Republican Gomorrah Read online

  When Obama emerged as the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination in the spring of 2008, the neocons urged a slash-and-burn campaign of rumors about Obama’s faith and ethnic background. Michael Goldfarb, a young editor for the neocon house organ the Weekly Standard, led the charge, proposing that “an unaccountable, right-wing, third-party outfit” create an attack ad highlighting Obama’s Islamic heritage. In a blog post, Goldfarb wrote,

  Show Obama in Tribal Outfit . . .

  Narrator: “Obama wants U.S. forces out of Iraq.”

  Cut out picture of Obama’s head and paste Osama’s picture.

  Narrator: “Osama wants U.S. forces out of Iraq.”

  This brand of character attack (essentially a 30-second mortality reminder) still had resonance among the Christian right. However, its appeal among independents and moderate Republicans was questionable so many years after 9/11. McCain pledged that his moderate tendencies would inform the kind of campaign he would run against Obama. “This will be a long and hard and well fought and, I believe, honorable campaign, one that is marked by respect,” McCain told the Florida Association of Newspaper Editors in June. But as McCain was joined by neocons such as Goldfarb (who became his deputy spokesman), and as right-wing radio hosts invented and amplified rumors about Obama’s background, pressure mounted on the right for McCain to sharpen his tone. When McCain hesitated, movement leaders clamored for a vice presidential candidate who not only shared their values but also demonstrated a willingness to broadcast the attacks they had concocted.

  They found their candidate in the unlikeliest of places. In June 2007, three of the movement’s leading pundits disembarked from a luxury cruise liner in Juneau, Alaska, for lunch with the state’s new governor, Sarah Palin. The pundits were Bill Kristol, the Weekly Standard ’s editor-in-chief; Fred Barnes, the Standard’s executive editor; and Michael Gerson, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush and Chuck Colson, who was well known for his coded evangelical rhetorical flourishes.

  According to the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, Palin began lunch with a lengthy, impassioned grace that left her guests in awe. After an agreeable discussion of local and national politics over a meal of halibut cheeks, Palin invited the pundits for a helicopter journey to a gold mine north of Juneau. On the way, she complained to them about an environmental group’s lawsuit that had so far prevented a local mining company from dumping tons of toxic waste into a pristine lake in the Tongass National Forest. They liked the cut of her jib.

  By the time they were back at the cruise boat’s buffet table, the pundits resolved to promote Palin to their friends inside the Beltway.

  Palin was a curious darling for a foreign-policy-oriented figure such as Kristol to choose. She had little knowledge of world affairs and only a faint awareness of the goings-on outside her state. She had traveled outside the country only once, to Kuwait for an official tour during the second U.S. invasion of Iraq, and had spent little time on the east coast. But to Kristol and the neocons, her parochialism was a positive quality. By drawing close a vapid vice president, Kristol—the former chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle—and his allies sought to become her Cardinal Richelieu, dictating her agenda from behind a curtain. “She’s bright and she’s a blank page,” said a former White House official working at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute. “She’s going places and it’s worth going there with her.”

  In June 2008, during an episode of Fox News Sunday, Kristol gushed praise for Palin, calling her “my heartthrob” and urging McCain to “Go for the gold with Palin.” Visibly annoyed by Kristol’s cheerleading, moderator Chris Wallace snapped, “Can we please get off Sarah Palin?” But Kristol only amplified his cheerleading in the weeks to come. And soon enough, Palin’s name appeared on McCain’s shortlist.

  CHAPTER 24

  A MATTER OF TONE

  Hoping to gird himself against the coming storm of character attacks, Obama embarked on his own clumsy foray to co-opt the religious right. Obama’s religious outreach strategy was inspired by a Democratic operative named Mara Vanderslice, who had recently formed a political action committee, the Matthew 25 Network, to advocate on his behalf. Vanderslice advised her clients not only to downplay their support for abortion rights and gay rights but also never to use the phrase “separation of church and state.” Hired by Senator John Kerry’s presidential campaign in 2004, she ultimately found herself sidelined. “She was a little bit overzealous,” the late Father Robert Drinan, a liberal Catholic legend and Kerry adviser, told the New York Times. Vanderslice claimed results two years later in the congressional midterms. Her clients, she said, citing exit polling, garnered 10 percent more of the evangelical vote than two years before. Widespread uncertainty about whether Democratic gains among so-called “values voters” were a result of Vanderslice’s inspired appeals, or simply a reflection of the nationwide backlash against the Republican Congress and Bush’s policies, did not deter her from taking credit.

