The Downfall of the Christian Right

Remaining significant is a difficult task for any public leader. The James Dobsons and the Pat Robertsons only have so much power as the number of people they can convince the rest of us they have influence over. It should come as no surprise that some leaders, and even Christian leaders, are charlatans extorting their influence when they in fact have none.

I always liked Huckabee even as I was scared of him. You knew where he stood, and I found admirable his intelligence and bravery in seeing Jeremiah Wright as a human being who deserved understanding. But Huckabee isn’t the nominee. The Christian Right’s leaders rallied around a man who did not extol their own values at all, and who they quite frankly really believed was going to hell. Why? Perhaps because they never believed in their stated values in the first place, who knows? That’s a public leader for you, but it now seems that some of them regret it:

Then, venerable Paul Weyrich—a founder of the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority, and the Council for National Policy (CNP)—raised his hand to speak. In a quiet, brief, but passionate speech, Weyrich essentially confessed that he and the other leaders should have backed Huckabee, a candidate who shared their values more fully than any other candidate in a generation. He agreed with Farris that many conservative leaders had blown it. By chasing other candidates with greater visibility, they failed to see what many of their supporters in the trenches saw clearly: Huckabee was their guy. Members of the group believed that Huckabee was “their guy” from a religious perspective but said he was not quite ready for “prime time.”

If they had backed Huckabee, could he have won the nomination over John McCain? We’ll never know, but what we can definitively say is they blew their opportunity. Instead of backing a winner, they backed a loser. How much influence did they have on their constituents after all? Many went ahead and voted for Huckabee anyway. Many may have voted for McCain. But what they didn’t do is vote for was Romney. I guess these guys didn’t have as much power and influence as they professed.

This is oddly enough the exact same position that Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson find themselves in. Every single time a Don Imus situation comes up, Al and Jesse are there to tell us how we got it wrong. They are there to threaten boycotts and raise ire. Funny that they may not have as much power and influence as they would have us believe. By picking Hillary Clinton as a candidate, they not only loss ground in convincing us they control the black electorate but they lost the few remaining black electorate individuals who listened to them.

What connects these two very different special interest groups is that by changing their minds and going with their supporters once again, they are trying to project the falsehood that they matter.

Article via Wonkette.