A Country Once Again Governed by Christians Ralph Reed
How Christians Are Changing The Soul of American Politics
By Ralph Reed
Chapter One: How We Got In that location
The sun was setting over central Florida every bit the aeroplane carrying me and my colleagues banked right and descended toward Orlando International Airdrome. Information technology was November 17, 1995, the 24-hour interval earlier the Republican party harbinger poll in Florida known as Presidency Iii. Information technology was the last preliminary bout in the "long primary" that stretched from the announcements of the presidential candidates earlier in the year until the Iowa caucuses in February 1996. Ronald Reagan had won information technology in 1980, and George Bush won it in 1988, so the printing corps and political party professionals looked to the harbinger poll as an early barometer of organizational musculus and a reliable predictor of the eventual presidential nominee.
With me in the plane were Duane Ward, a former adjutant to Jerry Falwell and Oliver Northward, and the Texas-based religious broadcaster John Hagee, who had come along simply to run across the Christian Coalition at piece of work upwards close. Below usa rushed the pino trees, occasional palms, and expansive flatness that I remembered from time spent growing up in Florida. As the airplane landed and came to a stop on the rail, I glanced at my scout. We had exactly fifteen minutes to make it to the junior high school where almost two thousand clapping, foot-stomping Christian activists were packed into a gymnasium, awaiting the start of our presidential candidate forum and rally.
I jumped into a waiting van driven by one of our county coordinators, and we screamed off the tarmac behind a police escort. The van careened through the streets of Orlando every bit 2 motorcycles with sirens blaring and blue lights flashing cut their way through the night. Every bit the minutes ticked by, our commuter reported the startling fact that more than two-thirds of the delegates attending the harbinger poll from her canton were members of the Christian Coalition.
"When we first showed up at the local meeting of the Republican party, nosotros were treated like pariahs," she said. "It was nearly similar we had leprosy. That was two years ago. Terminal calendar week we went to a coming together and were surrounded by candidates and legislators seeking our assist. We're no longer outside looking in. We're on the inside looking out." As the van screeched to a stop, its burning tires lifting a cloud of blue fume in the air, nosotros scrambled through a dorsum door of the junior loftier school, where the rally was but beginning. Greeting my entrance were the animated faces of Pat and Bay Buchanan, who were upset about his spot in the lineup of speakers.
"A candidate trumps a spouse," Bay screamed over the noise. "A candidate always trumps a spouse."
"I have to go set for the debate this evening," exclaimed Pat. Considering Bob Dole and Phil Gramm were stranded in Washington for a budget vote, they had sent their wives--Elizabeth and Wendy--to fill in for them. Pat was upset because the spouses were alee of him on the program.
"I just walked in the door," I protested. "I don't have anything to do with the order of the speakers. Why don't you accept information technology upwards with our Florida people?"
"They've already said no," laughed Pat. "That's why I'thousand coming to you." Pat was a no-holds-barred street fighter who had won a large grassroots following from his perch on CNN'southward Crossfire program. We had teamed up many times confronting liberal opponents on television, and I was happy to assist him, even if it simply meant juggling the schedule. Only his request to speak first probably had less to do with fence preparation and more to do with outmaneuvering his opponents.
Rather than argue, we agreed to allow Buchanan go start, which sent the other entrada staffs into an apoplectic fit. As the screaming and finger-pointing continued backstage, a singer belted out "The Star-Spangled Imprint." On cue, I stepped to the podium to deliver preliminary remarks. A large gold Christian Coalition logo sparkled beneath hot klieg lights behind me while the audition spread out before me like a homo coating in the darkened auditorium.
"If the Republican party wants to retain the bulk it won in 1994 and add to information technology in 1996," I predicted, "it should not, cannot, and must not retreat from the pro-life and pro-family calendar that made information technology a majority party." The auditorium erupted in adulation as those in the bleachers stomped their anxiety, waved banners, and blew horns.
"In politics, every bit in romance," I continued, "y'all trip the light fantastic with the one who brung yous. And the Republican political party has reached majority status with the votes of evangelicals, pro-family Roman Catholics, Greek Orthodox, and their allies."