  At a 2006 gathering of evangelicals convened by the Reverend Jim Wallis, a moderate figure with close ties to Democratic congressional leaders, Obama put the Vanderslice strategy to the test, attacking unnamed “secularists.” “But what I am suggesting is this—secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square,” he declared. During the South Carolina Democratic primary, Obama’s campaign distributed fliers describing the candidate’s supposed born-again experience: “Kneeling beneath that cross on the South Side,” the flier quotes Obama, “I felt I heard God’s spirit beckon me.” In bold type, the words “Committed Christian,” appeared beside Obama’s profession of faith.

  At the same time, the campaign rebuked protests from gay rights groups against a black gospel concert it had organized in South Carolina to generate turnout for Obama. The concert headliner was Donny McClurkin, a Grammy-winning singer who proudly advertised himself as an “ex-gay.” “I don’t speak against the homosexual. I tell him that God delivered me—from the homo-sex-u-a-li-ty!” McClurkin roared at the concert crowd, skipping across the stage in a flamboyant victory dance that seemed to contradict his claim of deliverance.

  With the general election in full swing, Obama took his confessional religious appeals into more hostile territory. On June 10, 2008, he convened a meeting in a law office in downtown Chicago with a wide array of about thirty evangelical leaders. Obama insisted that the gathering remain entirely off the record, forbidding participants to disclose his statements to the press. After acquiring a partial list of attendees, I learned that the meeting included Stephen Strang, founder of the right-wing Pentecostal magazine Charisma and a close ally of Pastor Hagee, whose books he publishes. Strang told me that Obama did little to assuage the hostility that many of those assembled—particularly the conservative white evangelicals—harbored toward him and his liberal positions on social issues. (Eager to demonstrate the Christian Zionist fervor for all things Jewish, Strang questioned me about the meaning of my last name—“Is your family from a valley?”—and signed off with “Shalom!”)

  Franklin Graham, son of the benighted Reverend Billy Graham and head of the international Christian aid organization Samaritan’s Purse, was seated next to Obama at the meeting. According to Strang and Graham’s spokesman, Mark DeMoss, whom I also interviewed, Graham peppered Obama with pointed questions, repeatedly demanding to know whether the senator believed that “Jesus was the way to God or merely a way” [italics added]. Graham, who immediately after the 9/11 attacks sparked an international controversy by calling Islam a “very evil and wicked religion,” proceeded to inquire about the Muslim faith of Obama’s father, suggesting that Obama himself might be a Muslim. After Obama attempted to rebut the canard, one preacher who supported Obama stood up suddenly. Hoping to sour his fellow pastors’ opinion of McCain, the preacher reminded them of McCain’s bitter divorce, recounted his vulgar tirades on the Senate floor, and claimed that he [McCain] was uncomfortable with out
ward displays of religiosity.

  “He seemed to be saying that if Christians can support a flawed candidate like McCain, the implication was, why couldn’t they support a candidate with flawed policies like Obama?” Strang told me. But Strang found the argument unpersuasive. “How I vote is based on whether or not the candidate is for life,” he said, explaining why he planned to vote for the anti-abortion McCain.

  Obama’s attempts to present himself as a “committed Christian” may have endeared him to black Democrats in South Carolina, whose support he had in any case, but his entreaties to conservative white evangelicals floundered. When Obama’s religious outreach coordinator, Joshua Dubois, a close associate of Vanderslice, called Focus on the Family’s headquarters in June to request a meeting between Obama and James Dobson, he not only was refused but also inflamed Dobson’s resentment. On June 24, Dobson took to the airwaves to lash Obama with homophobic rhetoric, accusing him of upholding a “fruitcake interpretation” of the Bible.

