Making a Values Call

Senator McCain speaking at the 2007 Family Research Council 'Values Voter Summit' in Washington D.C. (Reuters)

In the 2004 election, of all those who voted for President Bush in his re-election bid (over 62 million in total) about 20 million "identified moral values as their most important issue", a number roughly proportional to the amount who identified themselves the same way in the 2000 election.

By Citizen Correspondent Wyatt McIntyre

Date Posted: 07/05/08

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They say that politics makes for strange bed fellows....

A few months ago it would have seemed like there was little to nothing that Arizona Senator John McCain would have said to Evangelical and Value Voters that would have swayed them. After all, as the now Presumptive Republican Nominee cruised to a victory on Super Tuesday that would help him sow up the nomination he was hit by one of their more influential leaders. James Dobson, founder and head of Focus on the Family, went as far as to say "I cannot, and will not, vote for Sen. John McCain, as a matter of conscience", offering that if McCain were the nominee he simply would not vote. Then came Rod Parsley and John Hagee. Seeking to woo this group of traditionally Republican voters, he found himself having to distance himself from their support over controversial statements both men made years before. Their endorsements denounced and withdrawn by both parties respectively McCain was left with little other recourse to try and win them over.

Now though, it would seem that all the Arizona Senator had to do was wait...

Despite recent attempts by Presumptive Democratic Nominee Barack Obama to win conservative value voters or at least keep them neutralized in order to avoid them flocking to the McCain campaign, with his vows of making funding of faith based initiatives "a moral center" of his presidency if he were to win, and his faith based campaigning that speaks to his religious experience, they are hearing nothing of it.

The first to fall was Dobson himself. First he gave indications that he would support McCain's candidacy, giving a list of issues that were important to him and to the group he supported, that he needed to see the Arizona Senator take steps on, points of contention that lay between his organization and the McCain campaign. A few weeks later he would come out swinging against Senator Obama on moral and religious issues, saying that the Illinois Senator was "twisting the bible" for his own political purposes.

Now, it's a group of 90 Evangelical Leaders, including Alveda King, niece of the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Donald Hodel, former President of the Christian Coalition and Focus on the Family, Michael Staver, Dean of Liberty University's Law School, Rick Scarborough, President of Vision America, and Phil Burress, a leading Evangelical in Ohio and President of Community Values, met earlier this week in Denver, Colorado to discuss the 2008 Presidential Election. The consensus, though Senator Obama has made more attempts to woo their support they can not support him in this election, their backing has to go to the presumptive Republican Nominee.