Every bit I stepped from the phase, I couldn't assist but reverberate on how far nosotros had come since we had held the very first meeting of the Christian Coalition in Orlando in belatedly 1989. At that time we had fewer than 5 thou members, and our first rally drew simply six hundred supporters. Now, less than six years subsequently, we had 1.7 million members and supporters, more than a third of the delegates to Presidency Iii, and almost two thousand local chapters influencing legislation from school boards to the halls of Congress. In political terms, we had arrived.
Backstage, Lamar Alexander greeted me, minus his trademark cherry-red-and-blackness checkered flannel shirt. He wore a conventional blue suit and necktie, the official uniform of presidential candidates. Lamar was flanked by Mike White potato, his media guru, and Dan Casse, his chief policy wonk. Nosotros had talked on the phone earlier in the week, and Lamar expressed his desire to make a strong run at the pro-family delegates in spite of his moderate views on ballgame. I suggested that he stress his opposition to federal funding of abortion. That dark, Lamar cut the air with his fist and pledged to a rising crescendo of applause that under an Alexander assistants Planned Parenthood would not receive a dime in federal grants.
"Have you always met Naomi Judd?" Lamar asked. I replied that I had not. My wife was a big country music fan; she would merely dice if she knew I had met 1 of her favorite stars.
"Well, she would like to run across yous," Lamar said. I was led into a small belongings room, where Naomi sat on a bench. Her hair was peppery blood-red, her eyes deep blue, and she looked similar a little China doll in an Oriental tunic and yellow silk pants complemented by sparkling white-and-gold sequined shoes. Nosotros could hear the crowd roaring in the auditorium behind the states. It was well-nigh surreal, as though someone had parachuted a geisha daughter into the middle of a battlefield.
"I don't care much for politics," Naomi said, "but I do believe in what the Christian Coalition is doing. So even though I don't normally go to political rallies, I wanted to exist here."
I thanked Naomi for coming and so headed to the dorsum of the hall equally Elizabeth Dole, looking poised and bonny every bit always, held along from the podium. As a committed Christian who spoke openly nearly her religion, Elizabeth was one of Bob Dole's greatest assets. The Dole campaign oft sent her to address pro-family audiences, where she pledged her husband's fidelity to the bourgeois cause and spoke movingly almost her own religious beliefs. Particularly given the contrast with Hillary Rodham Clinton, many at the grassroots hungered for a conservative, pro-family unit First Lady who would be a symbol for their values the way Mrs. Clinton had served as a symbol for liberal values.
"Bob Dole supported the pro-life plank in 1980, 1984, 1988, and 1992, and he will back up it once more in 1996," she promised. The crowd cheered agreeably.
Michael Barone of U.S. News and Ron Brownstein of the Los Angeles Times sauntered over and asked how our members would vote in the harbinger poll. I replied that they were spread all over the map, with Dole, Gramm, Buchanan, and Keyes all receiving a healthy chunk. Alexander was also making a surprising run. Many remained undecided on the dark before the vote. By failing to endorse a candidate, nosotros had avoided the trap of actualization to dictate the nominee to the political party. There was no "Christian Coalition" candidate for president. Nosotros had dodged the bullet that brought down organized labor in 1984, when the AFL-CIO fabricated the error of endorsing Walter Mondale early and then was blamed when he lost 40-9 states. In 1996 we were existence courted past all the candidates, and similar a debutante at the cotillion, we refused to surrender our centre (or our chastity) to any of them.
After the rally the crowd scattered, and the candidates hustled to a live televised argue scheduled for that evening on Larry King Live. Sitting cross-legged on a metal chair in a back room with blank physical walls and with electrical cables strewn about, I was surrounded by a blur of noise and confusion. I marveled that our participation in the pageantry of politics was now treated by the media as almost humdrum. Our rally had featured every major presidential candidate or his spouse, dozens of state legislators, the state commissioner of teaching, the governor of S Carolina, and two m grassroots activists. The majority of the delegates to a preliminary straw poll that might well determine the nominee of ane of the nation's two major political parties were religious conservatives. All the same no i viewed our presence with warning any longer. What a contrast from the Republican national convention in Houston in 1992, where many of the same delegates were treated as if they were horned monsters rising from the swamp.
