In public John McCain has repeatedly tried to earn the respect of religious right leaders and their flocks. He ditched the 'maverick' status and went religious, attending ceremonies at Liberty University and wavered on his more moderate social policies such as abortion. Many independents distanced themselves from the Senator while the fundies didn't really move much closer to him.
Now it turns out that all of that posturing was for show. The nuts and bolts of the campaign tells a story that paints McCain as a politician that simply uses the religious right (like George Bush) for votes while not doing much at all for their core issues.
From U.S. News and World Report:
Two former aides hired to spearhead religious outreach for presidential candidate John McCain say that they were virtually ignored by the campaign and that McCain's top campaign strategists are intent on winning votes of religious voters without having to develop serious ties to faith communities. The aides, who were fired in early April after roughly three months on the job, said the campaign staff declined to return scores of their phone calls and E-mail messages, denied them access to leaders of the McCain campaign, and pressed them to collect church directories—a controversial tactic—as the centerpiece of a strategy to woo "values" voters."In the end, you came away with the strong sense that they had contempt for the faith-based community," says Marlene Elwell, one of those fired staffers. Elwell, a prominent Christian-right activist, was hired by McCain in December 2005 to be national director of his "Americans of Faith" coalition. "The way we were being treated it was as if we had leprosy."
McCain expected great results without doing any hard work for the conservative Christian vote. Now he is paying the price for that. George Bush got away with it for the most part but the religious right is getting tired of being used by candidates that talk a lot without doing much action.
The whole story pieced together is actually quite amusing. McCain panders to the right with meaningless political stunts, including hiring the religious outreach staffers. The right is still skeptical and rightly so, as the new staffers are treated as lepers. A series of mistakes due to McCain's image problems results in a drop in the polls, followed by a drop in donations and ultimately the need to cut back staff led to the religious outreach people's dismissal.
Now the story comes full circle when the staffers broke their anonymity and went to the press with what went down inside the McCain campaign. The result? McCain gets more bad news and continues to lose hope for a comeback in the Presidential primary.
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