Trump Is GOP Nominee
A group of powerful conservatives met Thursday to try to hammer out a plan for a potential third-party consensus candidate if Trump becomes the GOP nominee.
The team that brought you Santorum 2016 has decided to stop Trump.
He must be petrified.
For seven hours on Thursday, a few dozen conservative leaders gathered in an upstairs room of the Army Navy Club off K Street in downtown Washington, D.C., to rack their collective brains—but reached no conclusion on how to thwart the billionaire’s rise.
Quin Hillyer, a National Review contributing editor, fielded questions afterward from print reporters and a Chinese camera crew, explaining that the group hoped all the 2016 presidential candidates who haven’t endorsed Trump will coalesce behind a unity ticket. He added that there wasn’t a consensus that conservatives should unite behind Ted Cruz.
“That was not the consensus,” he said, when asked about support for a Cruz-helmed unity ticket. “The consensus was that we need a unity ticket of some sort and we’ll let the candidates work out who the unity ticket is.”
He added that the group hopes someone other than Trump will be the Republican Party’s nominee.
“Obviously a third party or an independent bid is one other option,” he added. “But we didn’t come to any formal plans. We are exploring every option.”
Other attendees—including Bob Fischer, the president of Fischer Furniture in Rapid City, South Dakota, who quickly jumped in an Uber when approached by reporters after the meeting, and Bill Wichterman, a key Santorum booster and a top D.C. lobbyist—declined to talk about the closed-door discussion.
The invitation billed the event as a meeting of “conservative leaders to strategize how to defeat Donald Trump for the Republican nomination, and if he is the Republican nominee for president, to offer a true conservative candidate in the general election.”
A copy of the invitation obtained by The Daily Beast showed it went to people on the email list of a group called Conservatives of Faith—a group that helped give energy to Rick Santorum’s 2016 presidential bid. The group came together in July of 2011 to connect evangelical leaders with presidential hopefuls. It’s loosely affiliated with another, larger group of powerful social conservative leaders called the Council for National Policy—which has endorsed Trump rival Ted Cruz.
The two groups sometimes have concurrent meetings so members can attend both.
Though the group has a history of helping Santorum, Thursday’s meeting wasn’t just a reunion of the former senator’s old advocates.
Conservatives of Faith held one of its first gatherings in August of 2011 at the ranch of Jim Leininger, a wealthy businessman who supports conservative Christian causes and school-choice efforts. Members of the group met at the ranch with Rick Perry and his wife, Anita, at the start of his 2012 presidential campaign.
Fischer, the furniture magnate, is a key organizer of the group. The invitation to Thursday’s meeting instructed respondents to RSVP to him directly. Acquaintances describe Fischer as “thoughtful,” “low-key,” “lovely,” “wonderful,” and capable of managing others’ big egoes. His basic belief, according to sources, is that if enough conservative Christian leaders get together in a room, discuss the issues, pray, and agree upon one battle plan or chosen candidate, that they will be able to accomplish their ends.
It’s an interesting theory. But—fortunately for Trump—it has a poor track record. A few weeks after Obama won re-election in 2012, the Conservatives of Faith group convened at a country club in McLean, Virginia, to gin up enthusiasm for a second Santorum presidential bid.
We all know how that worked out.
And though members of the Council for National Policy backed Cruz, he got schlonged in the evangelical-heavy Southern states where his team had hoped to do well. The fact that Donald Trump beat him by winning the evangelical vote indicates that evangelical Christian leaders—including those in the Council for National Policy and Conservatives of Faith—don’t have as much clout as conventional wisdom might dictate.
Still, it features a number of evangelical power brokers.
Sources estimated that the Conservatives of Faith email list has upwards of 300 names on it. Phyllis Schlafly of Eagle Forum has been involved with the group in the past, but she endorsed Trump this cycle and didn’t attend the meeting on Thursday.
Trump won every state but Ohio on March 15’s Super Tuesday primaries. So today’s effort is just the latest setback for the #NeverTrump movement—an effort that may have come just after the nick of time.
Perhaps as a result, there is reason for skepticism as this latest faction of the Republican Party sets out to try to change the trajectory of the race.
Dennis Stephens, a long-time conservative lobbyist based in D.C. who backs Trump, said the group’s plans aren’t promising.
“Third party equals Hillary Clinton,” he said.
By: Betsy Woodruff, The Daily Beast, March 18, 2016
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