These activists are not seeking to win authorities goodies or curry favor with politicians. They are reluctant political actors. After two generations of self-imposed retreat from political involvement, they have reentered the political arena with a common purpose and an uncommon enthusiasm. They await out upon a society they come across equally torn asunder past explicit sexual practice and violence on idiot box, rampant divorce, skyrocketing illegitimacy, epidemics of crime and drugs, and a 1000000 teen pregnancies every yr. Their way of life and their values are under assail. For these activists, the most important issue in the nation is not "the economy, stupid," as the sign in the Clinton campaign headquarters proclaimed. It is the civilisation, the family, a loss of values, a pass up in civility, and the destruction of our children.
Most politicians miss the middle and soul of this business. They debate bug like accountants. As they headed into the 1996 elections, two of the nigh hotly touted topics in American politics were the apartment taxation and the balanced budget amendment. Those are important bug. But a flat tax volition non teach a child right from incorrect when a friend offers drugs or easy sex. A counterbalanced budget amendment cannot provide a male role model to a immature male child in the inner metropolis who has no father. The nation is hungering for public figures to address these moral concerns--Hillary Clinton has called them "the politics of pregnant," Dan Quayle chosen them "family values," while Bill Bennett has termed them the "politics of virtue." But it is non on such labels but rather on the root causes of moral drift that our national politics will plow in the coming years. On that there is little disagreement. What makes religious conservatives controversial--and essential--to the contend over values is their insistence that, in the end, the answers to moral reject can be found only with a return to faith in God.
From the moment the religious conservative movement outburst upon the national political scene in 1979 with the dizzying rise of the Moral Majority, the printing and political establishment reacted with horror. Jerry Falwell, James Robison, and a core of preachers and religious broadcasters had awakened the slumbering giant of the American evangelical church. Their supporters poured out of the pews and into the precincts, becoming the most formidable grassroots army since the rise of the labor unions. When the movement played a fundamental office in electing Ronald Reagan and giving Republicans command of the Senate in 1980, their critics reacted ferociously, calling them "fascists," "extremists," and "fanatics." Falwell later on found himself embroiled in the financial mess of the PTL scandal and beat a serenity retreat from the political scene. The embarrassing sexual activity scandals that rocked religious broadcasting in the late 1980s, culminating with the plummet of PTL and the fall from grace of Jimmy Swaggart, robbed the movement of the power of the electronic church that had once been its mainstay. The movement seemed dead, and the cultural elites danced on its grave.
For believers, however, the grave is always followed by resurrection. The silent and plodding return began with the founding of the Christian Coalition in 1989, a year that saw the pro-family motility fighting a desperate (and losing) rearguard activeness. The Supreme Courtroom upheld a Missouri pro-life law, sparking a cruel counterreaction from the pro-abortion lobby. The National Abortion Rights Activeness League targeted pro-life state legislators across the country and poured millions into their opponents' campaigns. Two pro-life Republican gubernatorial candidates--in Virginia and New Bailiwick of jersey--waffled on the abortion effect and lost to pro-choice Democrats. Plans to legalize school prayer were quietly shelved. The number of conservative votes in Congress dwindled to barely enough to sustain President Bush's abortion vetoes.
How could the pro-family unit motility recover from the trunk blows it had suffered and regain the momentum of the early Reagan years? The style they chose was to focus on local politics and local issues. Thus the Christian Coalition began quietly building a formidable network of grassroots activists, who organized their neighborhoods, sponsored preparation workshops, identified friendly voters, and passed out voter education literature. A number of independent pro-family unit groups began to sprout up across the country, gaining newfound clout past lobbying country legislatures and producing well-researched policy papers. The media mostly ignored those changes. For iii years nosotros breathed new life into the movement, all with little fanfare. When the Christian Coalition showed its new forcefulness in the successful Clarence Thomas confirmation struggle, the media attacked once once again. Our opponents conspicuously hoped that nosotros would repeat the mistakes of the onetime religious right, overplaying our mitt, using overheated rhetoric, and becoming an easy target for the left. But they were swiftly disappointed. The grassroots were smarter, tougher, and wiser. They were seasoned veterans of many political battles. Now, almost two decades after the first religious conservatives broke into national politics, nosotros are a part of the scenery, a permanent fixture on the political landscape, treated with respect by our allies and grudging admiration by our foes.