  After the Dobson debacle, Obama leapt at the opportunity to appear at the “Saddleback Civic Forum on the President,” a faith-based Q&A session for both candidates that was televised by CNN and moderated by Pastor Rick Warren, the mega-best-selling author of the self-help manual The Purpose Driven Life. Warren, who had maintained a friendly relationship with Obama since the newly elected senator delivered a speech at his Orange County mega-church in 2006, seemed like a refreshing alternative to the hard-right dinosaurs that defined the Christian right’s image. Warren preferred jeans and shortsleeved shirts, often with loud, Hawaiian patterns, to the cheap suits familiar to Southern Baptist firebrands. He had a pudgy face and paunch that gave him a teddy-bear-like quality. And Warren favored a measured, almost ponderous preaching style over hectoring or hollering. “I have never been considered a part of the religious right,” Warren insisted, “because I don’t believe politics is the most effective way to change the world.”

  The mainstream press was almost universally eager to indulge Warren’s image of himself. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof called Warren “an evangelical liberals can love.” Newsweek named Warren one of fifteen “people who make America great.” And even The Nation, a historically left-wing magazine, published an article puffing Warren as a figure who “disassociates himself from the religious right,” noting that “he shares its position on social issues but doesn’t want to focus on them. He focuses on poverty, disease and aid to Africa.” By the time of the 2008 campaign, Warren was ascendant as the twenty-first-century version of Billy Graham, pastor to presidents, and minister of the national soul, and he was hailed for moving away from the hard right. He had constructed an international platform using two powerful constituencies that few figures before him had been able to reconcile: conservative evangelicals hungry for more sophisticated leadership and opinion elites frantically searching for postpartisan heroes.

  When I asked the public relations firm responsible for burnishing Warren’s image whether the media’s worshipful portrayal of its client was accurate, however, a spokesperson reacted with befuddlement. “As far as being America’s pastor, or whatever, well, that’s just a title the media has given him,” Kristin Cole of Larry A. Ross communications told me. For his part, Warren freely admitted to a Wall Street Journal reporter that the principal difference between him and Dobson was simply “a matter of tone.” Indeed, behind Warren’s fuzzy-wuzzy, green-friendly, and altruistic image was a religious-right crusader who opposed abortion, gay rights, and stem cell research. The presence of McCain and Obama at Warren’s church for a nationally televised campaign forum was less a testament to the progressive transformation of America’s evangelical community than it was proof of the Christian right’s continuing hold on the national discourse.

  For the first time, at his Saddleback Faith Forum, Warren’s right-wing tendencies were on display before a national audience. He began by asking the candidates, “Does evil exist? And if it does, do we ignore it? Do we negotiate with it? Do we contain it? Do we defeat it?” This abstract but loaded question, shot through with Christian Zionist undertones, gave McCain the opportunity to cast the war on terror in terms of spiritual warfare. Meanwhile, Obama rambled on about an array of topics, from Darfur to child abuse. Then Warren asked Obama, “At what point does a baby get human rights, in your view?” Knowing that answering the question directly would only further alienate most evangelicals, Obama replied haltingly, “Answering that question with specificity, you know, is above my pay grade.” Few reporters could have—or would have—set a better trap for Obama.

  Right-wing radio hosts fulminated for months afterward about Obama’s answer to Warren’s abortion question. Leading the angry chorus was Dobson, who declared during an indignant radio tirade, “With all due respect, Senator, if this question is above your pay grade, then so is the job attached to it!” Warren chuckled at Obama’s response during an appearance on a conservative radio show. Meanwhile, a who’s who of religious-right leaders hailed McCain’s performance at Saddleback. With the movement beginning to loathe Obama after years of preparing to tear down Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, McCain maneuvered to consolidate its support with his vice presidential pick.

