Recently in John McCain Category

Amid today's talk that Barack Obama has narrowed the God Gap, God-o-Meter checked in with Ralph Reed, who spearheaded religious outreach for George W. Bush's 2000 and 2004 campaigns and who pioneered such outreach for Republicans as executive director of the Christian Coalition.

What surprised you in the exit polls?

The durability--in a difficult election cycle--of the Republicans' conservative coalition--the overwhelming margin for McCain among evangelicals was about what Bush got four years ago. I don't think anyone would have anticipated that six or eight months ago. I don't think that was due entirely to the Palin effect, although she helped.

But the Republican Party has to do some retooling of the party's grassroots infrastructure, its message and the messengers because we lost some states last night that we haven't lost in two generations, like Virginia and Indiana.

So one surprise was that evangelicals, who were seen to be despondent over the McCain and the GOP, turned out in droves.

But a truly successful majority party is a multitasking party that tends to its core supporters and reaches out to those who haven't always felt welcome in their ranks. Obama clearly did that. He never wavered from his core liberal positions... But he reached out to evangelicals, which was a smart thing to do. Now, it didn't' work. e tried to emulate Martin Luther King in speaking about the challenges of the poor and left behind in a way that the white majority could hear.

Ronald Reagan did that, reaching out to Catholics and blue collar voters. And four years ago, Bush got 44-percent of the Hispanic vote even while winning 78-percent of evangelicals. So it's not an either or--you got to do both. The party has to stay true to social conservative but also has to figure out a way to win younger voters and African Americans and Hispanics.

If Obama's evangelical outreach failed, why was it a smart thing to do?

Because to be competitive in the South and the Midwest heartland of the country whether you win evangelicals votes are not there are a lot of moderate and independent voters that were beginning to have the view that the Democrats are hostile to religious voters. Tgat was hardening. Even if you don't get the evangelical vote, if you're going to carry Virginia and Florida and Indiana and Missouri, you can't be viewed as hostile to religion and the values that people hold. So the Democrats were smart to begin talking about faith and values.

Imitation is the highest form of flattery. If you look at what we did at Christian Coalition and then with the Bush campaign, [the Democrats] tried to beat us by attacking us. And it dint' work. And after about 15 years of attacking the values message, the Democrats decided to copy it and it was smart.

That's a welcome mat to Republicans--they shouldn't attempt to veer way from the values message. You can say a lot about what caused this [McCain's defeat] but it wasn't caused by the Republican Party's values message. In two states that McCain lost, Florida and California, McCain lost even as marriage amendments won.

But do you worry that McCain's loss will be blamed on Sarah Palin and other religious conservatives, who may have scared off independent voters?

I'm not worried at all. If you look at the polling, from the time Palin was selected around August 31 to September 20, when Lehman Brothers cratered and the DOW lost 25 percent and you have a credit crisis and financial panic, MCain was doing fairly well among independents and better among soft Democrats.

The Palin effect was across the board. It energized the base and caused independents and women to give her a second look. The gap began to yawn again around the financial panic. It was after McCain suspended his campaign and went to Washington and was not able to come up with a solution that united his party. But if you talk to people on the ground, the volunteers, the door-to-door knockers [for McCain], they were invisible until McCain selected Palin. I think it's revisionist history to blame the bottom of the ticket for issues that were always top of the ticket.

There's been a lot of talk about Palin's future. How can she have a future as a national candidate if her appeal is strong but limited to the Republican base--largely its religious base?

The strong but limited appeal was based on the ticket. The ticket underperformed among independents and those outside the Republican coalition. The sinking tide lowered all boats. But I don't think it's fair to particularize it to her. She has not yet been tested as a candidate in a normal national campaign, where she'd get the opportunity to introduce herself to voters in a primary.

I'd argue that if Obama had not run for president and Hillary Clinton would have won the nomination and then selected Obama as her running mate, with Rev. Wright and Rezko and Ayers and his voting record, he would have never had the opportunity to litigate all that like he did in the primaries.

In Alaska today, Sarah Palin indulged reporters on the subject of her future political should McCain lose the election.

Here's what she said:

"You know, if there is a role in national politics, it won't be so much partisan," she said. "My efforts have always been here in the state of Alaska to get everybody to unite and work together and progress this state."

"It would certainly be a uniter type of role," she added.

Asked if she had any regrets about the campaign, Palin bemoaned "the state of journalism today."