The candidate forum in Orlando that balmy November evening underscored a central reality that will shape American politics in the 1990s. No longer a bipolar globe dominated past Republicans and Democrats, America has become a fragmented, fractious republic of what James Madison called "factions"--citizen movements held together by shared values rather than party loyalty. Perot voters, property rights advocates, term limits supporters, environmental "greens," antitax activists, gays, gun lobbyists, home schoolers, and evangelical Christians are transforming politics in a dramatic manner. The nearly constructive amongst these citizen efforts is an emerging coalition of evangelicals, Greek Orthodox, and traditionalist Roman Catholics. Their goal: to limit government, reinvigorate the family, and restore the culture's Judeo-Christian principles. Their hierarchy of loyalties is uncompromisingly simple: They are people of faith first, Americans second, and Republicans or Democrats third. And they are proving yet again that man does non live by bread alone. The real boxing for the soul of our nation is not fought primarily over the gross national product and the prime interest rate, but over virtues, values, and the culture.
There are those amongst the ascendant elites and opinion makers who treat these religious convictions and the people who hold them as a danger to be feared. I believe they are a solution waiting to happen. For we must never forget, every bit George Will has observed, that the case for commonwealth is non aesthetic--it is philosophical. A dictatorship is efficient, placidity, and inhumane. In the chilling phrase most fascist Italia, Mussolini made the trains run on time. In a democracy, the trains sometimes run late, the conversation is loud, and disputes tin can turn contentious and occasionally downright nasty. Simply that dissent is a small cost to pay for freedom. Indeed, this racket is not a sign of weakness; it is a sign of strength. And among the noisiest disputes are those introduced into the trunk politic by people of faith. Sure, the mixture of religion and politics sparks controversy. But this nation's 30 million religious conservatives are forcing us to talk about things that must exist talked well-nigh. They are non going to be silent or go abroad. Nor should they.
The case for republic is that the rights of government derive from the consent of the governed, and the surest antitoxin to tyranny is a complimentary people that believes information technology owes allegiance to a Higher Ability, non the government. The consent of the governed rests upon faith in a sovereign God to which authorities itself is subject. In this greater moral context, faith equally political strength is not undemocratic; it is the very essence of democracy.
Over the by six years, equally executive director of ane of the nation's leading public policy organizations, I accept traveled an average of 200,000 miles a year, living out of a suitcase in a string of anonymous hotels and byways, crisscrossing the country and delivering hundreds of speeches to the faithful in hotels, churches, and meeting halls. This endless travel has required the commitment of my wife Jo Anne and our iii immature children, who have provided emotional support in the struggle. They are also a constant reminder of the reason why I and then many are engaged in it. On this frenetic schedule I accept been sustained by the inescapable decision that our time as people of religion has finally come.
The reasons are articulate: To expect at America today is to witness a nation struggling confronting forces as dangerous every bit any armed forces foe it has always faced. The threats, still, come not from without but from within. Families are disintegrating, fathers are abandoning their children, abortion is the most common medical procedure in the nation, and young people nourish schools that are not rubber and in which they practice not learn. In the inner city illegitimacy is rampant, drug deals are openly conducted on streetcomers, hopelessness is the norm, and children are shot by marauding carloads of juvenile gang members. In that location is no economic solution to this social chaos--information technology is a collection of moral issues that require moral solutions.
The pro-family motility grows and prospers past addressing these bug. Our solutions are so morally compelling that nosotros tin no longer exist denied our place in the chat we phone call republic. Nosotros shall feel triumph and disappointment, victory and defeat, leaps of progress followed past frustrating setbacks, only we will not exist denied what is right. I believe in the unforgettable words of the abolitionist preacher Theodore Parker: "The curve of the moral universe is long, but it leads towards justice."