  On August 31, McCain announced his running mate. Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska, a former beauty queen and ex-mayor of the small town of Wasilla, had met McCain only once, during a fifteen-minute chat at a meeting of the National Governor’s Association. While the press scrambled to assemble a profile of the little-known Palin, members of the Council for National Policy gathered secretly at a hotel in downtown Minneapolis to watch her accept the nomination. Tom Minnery, a Focus on the Family operative who accompanied his boss, Dobson, to the meeting, reflected on the CNP’s exuberant mood:

  “I was standing in the back of a ballroom filled with largely Republicans who were hoping against hope that something would put excitement back into this campaign,” Minnery said during a September 1 Focus on the Family broadcast. “And I have to tell you, that speech by Alaska Governor Sarah Palin—people were on their seats applauding, cheering, yelling . . . That room in Minneapolis watching on the television screen was electrified. I have not seen anything like it in a long time.”

  When the Republican National Convention began days later, the excitement generated in the CNP’s ballroom spread to the throng of Republican delegates assembled in St. Paul’s Xcel Center. The Palin that McCain’s aides had haphazardly thrust into the national spotlight was an overnight sensation, but like Hagee, she had been subjected to “poor vetting.” The real Palin, the Christian-right cadre who subjected herself to an anointing against witchcraft; the Pentecostal “prayer warrior” who could not say which magazines she read; the matriarch of a troubled family who became a paragon for James Dobson’s vision of womanhood—this figure would be unveiled to a shocked American public during the weeks ahead.

  CHAPTER 25

  THE FAMILY THAT PRAYS TOGETHER

  If McCain had had his druthers, he would have chosen Senator Joseph Lieberman, the Democrat from Connecticut who had been Al Gore’s running mate in 2000 and was a hawkish supporter of the Iraq War, as his running mate. Lieberman would have had some appeal to hawkish Democrats, moderate Republicans, and perhaps older Jewish voters, but his a prochoice stance made him anathema on the right. The movement’s influence on the party nullified McCain’s option.

  During a June radio broadcast, James Dobson presented McCain with a stark decision: Pick an anti-abortion politician or lose movement support as Bob Dole had in 1996. “I am not endorsing Senator McCain today,” Dobson said. “I don’t know who his vice presidential candidate would be. He might even choose a pro-abortion candidate, and it would not be unlike him to do that because he seems to enjoy frustrating conservatives on that account. . . . While I’m not endorsing John McCain, the possibility is there that I might.”

  Once again, the maverick buckled. McCain’s choices were reduced to Mitt Romney, a favorite of the Bush family, and Karl Rove whom he
personally disliked; Florida Governor Charlie Crist, an uncharismatic lifelong bachelor who suddenly became engaged to a woman after his name appeared on McCain’s VP shortlist; Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, a competent establishment dullard; and the glamorous Sarah Palin. In the end, McCain and his advisors made what they believed to be the “maverick” decision, selecting the woman. But their haphazard vetting of the Alaska governor failed to cover her large family, which turned out to contain enough intrigue for a season’s worth of Jerry Springer Show episodes.

  Unknown to the national media and possibly to McCain as well, Palin’s sixteen-year-old daughter Bristol had been impregnated during the summer by eighteen-year-old Levi Johnston, a local jock who identified himself on his Myspace page:

  “I’m a f**kin’ redneck who likes to snowboard and ride dirt bikes. But I live to play hockey. I like to go camping and hang out with the boys, do some fishing, shoot some sh*t and just f**kin’ chillin’ I guess. Ya f*ck with me I’ll kick ass.” Johnston added that he was “in a relationship” but insisted, “I don’t want kids.” (The two would split up almost immediately after the campaign ended).

  Bristol Palin’s pregnancy had been an open secret for months in her hometown. In Wasilla, a community of approximately 10,000, practically every secret is an open one—a northern exposure Peyton Place. When I traveled there in October, I was bombarded by a blizzard of rumors that had not been investigated by the dozens of big-foot journalists who had just blown through town. One local resident told me Bristol (named for Bristol Bay, Alaska, the hometown of Todd Palin) had moved in with her aunt, who lived twenty-five miles from Wasilla, because she resented her mother’s imperious, hyperambitious nature.