"The blogosphere, the two-, three-hour news cycles, where just too much is reported based on gossip and innuendo and things taken out of context," she explained, adding that she'd like to help improve the profession because she has "great respect for the world of journalism."

GOM thinks that's pretty telling. Though Palin was a hit among the GOP's religious base and bombed among pretty much everyone else--illustrating the nation's enduring culture war divisions--she's vowing to become a uniter. Is this Palin looking to broaden her support base for 2012 in light of her narrow appeal in this election cycle? Or does she actually have a point--that she'd always been a uniter in Alaska (were she had a track record of working with Democrats and declined to make hot button social issues a key part of her governership) and has been unfairly portrayed as a divisive figure, as the Christian Right's poster girl, by the national news media?

Has Palin, been socially conservative, Post-Christian RIght, Huckabeesque figure all along? It's an important question, since her image as the opposite sort of figure, as an old line culture warrior, may have sunk the Republican ticket. At the same time, it's worth remembering that Mike Huckabee--the Baptist preacher that even a secular liberal could love--failed to get traction outside of the GOP's evangelical base.

Should McCain lose, Palin and Huckabee may be slugging it out to become the next great hope of the Christian Right. But do either of them have a political future on the national stage beyond that? The overwhelming evidence so far suggests not.

The "Godless" ad that U.S. Senator Elizabeth Dole is running against her Democratic challenger in North Carolina is a stark reminder that faith-based attacks have been kept to a relative minimum in the presidential race.

It's also a reminder, to GOM at least, that the McCain campaign has thus far refrained from running ads against Obama based on Jeremiah Wright, his longtime pastor. That kind of attack would be the opposite of Dole's in North Carolina; rather than paint Obama as "Godless," it would skewer him for cozying up to a man of the cloth.

To God-o-Meter, there's a pattern here: faith-based attacks tend to come from Republicans who are religious and who've incorporated their faith into their political personas, e.g. Dole and Palin. And McCain, a Republican who's famously uncomfortable incorporating faith into his political persona is refraining from such attacks.

So if Palin, Mike Huckabee, or another social conservative gets the nod in 2012, due to a post-McCain religious right uprising, we could be looking at more faith-based attacks at the presidential level. By then, though, Rev. Wright would be old news

David Brody has the scoop on Christian lit the McCain camp is distributing to churches across the country. The document is framed as a voting guide to the hot button social issues: abortion, gay marriage, judges, sex education, school choice. That's all well and good. This is the kind of thing McCain needed to start doing a year ago to mobilize the GOP's faith-based base.

But what surprises GOM is that the McCain campaign, in background interviews, argues that the evangelical movement is much more broad-minded than it used to be, pointing out that McCain's leadership on issues like global warming is likely to resonate with this crowd. In its limited evangelical outreach, however, McCain has ignored those centrist positions to bang the drum on the kind of culture war issues that McCain has long been uncomfortable discussing--which made him so unpopular with the Christian Right for so long.

Notice how so much political reporting these days about the future of the Republican Party is about the God Gap between religious conservatives and the rest of the party? Much of it hinges on the fact that Sarah Palin has become the movement's new political face. The New York Times reports today that conservatives are already discussing her future political prospects should the McCain-Palin ticket be defeated next Tuesday (The Times says it's "conservatives" who are excited about Palin, but the paper is basically writing about social conservatives):

Whether the Republican presidential ticket wins or loses on Tuesday, a group of prominent conservatives are planning to meet the next day to discuss the way forward, and whatever the outcome, Gov. Sarah Palin will be high on the agenda.

Ms. Palin, of Alaska, has had a rocky time since being named as Senator John McCain's running mate, but to many conservatives her future remains bright. If Mr. McCain wins, she will give the social conservative movement a seat inside the White House. If he loses, she could emerge as a standard bearer for the movement and a potential presidential candidate in 2012, albeit one who will need to address her considerable political damage.

Her prospects, in or out of government, are the subject of intensive conversations among conservative leaders, including the group that will meet next Wednesday in rural Virginia to weigh social, foreign policy and economic issues, as well as the political landscape and the next presidential election.

Ms. Palin's aides insist that winning this time around is her sole objective. But there are signs that she, too, is making sure that she is well positioned for the future if she and Mr. McCain lose.

The 2012 Republican primary could be waged on winning religious conservatives than the '08 GOP primary was, with Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, and Mike Huckabee vying to become the movement's political standard bearer.