Whittaker Chambers wrote in his autobiography Witness that when he left Communism he felt every bit though he had passed from the winning side to bring together the losers. Those were chilling words for anyone who lived during the Cold State of war. The American revolutionaries in their mean solar day, the Communists in their time, and the left in the 1960s all possessed a unique and powerful confidence that history was on their side. Today that confidence no longer belongs to liberals or their allies, just to the right and, more than particularly, to religious conservatives. The once morally persuasive and politically powerful left has lost its vocalism. Where once it was a vanguard on behalf of minorities and the downtrodden, today information technology is a special-interest polyglot of quotas and gear up-asides. Its eloquent defense of voting rights and economic equality for women has been drowned out by the extremist demands of the abortion anteroom. Its voice for the take-nots has been garbled by a shameful defense force of a swollen and unresponsive poverty manufacture.
But more than any other failure, it is their myopic rejection of religion equally a "fanatical" intrusion into politics that has paved the way for the success of the pro-family movement. For today, religious conservatives are poised to enter an era of American life in which moral issues, and the pro-family agenda, volition predominate.
Those social undercurrents are far more of import than the issue of the 1996 elections. If the Republicans can make the election a referendum on Clinton'south record, he volition exist a one-term president. But Clinton is a gifted politician who will borrow shamelessly from the rhetoric and entrada themes of conservatives in order to become reelected. His campaign is plagiarizing the Reagan reelection strategy of 1984. That will make the presidential competition competitive and close. But no thing what the issue in 1996, Clinton is already governing on bourgeois terms, like-minded to a balanced budget in 7 years, delivering homilies in support of schoolhouse prayer, promising to "end welfare every bit nosotros know it," dumping Joycelyn Elders and other left-wing lightning rods, and abandoning the pet causes of liberalism.
Bill Clinton cannot win the fence over ideas, but the Republicans could lose, especially if the political party abandons its unapologetic pro-life and pro-family unit policies. If its presidential nominee chooses a running mate or runs on a platform that sends a indicate of retreat on bug beloved to pro-family voters, support for the party among its religious base will drain away every bit if from a slashed avenue. The "big tent" will plummet, and a third party featuring an evangelical Ross Perot figure could mushroom from the dank soil of compromise. If the GOP hopes to win back the White House in 1996, it must be the party of Main Street, not Wall Street, and it must be viewed as a pro-family political party, non narrowly pro-business.
Information technology is one of the ironies of our time that equally society has become increasingly secular, organized religion has get a more potent force than ever in a cynical and alienated electorate. More than by the Perot movement or the independent voter, the destiny of American politics volition be determined by the energized evangelical, the devout Roman Cosmic, and the observant Jew.
To many, this reality comes as a profound surprise. In 1989, when Jerry Falwell closed down the Moral Majority, many declared the religious conservative movement dead. Editorials and columns gloated that after generating much rut, it had simply fizzled out. According to some information technology was like a "summertime flower" that blossomed once and quickly faded. Few believed there was any futurity for the motility at all. Dark forebodings of irrelevance abounded. Even some evangelicals agreed. Christian groups had campaigned for years on issues like abortion and schoolhouse prayer "without achieving one slice of legislation," one prominent evangelical theologian observed. And David Frum, author of the 1994 volume Dead Right, proved that sometimes the bourgeois chattering grade tin be as wrong equally their liberal counterparts. In his book and in later on columns and articles, Frum wrote that a "poor, relatively uneducated grouping" would not "win very many fights, and is hardly in a position to offset them." He wondered how a group "so few in number and and so politically weak" had ever "generated and then much fuss."
How did the Christian Coalition rise from the rubble of the televangelism scandals and political defeats of the belatedly 1980s to go one of the most effective grassroots political organizations in the country? The reply may surprise you lot.
Afterward his bruising 1988 presidential entrada, Pat Robertson returned to rebuild the battered finances of the Christian Dissemination Network, which had suffered more $100 meg in lost revenues in his absence. Robertson had come in 3rd in the Republican presidential primaries, trailing George Bush-league and Bob Dole. The financial network and grassroots regular army he had congenital during this presidential campaign provided a fix-fabricated base of operations for a new political motility. But what grade would it take?
In the leap of 1989 Robertson received a phone telephone call from Billy McCormack, his Louisiana state coordinator, that would prove fateful. "You brought hundreds of thousands of people into the political process," McCormack said. "Unless you provide them with leadership at present, all y'all have worked for will be lost, and all the blood and treasure yous take spent will be for nought." Robertson agreed and some time later sent out invitations to a meeting of key campaign operatives and other pro-family leaders to discuss the time to come of the religious bourgeois movement.
