The preacher primary

McCain and Falwell went at it in 2000 — the senator called him an “agent of intolerance” — but things have changed since then. McCain and his advisers decided that the route to the nomination in 2008 lay in loyalty to the Bush legacy, and to Bush personally. It was a natural step, then, for McCain to begin cultivating Falwell, the family political preacher. He has done just that — and Falwell has been only too happy to help “educate” McCain on the issues.

Last May, McCain delivered the commencement address at Falwell’s Liberty University.   

But the Falwell-McCain alliance cost the candidate whatever chance he might have had to gain the support of Virginia’s other leading religious broadcaster, Robertson. The Commonwealth is barely big enough to contain the both of them: their differences are deep — theologically, organizationally and personally. To the Yale-educated Robertson, son of a senator, Falwell is a country upstart. I’ve always thought that one reason Robertson mounted his own campaign for the presidency in 1988 is that he couldn’t abide the original Falwell-Bush alliance.

Romney’s edge
So Robertson has to have his own candidate, and there is no way it would be McCain. The good doctor seems to have taken a liking to Romney, whose father was a governor and who had the good sense to get graduate degrees from Harvard. Robertson’s CBN network ran a glowing profile of Romney, a piece that studiously ignored some of the Mormon doctrinal teachings that would seem calculated to make even Robertson’s helmet of TV hair stand on end.

Romney is expected to be the commencement speaker this May at Robertson’s Regent University.

Among the Three Kingmakers, it seems that only Dobson is unsure of his nominee. He seems to be working by the process of elimination. He already has declared that he would not personally vote for McCain — take that, Jerry — but in a lesser-noticed interview he also said that he could not vote for Giuliani (no surprise there).

Dobson has said nice things about Romney, but at a private meeting of Christian activists in Washington last week, I am told, he made the case — at least for the sake of argument — for Huckabee, the personable former Arkansas governor who also spent a good bit of his career as a Southern Baptist preacher.

I always thought that Huckabee was the logical candidate for religious conservatives — the next step in the progression. If you want to put God in the public square, why not get a preacher to do it? Eliminate the middleman — or men.

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