Quadruple-checking
June 6th, 2008Mark DeMoss is a conservative leader who most often works with Evangelicals. In an interview with Belief.net, he was asked if he thinks Barack Obama can gain Evangelical support. He answers:
If one third of white evangelicals voted for Bill Clinton the second time, at the height of Monica Lewinsky mess—that’s a statistic I didn’t believe at first but I double and triple checked it—I would not be surprised if that many or more voted for Barack Obama in this election. You’re seeing some movement among evangelicals as the term [evangelical] has become more pejorative. There’s a reaction among some evangelicals to swing out to the left in an effort to prove that evangelicals are really not that right wing. There’s some concern that maybe Republicans haven’t done that well. And there’s this fascination with Barack Obama. So I will not be surprised if he gets one third of the evangelical vote. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was 40-percent.
First I would note that there are significant differences between Barack Obama and Bill Clinton which make it a different sort of challenge for Obama to gain Evangelical support over Clinton (for instance, Obama does not have a strong religious tradition, especially not now that he dumped his pastor and his church, and Clinton talks about religion and Christ far more often than any politician of our age except maybe George W. Bush and Jimmy Carter, and that’s just an introduction). But beyond that, I’m flustered by his claim that he “double and tripled checked” that voters voted for Clinton “the second time,” during the “height” of the “Lewinsky mess.” The Lewinsky scandal did not erupt until significantly after the election, so it certainly wasn’t at its “height” during the election cycle. Maybe a fourth check might’ve done him good? (In fact, in 1996 some people believed it was almost impossible logistically for the President to have an affair, but that’s just an aside. The greater point is that he didn’t “double and triple check” a damn thing.)
I do not know how Evangelicals will vote when it comes to McCain in the fall, but I doubt Obama gets forty percent of them for a variety of reasons. The greatest might well be that he disowned his church, and DeMoss talks about McCain being critical of the Religious Right but that will pale in comparison to the fact that Obama left his church for political purposes. Besides, I think it’s incredibly foolish to expect Evangelicals to vote for a Democrat when there are so many aging Supreme Court Justices on the bench waiting to retire.