In late September 1989 Robertson convened the meeting at a downtown hotel in Atlanta. Many of the nigh prominent pro-family leaders in the nation attended. They groused nigh having been asked to carry water in presidential campaigns for Reagan and Bush-league while being given trivial input into policy or personnel. That reinforced the feeling among the leaders that they were similar urchins with their easily out. Their level of political maturity---and frustration-was rising. They at present understood that all the pro-life platforms in the world were a poor substitute for committed conservatives serving in government.
The movement was at a fuming point. Unless information technology did something to reassert its force, it would go on to be taken for granted by Republican politicians and discounted by the printing. Information technology needed to build a permanent, lasting political infrastructure. Two ideas dominated the discussion. Several leaders proposed a large convocation to call for a rightward plow in government and a render to traditional values--a kind of political Billy Graham crusade that would burn down up the troops and describe massive media attention. The proposed name was the American Congress of Christian Citizens. The thought was to fill up the Houston Astrodome or some other huge arena in the South or Westward with xx grand to thirty thousand supporters. Such a meeting, it was felt, would exist a tangible expression of the movement's political clout.
The 2nd idea was for a grassroots citizen group that would "requite Christians a voice in authorities again." Robertson passed out a proposed mission argument with a five-fold purpose, which included training Christians for effective social activeness, combating antireligious bigotry, alerting Christians of issues and legislation on a timely basis, speaking out for profamily values in the media, and representing people of faith at every level of government. The reception to this plan, the brainstorm of Robertson, was less overwhelming. Many leaders, like Beverly LaHaye of Concerned Women for America or Don Wildmon of the American Family Association, already had big and formidable organizations. They wondered if another group was necessary. Grassroots leaders were besides nervous. Many had launched small, struggling state-based or community-based groups bearing innocuous names like the Family Policy Network. Did they want another national organization that would compete for dollars and moreover could get a lightning rod for the national media, as the Moral Majority had been in the 1980s?
Robertson had invited me to attend the meeting after I bumped into him at an event at the Bush countdown in early 1989. At his request I had sent him a memorandum on how to organize a grassroots organization--a group that had no name but would later get the Christian Coalition. My background was as a Republican political operative and a historian, though I was a committed Christian. I did not consider myself a "Christian activist," just I shared many of the values of the motion and wanted to run into religion play a more vital part in the public life of the nation. The memorandum recommended that the new grouping focus on building a state-by-state, county-by-county grassroots organization that reached all the fashion down to the neighborhood level. Information technology likewise advocated instruction those pouring into the political process how to be effective citizens by launching an aggressive preparation plan modeled afterward the leadership schools of Morton Blackwell, a longtime conservative who had served in the Reagan White House and whose political activism stretched dorsum to the Goldwater campaign.
When some present were critical of the idea of launching a new organization, I leaned forrad and said to Pat, "I recall at that place is a existent need and a huge constituency out there."
Although offered an opportunity to become involved in the project earlier, I waited until I had finished my doctorate in history at Emory University. My existent goal was to write and to teach at the collegiate level. I was writing literally the last three pages of my dissertation when Pat chosen and invited me to nourish the meeting. The timing was providential. Every bit attracted every bit I was to the thought of a life in the cloisters of academe, the opportunity to help rebuild the remnants of the religious bourgeois movement was more compelling. When Pat introduced me to the others in attendance every bit the "first staff member" of the new organization, I was as shocked every bit everyone else. But the sense of risk was irresistible, and the possibilities for success seemed almost limitless.
The coming together adjourned with a decision to pursue both projects simultaneously. The idea was to begin forming a grassroots network across the nation and to employ information technology to feed into the American Congress of Christian Citizens. I moved to Virginia Beach, and began the arduous work of launching a straight-mail fund-raising endeavour and making the start grassroots contacts from lists of activists left over from the campaign. Sifting through the wreckage of the presidential entrada, I sat in an erstwhile warehouse building surrounded past the relics of its heyday: abandoned postal service machines, inflatable elephants, an IBM mainframe computer that we sold for salvage, and thousands of cassette tapes bearing the championship, "What I Will Do equally President." Phones jangled all 24-hour interval with disgruntled vendors all the same owed money by the defunct campaign. I was reminded of Winston Churchill's observation, "Politics is virtually every bit heady as war and quite every bit dangerous. In state of war you can merely exist killed once, but in politics many times."
