Young evangelicals embrace Huckabee

While Dr. Dobson and Mr. Perkins remain on the sidelines, many in the old guard are actively backing Mr. Huckabee’s rivals: Pat Robertson is for Mr. Giuliani, Gary Bauer for Fred D. Thompson, and Paul Weyrich, a founder of the movement, for Mr. Romney. The few national conservative Christian political advocates who have rallied to Mr. Huckabee say they are dismayed by the reluctance of their best-known leaders to do the same.

“Some of my Christian friends, just like some of my not-so-Christian friends, have become a little too Washingtonian,” said Rick Scarborough, an aspiring successor to the previous generation of conservative Christian leaders. He recently argued that his allies were wrong to balk at Mr. Huckabee’s turn toward environmentalism and “social justice.”

“Can you imagine Jesus ignoring the plight of the disenfranchised and downtrodden while going after the abortionist?” Mr. Scarborough wrote on the conservative Web site WorldNetDaily.com.

But the lack of enthusiasm at the top of the movement has not deterred hundreds of grass-roots activists in Michigan and South Carolina who, like the Harrises, are trying to make up for the Huckabee campaign’s lack of organization and resources.

Efforts for evangelical voters
In Michigan, the Huckabee campaign had spent no money, hired no staff and had no office until last Wednesday, six days before the primary. But Gary Glenn, a conservative Christian advocate based in Midland, Mich., has been leading an informal effort to turn out evangelical voters. Some pollsters expect them to make up as much as 40 percent of the state’s primary voters this year.

Last week, Mr. Glenn lined up 50 local pastors to attend a closed-door breakfast with Mr. Huckabee in Grand Rapids. And he has compiled an e-mail list of more than 600 volunteers — many in Internet groups that Huck’s Army is connecting — who have been using church directories to make phone calls, courting local pastors and leafleting church parking lots .

“Recruit volunteers to stand this Sunday on public sidewalks across the street from the parking lots of the biggest evangelical churches you can find,” Mr. Glenn urged in a recent e-mail message.

Mr. Glenn said Mr. Huckabee’s populist side had also provided him with some unusual allies: the International Association of Machinists has endorsed him. Its state membership is estimated to be one-third Republican. Because of a scheduling dispute, there is no competition in the Democratic primary in Michigan this year, and voters can cast their ballot in either party’s contest.

Huckabee volunteers are also working hard to court Catholics in Michigan, said Jeffrey Quesnelle, a 20-year-old conservative Catholic who is now the Michigan coordinator for Huck’s Army. (The Harris brothers have signed up state coordinators in 45 states.) Among other things, Mr. Quesnelle said, volunteers have been distributing copies of articles from the Web site Catholic Online, a hub for dedicated church members, praising Mr. Huckabee’s opposition to abortion rights and his empathy for the poor as consistent with the social teachings of the church.

Mr. Huckabee’s candidacy could signal “the fall of the old ‘religious right’ and the emergence of a true populist movement which crosses the old, tired lines and labels,” a Catholic Online column recently said.

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