[NYTr] Demopublicans court the American Taliban for their votes

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Newsweek - Oct 1, 2007 issue
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20920353/site/newsweek/?from=rss

Democrats Seriously Court Evangelicals

For 25 years, evangelicals have voted Republican. But the 
Democrats are courting, and their efforts may have a prayer. 

By Eve Conant Newsweek

Oct. 1, 2007 issue - Richard Land had never met one-on-one with a
chairman of the Democratic National Committee. The Tennessee
evangelist, an influential force in the Southern Baptist Convention,
generally views such people as adversaries, if not enemies. So consider
his surprise when, at a nonpartisan leadership conference over the New
Year's holiday, Howard Dean leaned in and said he'd love to get
together for a private chat. Land agreed to meet for coffee at a
downtown Washington hotel. He was wary: "I brought a witness," he jokes
now. Dean was there to chip away at Land's loyalty to the GOP, and
strangely, Land found himself warming to the liberal Democrat. Among
other things, he admired Dean's frugality. "He hauled his own suitcase
around, and the Capitol Hill Suites isn't exactly fancy," Land tells
NEWSWEEK. "I was impressed." More important, the two men had something
to talk about, and did so cordially. "Dean told me how the Democrats
were pro-life in that they wanted a country in which abortion was rare.
I said, 'I agree, but we disagree how to get there.' Still, it was
certainly a change in tone."

For the Democrats, it's a change in tactics as well—an audacious, if
not quixotic, effort to win over a constituency that has been solidly
Republican for a quarter century. Dean and other Democratic strategists
hope to take advantage of deepening discontent with the GOP among some
evangelicals. As a movement, conservative Christians have yet to get
fired up about any of the leading Republican presidential candidates.
There was a brief wave of enthusiasm for Fred Thompson, but that may be
ebbing. One of the nation's most influential evangelicals, James
Dobson, wrote a scathing e-mail about Thompson, obtained by the
Associated Press last week, in which he objected to the candidate's
opposition to a constitutional marriage amendment and said Thompson had
"no passion, no zeal." Meanwhile, Mitt Romney suffers among some
evangelicals because of bias against his Mormon faith. Front runner
Rudy Giuliani leaves conservative Christians particularly cold. "If the
Republicans are foolish enough to nominate the pro-choice Giuliani,
that will give the Democratic Party license to hunt for evangelical
votes," says Land, who has been contacted by both the Barack Obama and
Hillary Clinton campaigns. "I don't know how successful they'll be, but
at least they'll have that license."

No one expects miracles, of course. Conservative Christians started
shifting to the Republicans as the "party of values" in 1979, when
Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority. They were the most important
bloc of voters in George W. Bush's victories in 2000 and 2004. But the
movement is not as cohesive as it once was. Many younger evangelicals
are worried about issues beyond the traditional struggles over
abortion, school prayer and gay marriage. They're becoming vocal about
the environment, AIDS, poverty and genocide—a newer set of "values"
that Democrats are more comfortable addressing.

The Democrats see an opening—not to conquer the movement but to
harness some of its energy for themselves. "In the past, we've come off
as dismissive to evangelicals," Dean tells NEWSWEEK. "But our party has
become much more comfortable talking about faith and values." Dean has
met with four or five influential evangelicals in addition to Land,
sometimes visiting their offices to talk. "Are we going to abandon Roe
v. Wade? No. But a lot can be done to prevent teen pregnancy and
abortions. There is a lot we do agree on." The DNC under Dean has
stepped up its Faith in Action initiative, an outreach program created
in the wake of the Democrats' 2004 defeat. Run by a Pentecostal
minister, it has trained about 150 people.

Such efforts, along with general disillusionment with Bush, may have
already paid off. According to a Pew Research Center survey in
February, support for Democratic candidates among white evangelicals
under 30 jumped from 16 to 26 percent between the 2004 and 2006
elections. Some evangelical leaders now say they're tired of being
viewed as an appendage of the GOP, or any other party. "We want to be
viewed as we are—people of faith—not a political bloc," says Leith
Anderson, president of the National Association of Evangelicals.


For now, the Democrats' best target may be Hispanics, the
fastest-growing subset of evangelicals. They voted strongly in support
of Bush in 2004, but many are now angered by the GOP's handling of
immigration. "All of a sudden we're a security problem? We're the drug
dealers who are destroying the nation?" says Luis Cortés, president of
the Esperanza USA network of 10,000 evangelical churches. "If the
Republicans choose a candidate who takes a negative stance on
immigration, then I believe you will see a large defection." Until now,
the only GOP candidate taking a strong, "positive" stance on
immigration is John McCain. But Christian conservatives generally
reject him, in part because of his push for campaign-finance reform.

Cortés is flirting with the Democrats, or at least they're flirting
with him. Since June, he has received several calls from Obama and has
met with Clinton and Bill Richardson. Sam Rodriguez, president of the
National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, which represents
more than 17,000 churches, also senses a changing mood. If Democratic
candidates had called him in 2004, Rodriguez says, he's not sure he
"would have even picked up the phone." But now "the GOP has completely
abdicated ... the evangelical Hispanic vote as a result of the
immigration-reform debacle ... This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity
for the Democratic Party."

Clinton, Obama and John Edwards all have senior staffers in charge of
reaching out to religious groups. "There's a lot of common ground here
with evangelicals on the genocide in Darfur, ending human trafficking
and making sure that religious liberty is not static around the world,"
says Burns Strider, director of faith-based operations for the Clinton
campaign. (By contrast, talking to evangelicals in 2004 was considered
"a waste of resources," says Mara Vanderslice, who was hired by John
Kerry only eight months before Election Day to reach out to the faith
community.) Obama's national director of religious affairs, Joshua
DuBois, says he has contacted more than 75 evangelical leaders since he
joined the campaign on its first day. Speaking at an AIDS conference
sponsored by the evangelical Rick Warren last year, Obama talked about
contraception as a strategy to fight the disease, and "there was a
standing ovation," says DuBois. The campaign has hosted more than two
dozen "faith and politics" forums in New Hampshire and Iowa and is
planning more for South Carolina.

Can the Democrats really become the party of the fundamentalist
faithful? By playing footsie with Democrats, at least some evangelicals
may be aiming to provoke GOP leaders into giving them more attention.
Christian conservatives complain regularly that the Republican Party
doesn't hew to their agenda, but they've almost always pulled the red
levers in the end. "We're still kind of frozen in the twilight zone
with many of the Republican candidates," says Tony Perkins, who heads
the conservative Family Research Council. "If the Democrats follow
through with substantive policy initiatives that reflect their newfound
faith, they could make headway. But it's got to be more than just
talk." Darkly, he warns there is always the option of "a third-party
candidate for president." That's a signal to both parties: show us some
love ... or else.