All that occurred against a backdrop of the deepening disappointment of many religious conservative leaders as the Bush administration assembled a government. George Bush was elected in 1988 as the first incumbent vice president to succeed a sitting president since Martin Van Buren followed Andrew Jackson in 1836. Bush had campaigned every bit a conservative and had pledged to assemble what would have been in event the third term of Ronald Reagan. Pro-family voters had played a prominent role in his victory--i-3rd of all voters listed abortion as their main reason for voting--and they cast their ballots for Bush-league by a margin of two to ane. But later the entrada ended, many Reaganites throughout the government were politely asked to leave. A grouping of evangelical leaders led by Pat Robertson, Jim Dobson, and Bob Dugan submitted names of qualified conservative evangelicals to the Bush-league transition team. A number of them met with Bush-league and Chase Untemeyer, director of White Firm personnel, simply before the Bush-league inaugural and provided them with a list of individuals and the posts they were seeking. Untemeyer and others promised to give the list full consideration.
The personnel selection process got off to a rocky start well-nigh immediately. When the White House floated the name of Dr. Louis Sullivan, president of Morehouse College Medical School in Atlanta, every bit Secretary of Health and Human being Services, the pro-family unit movement balked. After delivering a huge vote for Bush-league in the fall, the last thing they expected was for a pro-choice moderate to head the cabinet department with responsibility for social policy affecting families and children. Sullivan was also weak on other important items in the pro-family agenda, such every bit funding of Planned Parenthood. Paul Weyrich, a longtime Washington-based conservative activist, and others peppered John Sununu, the new White Business firm chief of staff, with messages of protest. But there was a trouble: Sullivan was a friend of Barbara Bush. The postal service had already been offered to him, and he had accepted. With the help of George Due west. Bush, the president's politically savvy son, Sununu contacted Kay James, an eloquent pro-life spokeswoman and prominent conservative African-American, and offered her a mail as Assistant Secretarial assistant of HHS for public affairs. Kay agreed to serve in the position, sparing the administration a major explosion on the right. Only the entire episode left a bad gustatory modality in the mouth of the religious conservative community.
Other bourgeois Christian candidates for high-profile jobs faced a similar fate. Guess Paul Pressler of Houston, a bourgeois lay leader in the Southern Baptist Convention and a longtime friend of George Bush, was originally recommended for Solicitor Full general or federal district estimate. He later on accepted the newly created post of ethics czar. But Pressler withdrew his proper noun from consideration after he came under set on from liberal Baptists and moderates within the Bush White Business firm, who leaked allegations against him to the Washington Post. This pattern repeated itself numerous times. Pro-family leaders besides lobbied for Patricia Heinz, who had served in the Reagan White House, for a slot as Assistant Secretary for Education, a powerful post with oversight over much of the department'southward budget. When Senator Ted Kennedy objected, Heinz instead received a post at the Pentagon overseeing the training of Navy personnel, a chore that did not crave Senate confirmation. Some other stiff conservative, Hal Ezell, was serving equally a deputy regional commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Evangelicals concerned with Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union wanted him reappointed, but he was dropped in favor of a Bush loyalist.
In the end, few evangelicals were appointed or, for that matter, carried over from the Reagan years. By the fourth dimension the Bush administration held its first cattle telephone call for religious leaders in November 1989, the grumbling was condign clearly aural. In what was supposed to be a typical mitt-holding exhibition at the White House, several rose to challenge Hunt Untemeyer, director of presidential personnel, equally to why then few evangelicals had been selected for prominent posts. Untemeyer argued that it violated the law to "count" people according to religious beliefs.
Finally, Pat Robertson rose to speak. "Isn't it interesting that yous take no difficulty identifying evangelicals and their allies during the entrada," he said, "but you cannot find them after the election?" The room exploded with laughter and applause.
Religious conservatives had grown tired of being patronized. Their leaders gathered for a planning meeting in February 1990 at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, DC, held in conjunction with the National Prayer Breakfast. Among those in attendance were nm and Beverly LaHaye, Jerry Falwell, Chuck Colson, the Reverend Charles Stanley, D. James Kennedy, and several prominent Roman Catholic organizers. It was i of the largest gatherings of religious conservative leaders in many years.
Spirits were upbeat, only it was clear that financial resources and grassroots organization were exhausted. Many groups had seen their memberships wither and their budgets collapse post-obit the accuse-the-breastworks atmosphere of the past decade. When the subject of contributing money (the proposed convocation would cost nearly $1 meg) or lending mailing lists came up, many fell silent.
Were the grassroots ready for some other crusade? Some were not sanguine about the prospects. "I affair I take reamed about Christians, having organized them for years," Jerry Falwell said. "When they lose, they quit. And when they win they quit. Nosotros are just quitters." We knew we needed to propose a long-term vision that would stretch not for one election cycle or a unmarried decade, just for an entire generation. To that stop, we targeted the fall of 1990 equally the appointment for the American Congress of Christian Citizens, just prior to the elections.
A few days later I flew to California for my showtime organizing trip for the Christian Coalition on the West Declension. In Orange County I spoke to a packed breakfast meeting with an overflow crowd spilling into the halls. The electricity in the room showed that the grassroots desperately wanted a new vehicle for affecting public policy. Later I dropped past the headquarters of Focus on the Family unit, headed by influential Christian radio psychologist Jim Dobson, where the public policy staff grilled me on our intentions. Did Pat Robertson program on running for president again? No, I replied. Were we planning to start a Christian third party? No over again. We parted on good terms, only clearly at that place were suspicions well-nigh whether or not the Christian Coalition was just a front for another Robertson presidential bid.
About a calendar month later, Pat Robertson and I were flying to another Coalition organizational consequence when I laid out for him the time and endeavor that would be necessary to put on the Christian Congress upshot in Atlanta. It was taking more and more than of my time, pulling me away from my grassroots activity.
"Pat, nosotros have to decide to exercise ane or the other," I said. "We are either going to exercise one extremely well, or both poorly. If yous want an effective grassroots network, we may demand to put the idea of the political rally on the back burner."
Pat looked out the window of the airplane and nodded. "We have to have the grassroots organisation," he said. "Information technology is the hope of the state." Later on that the Congress projection quietly died for lack of attention, and we moved ahead with the nearly ambitious state-past-state recruitment and training program in the history of the pro-family movement. Information technology was a decision that would accept far-reaching consequences for the movement and the country in the years to come.
My arrival at this position of responsibility and leadership was the culmination of a long personal odyssey. It all began in Miami, where I grew upward. My childhood was hardly spent in the Bible Belt. Miami was an international urban center in which whites were a bare bulk, with a large population of Cubans, Nicaraguans, Haitians, and African-Americans. Information technology likewise had a large Jewish population, and I attended more bar mitzvahs than baptisms as I grew up. My male parent was an ophthalmologist and surgeon, and my mother worked at abode. I grew up in a adequately typical middle-class neighborhood, where I attended public schools, joined a local swim club, learned to play golf, and followed the Miami Dolphins. But from an early on historic period my greatest passion was reading. Most children of my generation watched Sesame Street. I read the autobiography of Eddie Rickenbacker, Sandburg'south Lincoln, The Rise and Fall of the Tertiary Reich by William 50. Shirer, The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam, and All the President's Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. The political figures in those books--especially Churchill, Lincoln, and Roosevelt--came to life in my young mind.
Shirer's account of Britain'southward failure to heed the warnings of Churchill and stop the ascent of Hitler chilled my bones. I as well recall reading a biography of Woodrow Wilson and being enthralled by an account of his ballot, which had been made possible by the support of political bosses like James "Sugar Jim" Smith. Only in his countdown accost, Wilson had promised to reform the political system and prefer progressive measures, astonishing the decadent bosses who had mistakenly idea they could control him. I securely admired these nifty leaders, sensing that public service was an enormously consequential career and that politics could be a noble calling.
Dorsum to the top
Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/active.htm
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